The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers

How can you tell where the real innovation in publishing is happening right now, and why is it emerging from the indie side first? How do you market your own book when you've spent 35 years marketing everyone else's? John Bond talks about Going Indie and what he's learned about authors who last.

In the intro, my thoughts on writing with AI, Charles Dickens and encouragement for the 3-year-old dancing to K-Pop at the wedding, UK copyright law, The end of an era — Hugh Howey; Notre Dame, Paris;

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

John Bond is the co-founder of Whitefox, a premium publishing services agency, and has over 35 years in traditional publishing, from bookselling to marketing and management. He's also the co-author of Going Indie: Publishing Your Book Your Way, with James Silver.

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 2012 was a watershed moment for publishing in the UK

Whether the snobbery around self-publishing has finally gone

How to co-write a book with someone, and why there's no formula

The pride swallowing involved in getting endorsement quotes for your own book

The shadow economy of indie sales that no industry chart measures

The hallmarks of writers who build a long-term career

You can find John at wearewhitefox.com.

Transcript of the interview with John Bond

Jo: John Bond is the co-founder of Whitefox, a premium publishing services agency, and has over 35 years in traditional publishing, from bookselling to marketing and management. He's also the co-author of Going Indie: Publishing Your Book Your Way, with James Silver.

So welcome back to the show, John.

John: Thank you, Jo. Thanks so much for having me.

Jo: You were last on the show in 2022. You've been on a couple of times, but just set the scene.

Tell people a bit more about you and your long background in publishing.

John: I suppose I could say I started as a marketing manager at Penguin back in the early 1990s in London, and that role eventually evolved into running sales and marketing, as it often does. I did that at Penguin and at HarperCollins.

Then I ran one of the publishing divisions at HarperCollins, including 4th Estate, and published Hilary Mantel and Jonathan Franzen and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and others.

I left that in 2011 and set up Whitefox in 2012, and it's a classic startup story. It was somebody I worked with at HarperCollins. We sat around a kitchen table, came up with an idea for a business, which was Whitefox, and that's grown into the creative agency that it is today.

Jo: So back then, did you think, “I can do this better”?

Was that the impetus, “I can do publishing better than Penguin and HarperCollins”?

John: No, I thought we would solve a problem. There's something very attractive about that whole startup mentality and beginning something from scratch.

I mean, I was in my early 50s. I'd had a long career in traditional publishing. On the plus side, I knew a lot of people, and I thought I could get meetings, people would reply to my phone calls or my emails. On the downside, I didn't necessarily have the energy of a 20 to 25-year-old.

I knew a lot of people and I knew quite a lot of things, and I also knew what problems something like Whitefox could solve.

We set up with this idea that if we could galvanise and organise the diaspora of freelancers in the publishing space and make them available to anybody that wanted to make a book, that that would be quite a powerful thing.

These incredibly creative, wonderful people who were below the radar and were not particularly valued or managed or utilised properly.

I thought if we could access that and make that available not just to traditional publishing people who know about these people, but to individual authors, businesses, brands, people that wanted to make a book, and if you added a layer of our expertise from traditional publishing, that could be quite powerful, I suppose.

That's what I was thinking back then.

Jo: It's funny, though. You said these wonderful freelancers who were not particularly valued or managed or utilised properly. That could also apply to a lot of authors in traditional publishing.

John: Totally. Totally. But if I'm honest, I don't think I was thinking about that.

What's really evolved since we started, even in that 2011, 2012 period, is so much has happened to independent writers, indie authors. The whole ecosystem has become much more vibrant, and what is accessible to those writers is much greater.

I'd like to think we've played a part in that. What that's done is put power back into writers' hands, and that quickly became apparent in the business as a byproduct of what we'd set up.

Jo: Yes, and 2012 I do think in the UK was a pivot point, because I got into self-publishing in 2006/2007 when the Americans did with the beginning of the Kindle and the iPhone. Really the American ecosystem grew first.

I happened to be in Australia, and so I think I was able to escape the negativity of the vortex in the UK, which took a number more years to embrace self-publishing as a force to be reckoned with as opposed to an embarrassing thing in the corner for vanity press.

Do you see 2012 as a changing point in UK publishing?

John: I think we'd just come out of the Kindle moment, hadn't we? There were all sorts of conversations going on about how that was going to change things forever. I think no one quite knew what the upshot of that was going to be, but we knew that it was incredibly disruptive.

In 2012, Penguin, as it was then, before Penguin Random House, had offered to buy Author Solutions for $115 million, presumably seen as some kind of defensive measure as to what the market was going to evolve into.

I think it felt like a real period of change. In the UK, James Daunt took over running Waterstones, and he was then ultimately going to run Barnes & Noble.

It felt like a bit of a watershed. I think we were lucky in that sense, that maybe in the UK and in London, what we were creating coincided with an opening up of opportunity and creativity, and people wanting access to more tools to be able to do things themselves.

Getting this idea that you invest in your own talent and what that could mean for your ability to do things quicker, better. Some of it was happenstance, but lucky for us.

As you say, we then became aware that in a sense a lot of these things had come to fruition earlier on the US side.

In London, that whole idea of setting up something that wasn't a traditional rights-owning model, but where you wanted to be working with people creatively, felt actually really exciting and timely.

Jo: And when you started to work with independent authors, probably a couple of years after that, you started to work with a lot more indie authors and things really started to change in terms of the business side.

Did you feel any of the snobbery from the traditional industry?

Like you mentioned, you have a lot of contacts, a lot of connections. I came to your wonderful launch party and there were just people from all over the industry. I wondered if you got any kickback, or if anyone raised their eyebrows a little bit at who you were choosing to work with?

John: Oh, definitely. And I would say I really think that's gone.

You may think differently, Jo, but from my perspective, I think there has been such an evolution in the nearly 15 years that we've been going. So any of that residual snobbery, looking down your nose at people that were going DIY, producing multiple books, learning from every single publication.

We've spoken about this before. I remember you sat on the panel of a FutureBook conference in the UK, which was run by a trade magazine, with this idea of looking at the, in quotes, “digital future of the business.” It felt like there were a lot of things being talked about, but not a lot of action on the traditional side.

I suppose some sort of awe that there was some magic going on with people who were making a success of self-publishing. But then quite a lot of people looking down their noses at things that shouldn't get through the gatekeepers.

I do think that's gone. Or if it's not completely gone, I can see it on the way out of the door, because there's no room for that when agents are struggling to sell books to publishers because publishers are looking at the next indie author, the next Freida McFadden, the next Sarah J. Maas, the next Rebecca Yarros.

So whoever it may be, or wherever they're publishing, whatever they're doing now, wherever they may be, knowing that a lot of those people will already be publishing and be on not their first, second, third or fourth, but potentially their 10th or 11th book.

It's a race to see who can help those authors, as a traditional publisher would see it, amplify what they're doing. I think the idea that there's an us and them, if it did exist then, which it certainly did in certain publishing quarters, is gone.

I used to go to those conferences, like the FutureBook Conference, and certain publishers would talk about publishing, and when they meant publishing, they meant a really tiny area of quite literary, traditional imprints. That's what publishing meant.

They didn't even mean publishing to mean educational publishing, or children's publishing, or academic publishing, and certainly not Kindle or POD or whatever. So I think that's had to change for very good, sound, commercial, economic reasons.

Jo: Yes, you're right. I definitely have heard, as we go to similar events sometimes, and you do hear agents used to talk a lot more about finding books very occasionally in a slush pile, or doing courses so you could meet people and do pitch events and all this.

Now it's often build an audience on BookTok or whatever, and sell lots of books, and traditional publishing as an amplifier, as you said. That's how I always hear them pitch it now, the question of—

What can traditional publishing still do when indie authors can do so much?

It does seem to be, well, we can amplify you, we can get you into traditional press, we can get you in traditional bookstores, we can help you with film and movie deals, that kind of thing. So that's really interesting, because that's actually changed quite a lot.

They don't now seem to say, “Oh, well, we can make sure we pay you,” or, “We are editorial success as such.”

John: I think they don't say editorial success or quality or indeed marketing, because that was what used to be said.

I think there's an understanding that a lot of indie writers are better marketeers of their own books than traditional publishers, and if you go into the publishing machine, then you'll get your slot. It lasts for a certain period of time and then that moves on to another book.

Whereas obviously if you're writing your own book and you're marketing your own book, you're able to do that yourself 24/7 wherever you are in the world, and you will know more about your readers and your audience and how that evolves than a traditional publisher would.

What they probably mean now is, as you said, as much as anything, distribution, or even physical distribution.

Because to be part of that process, I think that is still where a large conglomerate is able to wield some muscle, with this idea that if you physically want to see your book in bricks and mortar retailers in X outlets around the world, that's potentially easier to do if that is your aim, via a traditional publisher.

So it is constantly evolving, because it used to be that marketing was the silver bullet, and I don't think that's the case anymore.

Jo: No. We'll come back to marketing, shall we? Struggling with marketing.

So let's get into your book. You recently co-wrote Going Indie with James Silver, Publishing Your Book Your Way. Obviously you already knew a lot about indie authors, so I wonder, what did you discover in the process of researching the book and the interviews you did? And I was one of your interviews.

Did anything come up that surprised you, since you're already pretty embedded in the world?

John: I would say some of it was reinforcing what I knew. So how everything is so intertwined, how in some ways unlinear everything is.

People are doing lots of things in a different order to the way that traditionally writers would perceive this relay race of a manuscript gets passed to an editor, an editor passes on. That's just not how it is or needs to be anymore.

I still think there is—not even a misconception—but I think there's a received wisdom that when you're talking about self-publishing, you're talking about fiction.

The majority of books that Whitefox produces are not fiction, they're non-fiction. Some of them are quite mainstream, some of them are quite niche.

That idea of connecting to your audience and your followers, and being slightly more scientific about how you find readers in your non-fiction niche, I think is still unspoken about in a way, in that genre fiction tends to be what people automatically assume the conversation is about.

This probably doesn't surprise you, but I was pleasantly surprised to have it confirmed to me quite how much swapping and sharing there is of skills and knowledge in that space.

I'm not saying indie writing is egoless at all, but there's quite a lot of sharing of knowledge and what works, and collaboration, which I think is great to see.

Again, if you've, as I did many years ago, come out of corporate conglomerate publishing, traditional publishing, there's less of that by the very nature of the kind of organisation.

And look, we just talked about marketing a little while ago. I do think this whole idea that the cutting edge of experimentation, it's not traditional publishing, it's indie writers.

They are looking at not just how to find readers, but how to fulfil orders, how to make commercial sense of what they're doing from the absolute outset and get-go of what they're doing.

And just how now the lines are blurring between what would be classified as traditional digital publishers and the writers who are doing their own thing, or doing their own thing on behalf of a few other writers. Those lines have completely blurred.

There used to be this traditional hardback, paperback, X number of books a year, a year after hardback there's a paperback. This is the model we have been doing for centuries, and people doing things on their own.

I think that's blurring massively, and the Venn diagrams of people's areas of expertise are just overlapping massively.

Jo: Well, I think you're right there, and certainly the hardback special editions with sprayed edges and foil. A lot of us now are doing that first and not putting out the other, or putting out the rest of it at the same time.

I dare say probably there are more indie authors with sprayed edge hardbacks than there are traditionally published authors.

John: I'm sure that's right. And what's interesting is if you go to a traditional book printer, they are loving the direct communication with writers, that's not coming through traditional channels and traditional relationships. It's great business, it's interesting.

I think that's something that's even developed in the last couple of years, that cutting out of some of the middle men required.

Jo: Yes, and in terms of supporting freelancers and small publishing houses and printers and stuff, the other thing I've heard is that indie authors pay upfront, or they pay quickly, compared to some of these big publishers who are asking for long lead times and steep discounting.

So actually a lot of these independent businesses are doing better under indie author work than they were under traditional.

John: I think that's right, and that's what I mean also about the sharing of information and this collaborative idea of sharing creative knowledge. I mean, I'm making it sound like a kind of 19th century cooperative, which it isn't. I'm not suggesting that for a second.

It's this idea that there's a lot of people learning a lot of things and there's a keenness to share some of that information, because if you've developed your own readership for your unique creative product, some of those learnings are very exciting.

The printers I've spoken to love working on those kinds of things, because they are also being challenged to come up with new ways of developing ever more innovative physical product.

Jo: Yes, I think it's a fun, creative time for sure. Things like Kickstarter, which you came on and talked about crowdfunding years ago, and I've obviously done. I think, what am I on now? Seven? I've just done my seventh.

John: Wow.

Jo: It's so much fun. But now what's happening is traditional publishers are arriving on Kickstarter and all that kind of thing. So we really see a blurring.

Let's come back to your book, so Going Indie. You co-wrote it. Now obviously there are lots of positive sides of collaboration, but in terms of any challenges with collaboration and co-writing and the writing process of doing this? Because I've done this several times and I've found it very challenging.

So tell us about the collaborative writing process.

John: We thought a lot about it before we took it on. What I would say, having done it, is I am assuming there is no formula for how you do this.

At Penguin I worked with a married couple who were crime writers, and they wrote books together. They merged their names so it appeared to be one name. I could not tell you, and they didn't share what that process was, whether they were writing different chapters or … I don't know. So I can only speak from my own experience.

James is an established journalist. He's great with deadlines. He was very good at chivvying me along when I needed to be persuaded to hit the deadlines that I'd promised.

I write blogs, I write newsletters, I write content for our website, but this is my first book. I've never written anything of this length. So in a way it started with the structure. It started with this idea that we would play to what we perceived as our respective strengths in terms of writing.

We absolutely were not each writing every third word or anything like that. It was a process of trust in different parts. I thought, James had done some research and will be better at writing that. He deferred to me on areas that he took to be my areas of expertise.

We did every interview for the book together. We went over the notes from those before they became part of the interviews for the book. And some of the book's elements are diagrammatic, so those are very easy to collaborate on.

I think we tried to be professionally, creatively constructive with each other. So it was raising an eyebrow rather than shouting at each other if we didn't agree about something.

A lot of it was down to the editing, and I don't know what your experience was like with a co-writer, but a lot of it came down to: here is something which is quite baggy. How do we, between us, make this as tight as we possibly can?

I don't mean copy editing or proofreading. I mean the actual sort of, how do we get this into a pithy, usable, practical but discursive book? We didn't ever set out for this to be a pure reference book at all. We wanted to take a snapshot of what was going on.

So a lot of it was genuinely trying to do some research and get people to feed into what was going on from lots of different perspectives, which is why we wanted to get mainstream traditional publishers, we wanted to get agents, we wanted to get indie writers, we wanted to get people who have all sorts of experiences and perspectives.

That's what makes it what it is, which is, here's what we think are some of the interesting discussion points of what's going on now.

Jo: It is a fantastic snapshot. I think it's really interesting—and obviously you also have seen my book, Successful Self-Publishing, which is on its fourth edition—this is one of the difficult things with snapshot type books. So have you already thought about that?

I know this one has just come out, but have you thought, “Oh no, in five years we have to do it again”?

John: Well, I think we thought we're going to have to address AI, which we do in the book, and we really tried to caveat that with saying, look, so much may change so quickly, and here we are talking about what we know now.

We obviously tried to set the context for where we are now, and we tried as much as possible to make something which would last as long as we can.

I think what we did think was, we have tried to make it as international a perspective as possible. But at the same time, we are a London-based agency, and a lot of the views will be from people based in the UK.

So I think what I would like to explore is something that looks at potentially somewhere like the US, where I think there'll be different people that would perhaps have different perspectives on different things.

So I think we thought about potentially there being future iterations of the book, but not yet.

Jo: Not yet. This is the challenge with non-fiction, of course.

On that, I would say what you just said around the US and stuff, the successful UK authors all use the same systems as the US. So I wouldn't say that the US … I mean, we all have the US companies we all use.

I say Kobo is obviously Canadian, but I would say that we use the same ways of doing things. Obviously you might interview a different author, but …

John: That was all I meant. I meant interviewing. Because we've interviewed agents and authors and publishers and they are largely UK based. So it was the idea that maybe there are some perspectives on things rather than systemic.

Jo: Differences.

John: Yes. Just that.

Jo: So then I guess another challenge, we've kind of nodded to it so far, is marketing.

So let's talk about the challenges of getting this book out in terms of publishing and marketing.

Because you've been on the inner circle side, trying to do that for other people's books, but your own book, this is a whole nother thing. So tell us about that.

John: Well, how do you do it, Jo? I mean, honestly, I've loved some of it. I get how you become completely obsessed with your book and trying to make sure that you can get it into the hands of the people that you want to get it into the hands of.

We've got some great endorsement quotes, which was a task that, how can I say this? I would call it pride swallowing. The idea that you really try and get people to say nice things about your book and, if they don't reply, you think, “How much do I pester them? How much do I annoy them by asking them again nicely?”

And the absolute sheer unadulterated joy when they come back with something positive that you can use and utilise in some way. So that whole process of waiting for feedback, I suppose, and hoping that people are going to like what you've done and help you spread the word for it.

We had a launch event, we've given books away. We've published the book as ebook and POD. I think one of the great things about that is it's enabled us to be completely adaptable and make changes right up until the last minute.

That drove everybody in my team completely crazy because we were making changes up until the last minute. So, is the book definitely going to be available on publication date? What's it going to do? You know, all of that kind of stuff.

Also, just getting this idea that I suppose you can never stop. Is that a very obvious thing to say to a writer? It probably is. You just can't stop, because if you go, “Right, well, I've done it,” complacency is the enemy.

Just as soon as you've got that quote, or someone said that they're going to give you an opportunity to talk about it on a platform, it's just another day and you've got to keep thinking about how you can spread the word and tell people that it exists.

Jo: Yes, well, I think that's right, and particularly non-fiction, which unless it's very timely and you must get it out right now. But other than that—

Most books you just have to keep marketing for years.

Then just as you say, when do you stop? Well, you kind of never stop unless you want to, unless you want to retire and just give up, basically.

Dean Wesley Smith, who's a big writer in the US and a kind of a mentor of mine in past years, he talks about it as this massive sea of books. And when a book arrives, he pictures it coming down and landing on the water. So the day you launch, it's landed on the water, and then it begins to sink.

Then there are all these other books coming down. It's like this rain of books, and your book is sinking as soon as it lands. And your job is to keep it afloat somehow.

John: Keep it afloat.

Jo: Yes.

John: I think you're right, and it's such an interesting perspective for us, who work with a lot of people who have one book. You know, they've spent 10 years writing it. It's their life story. It's their memoir. It's their self-help book. It's their book that accompanies them on their speaking journey, or whatever.

Then there are the people who are writing constantly and can't stop writing because they're exercising that creative muscle all the time and wanting to get better, and wanting to improve and learn and understand why this works and why that hasn't worked.

Just getting a glimpse into what it must be like for that person for whom writing is not a hobby. I kept saying to myself, “This is not something you're doing as a hobby.”

I want this book to be of value to people, and if I'm investing that time and effort into something that I want to get out there, you've got to commit to whatever it is you need to do to make sure you're not sinking.

Jo: Yes.

John: I will now not be able to get that image out of my head.

Jo: Yes. I know there's people listening who don't have a mind's eye, which I always find fascinating, but for those of us with a mind's eye, you can now picture that and you will never forget it.

The other thing, I guess, is that, having done a lot, over 40 books now, the inevitable thing is you cannot keep pushing all of those books back up to the surface.

So when you do get the bug as such of writing, the most interesting thing for all of us is always the next book. It's always like, ooh, the next thing I'm doing, I'm very excited about. So you do have to pick your battles on marketing.

So have you got the bug, do you think? Are you thinking of other books in general?

Because as you said, you must be, I guess, in your 60s.

John: I am.

Jo: You could retire.

John: I am. You were talking about that long career. I could. I mean, I really love doing it, and I would love to do more.

I think one of the things that surprised me was just how many ideas came up while we were doing the book about tangents that one could take it.

I have no desire to write a novel. I don't want to do that. I wouldn't be very good at that.

I do think there are some interesting spaces around where there's a kind of intersection of creativity and learning, and how you can develop books that would help people who are trying to achieve different things in different sectors of publishing.

So without getting too granular about it, this book doesn't really address brands who want to become publishers, and I think that is something that our business has developed into working with, not just individuals, but businesses and brands.

I think there's definitely spin-offs of this book which are not about repeating what we've done so far. And this whole idea of what you've been doing for a long time, what we've been doing since 2011, 2012, it's evolving now at such a speed.

I mean, who would have known what was going to come out of TikTok? As you talk about TikTok to Shopify, that whole kind of new ways of finding readers, of taking books to market. As you said, Kickstarter, crowdfunding.

There's all sorts of things that I think will emerge, because in a funny sort of way traditional publishing at the moment feels quite conservative with a small c.

I mean, the bestsellers. Dan Brown is number one in the bestseller list this week in the UK as I speak, who has been a bestseller forever. And obviously new writers come along the whole time, but the market feels a little bit as if it's waiting now for innovation.

I think if that innovation's going to happen, it's probably going to happen in the indie space before it happens in mainstream publishing. So people are coming to us and thinking, does that represent a trend?

Does that represent something which could be a way of looking at something a little bit deeper, doing some research around and creating something which is not a long book, not a massive thesis, but something which is indicative of something which could be useful for people.

Jo: Just coming back on the Dan Brown is in the bestseller list.

I think this is completely to do with the way that traditional publishing measures things.

For many years, more than a decade, probably since the beginning of Kindle, certainly the beginning of Kindle Unlimited, there is a shadow economy, I call it, or a parallel economy.

I would say that almost zero of my own personal sales are measured by any industry standards. Anyone who makes any money from Kindle Unlimited or Kickstarter or Shopify, or selling direct in any form, or selling books at conventions, none of this is measured by any traditional things.

As you know, the New York Times list, for example, does not include Amazon sales in their bestseller list.

So you've got indie authors in the UK who are incredibly successful who have to decide, say, someone like LJ Ross, for example, decides, “Okay, I'm going to set up a proper imprint with Gardners or whatever so that I can get in bookstores so that I can hit a Sunday Times list or something.”

So I would say that seeing things like Dan Brown on a bestseller list has almost no meaning in the shadow indie economy.

John: No, you're absolutely right. We're not even able to see audiobook sales.

Jo: Yes, audio. Any kind of borrows, like Spotify.

John: No, you're completely right. I suppose I was making a broader cultural point, that it doesn't feel like there's an enormous amount of innovation going on or risk taking within what I would call mainstream trade publishing.

And there doesn't seem to be the need to be, because there will be more consolidation. Small companies will be bought by big companies, so there's growth through acquisition.

There's still a hope that something will take off that is a surprise, and there's still an enormous reliance on established brands who, even through the traditional metrics of how you measure them, are probably selling less, but still at the top of the pile. I suppose that's what I was meaning.

Jo: Yes, and I agree with what the industry looks at as signals. It's just, as we said, a lot of these signals are invisible.

So coming onto innovation, at London Book Fair this year there were a lot of sessions on AI, and you mentioned AI briefly, and there is a chapter in Going Indie on generative AI. And of course there's a lot of negativity and drama and lawsuits and this, that and the other.

But at the same time, at London Book Fair, a lot of traditional publishers talking about using it, and of course they always say, “Oh, we use AI only in marketing and business, not with the creative or editorial.” Everyone makes this distinction.

What are your thoughts on what's happening and where's it going with AI? Is a lot of this stuff not happening in public and just going on behind closed doors?

John: I think so. We do have a chapter in the book on AI. We've generated summaries of every chapter using AI, which we explicitly said in the book as well. We've got our Ten Commandments of what we think are useful guidelines.

I think that there has to be an enormous amount being done, whether it's experimentation or speeding up for efficiency's sake, or things that slow you down, within mainstream publishing.

There has to be more than just the guardrails around the creative process. And clearly when we're talking about metadata, book description, cover copy, presumably royalty calculations, presumably if you're trying to grow your newsletters. There has to be an enormous amount of activity going on.

We're driven by the market, so we do not commission. Writers come to us and they either want to work with us and we want to work with them, or that doesn't happen. So we're in a sense seeing what the market is seeing, and that is a whole range of things.

As I've said before, there's a lot of sweeping generalisations out there, which if you look back to that Kindle moment, we were talking a little while ago about what was going on in 2010/2011, about the enormous broad brush strokes that were being perceived as a result of Kindle.

Kindle has affected some areas of publishing, it's affected some not at all.

I think it will be absolutely fascinating when the sweeping generalisations stop and there becomes, I suppose, even more transparency. The thing that people are looking for, isn't it? A little bit less opaqueness as to what is really being done.

Because everybody's being so careful about what they say they're doing and what they're not doing. I suppose ElevenLabs is the one where people are openly engaging on the audio side. I mean, everyone is being so careful and cautious.

Jo: Me too.

John: What do you think? We spoke a bit about AI within the book, and I'm interested to know what you think.

Jo: Well, I've obviously been openly talking about it since 2016. I openly talk about using it, and I've got my Patreon community where we talk about how we're using it, and tips on how to use it.

But then, because I have been writing and publishing since 2007, 2008, I'm very strong in my creative voice. I'm very strong in my understanding of what I consider to be my level of output, and what I publish under my own name is what I publish under my own name.

John: Totally.

Jo: So the problem is for people who are less confident, I think, in what they're doing creatively perhaps. I know some people feel like they're scared it will take over or something.

When you're as strong-minded as me, it's not taking over anything.

John: It's not going to take over anything. And the other side of the coin is how many people are finding Whitefox using ChatGPT.

Jo: Mm.

John: I'm thrilled that we are emerging, through very detailed briefing of AI, as something that is worth engaging with.

Jo: Positive marketing.

John: Yes, exactly. As you say, I think there's a lot of negativity, and I think it will settle down eventually. I think less hysteria.

Jo: Yes, hopefully sooner rather than later.

So as we come to an end, you've been in the publishing industry a long time and seen a lot of people who have disappeared, but also those who've lasted. I wondered if maybe you could comment on those who last, because I definitely feel like I'm in my 50s now, and I want to keep doing this. I'm pretty obsessed with—

What are the hallmarks of people who have a long-term career?

So reflections on that.

John: Oh, that's such a good question. I think there's some common characteristics and themes. So I think authenticity, I think this idea of being continually curious.

I think there are people who can't help but create, and this idea that once you've sort of expelled once, that's enough. I think there's people that just can't stop creating, whatever you do with it. But this idea that the more you do, the better you get, the more you evolve and keep an open mind.

I think there's definitely entrepreneurial writers who love this idea of keeping their readers engaged, and how that conversation is something that evolves and that collaboration evolves, is fascinating. I think if you love that, and you listen, there's always an opportunity to keep building on what you do.

I love the writers who we work with. I can think of a writer who we're working on his fourth novel at the moment, and he is a bundle of positivity. No matter the trials and tribulations, the things that have gone wrong, his expectations definitely not being met with his first book.

He definitely has this idea that he wants to keep writing, he wants to get better, and he is getting better. It isn't a journey that has a beginning and an end. It's something that will continue for as long as he wants to write.

Every single book that he has published, he has learned and gained confidence, gained a network of connections that he's utilised himself now to not make the first half a dozen mistakes he made on the first book.

Who knows where it will end up? But certainly the satisfaction he's getting, and the sales he's getting, are growing as he becomes savvier and quicker to make the right choices and decisions.

So I think that's my honest answer to that. I think there are definitely people who think, “Phew, I have really wanted to do this book. Now I can rest easy. I've done my book.”

Then there are people who really, whatever their objective, whatever the definition of success is from the get-go, just can't help creating. I do love that and respect that.

I don't think our book falls quite into that category, because I think it's a slightly different thing. I think there are people who are still making a success of what they do and redefining that as they go on, and who are really open to ideas and input from different people and are not closed off. I love working with those people.

Jo: So where can people find Going Indie and everything you do online?

John: Well, Going Indie is available online at all good bookshops. It's available at Amazon and anywhere you buy books online as ebook and POD. Our website is wearewhitefox.com, and you'll find information about not just our book there, but a lot of other things that we're doing on that site.

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

John: Thank you so much, Jo. It's been a pleasure.

The post Going Indie, Publishing Innovation, And The Challenges Of Book Marketing With John Bond first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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

In the intro, how to stand out as a writer in the age of AI [Nathan Barry Show; Interview with Nathan Barry]; thoughts on asset maintenance; Goodreads giveaway on Bones of the Deep (Aug 5-20, 2026)

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

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

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

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

Show Notes

How a free blog in a tight niche built the audience for the book

Rewriting the book from scratch when the law changed

Why speed made self-publishing the only option

Building a paid membership after one audience member asked for it

Negotiating a Penguin Random House deal with no agent

Using AI as a business sidekick, with a control room and an engine room

You can find Suzanne at TheIndependentLandlord.com.

Transcript of the interview with Suzanne Smith

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

Suzanne: Thank you.

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

Tell us a bit more about you and your background, and how you got into property and writing after a legal career.

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

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

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

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

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

Jo: So you went into law, and then how did you get into property?

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

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

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

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

I know Jonathan is doing one at the moment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jo: Woo-hoo.

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

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

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

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

Why did you decide to do a book in the first place?

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

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

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

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

Jo: My blueprint?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did you always decide to self-publish?

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

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

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

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

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

Jo: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

You haven't just talked about all this. You've literally done everything.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think you were pretty determined to do that because you had a community as well, right?

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

Jo: Yes, London Book Fair, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suzanne: It was three and a half by then.

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

So that's an email list. You've got a blog. Did you do anything else in terms of marketing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jo: Yes.

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

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

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

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

Suzanne: Yes, it is.

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

So are you happy with the change to a business? Because obviously you have to treat it quite differently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes we just have to listen to those urges, don't we, to take things on?

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

Jo: Yes.

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

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

Jo: That's Wayne Gretzky, is it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What happened with the book deal?

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

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

Jo: AI spam bot, right?

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

You're always saying, and Orna Ross and everyone are always saying, “Watch out for scams.” And in fact, Penguin Random House even this weekend on Instagram put out something saying, “There are lots of people impersonating us.”

So I didn't take it too seriously, and it was something like, “Oh, would you be interested in us publishing your book?” And I thought, and I laughed. It was like, no, this is too good to be true.

So I replied and said… Oh, I said, “Well, thank you so much. The Renters' Rights Act…” And so this is like the second week in March. “The Renters' Rights Act comes into effect on the 1st of May. If you want to publish it, you're going to need to get your skates on.” I literally did say that.

Then she arranged a meeting with me the next day, on the Friday. I still was very dubious about it, and I had a think about it. What helped me, and I have the little booklet here: at the Author Lab, we did some work at the beginning, and Orna said, “Put your phones away.” And it was like, “What? Put my phone away?”

Then we had to do this definition of success, and our passion, and our mission, and our purpose. I wrote down things like, I want to help landlords, and in so doing, help improve the private rented sector. I get pleasure from helping people. I want to improve standards and use my legal and practical skills, et cetera.

So I thought, “Okay, what is my purpose of doing this book?” It isn't really to make money, because going with Penguin, you wouldn't do that for financial reasons, because you'd make very little money.

So I thought, what is my why? My why is I want as many people to read this book as possible. And I've managed to sell a few thousand copies, but there are 2.4 million landlords, and they all need to understand this book, and the only way that I can get it out there, apart from doing ads, is to get it out in bookstores.

So I thought about it, and then said, “Yes, I will do it, because I want to get the book out there.” So it's distribution.

It's going to be published on the 6th of August, which is really quick, bearing in mind they contacted me in the middle of March.

It's exactly the same book, it's just got different copyright wording and different blurb, different paper. Same cover, because I managed to find a fantastic cover person to do it. So they've kept everything the same.

So we negotiated that book. I have no agent. They came to me. It's the attract, don't chase.

I just put my lawyer hat on, and because one licence is very much like another one… I did turn down their first offer.

Jo: Well done. Good negotiation.

Suzanne: My daughter said to me, who's an adult daughter, she said, “But it's Penguin.” And I said, “Well, no, but it doesn't work for me.”

So I had a call with them, and then they came up with something that worked for me a bit more. I did have to concede on a few things, like I can't sell it in my Shopify store. But in some ways, that was a blessing in disguise, because it means I don't get any more “Where's my book?” emails.

Jo: Yes, exactly. Pros and cons of everything, basically.

Suzanne: I have very clear rights to get it back. If I want it back, I can get it back and I don't have to give a reason.

They're lovely. They have been really very wonderful. When I went up there a month or so ago, they gave me this book bag, and it's got on it, “I'm published by Penguin,” and I burst into tears.

Jo: Aw. That's nice.

Suzanne: I don't know, it just seemed like such a big deal. Because up until then I was just being all very lawyerly and task-orientated. Then I thought, “Oh my goodness,” and then it dawned on me.

So I'm now in this interim period where I've taken it off Amazon and off my Shopify store, and I feel very maternalistic towards the book because, you know, it took me two and a half years, which is longer than a pregnancy.

Obviously it's not a child, but it's like my book child. I've sent it off with a backpack and a drink and some snacks, and I hope that they look after him, my book.

The day I took it off Amazon it was still number one. And a big shout-out to Publisher Rocket, by the way.

Jo: Yes. Very, very useful for niche publishing.

Suzanne: Very. It helped me choose the right niche categories. So it was number one on at least one category, often six, all the way through. I thought, “Well, it's over to them now.”

They're very lovely people. They've given me some marketing assets, as they call it, some swanky graphics and things to use. We'll have to see what we do in terms of marketing. I don't mind doing marketing. I'm on LinkedIn quite a bit, and my whole blog is marketing.

What I've been doing is updating my blog to include one of these graphics and to mention the book, and I got Claude to help me draft the code so it looked right. So I've been going through all of my blog posts and sending people to Amazon rather than to my Shopify store.

It is mixed feelings, because I care about my book. I put a lot of effort, a lot of love, a lot of tears. No, not tears, but I put a lot of effort into it, and it's out of my control now.

Jo: Yes, you said it's over to them, but obviously you will still be creating content around this topic, so you'll probably still be the biggest driver of book sales.

Suzanne: Yes.

Jo: Are they also suggesting, for example, a podcast tour, like pitching for podcasts? Are they going to assign you some PR? Because, also if people don't know, as we are recording this, we have a new prime minister who wants to do various things.

You said no politics, but this is obviously a political thing. So you have the potential to go on a lot of different podcasts, media, talking about this, becoming almost a talking head in this kind of area.

So are you angling for all that, and is that in your contract, or is it literally just going to be whatever you want to do?

Suzanne: That's not in the contract. What's in the contract is very minimal. I think I've already done what I'm supposed to do. They are pitching for me to go on podcasts and things.

I'll tell you a really funny coincidence. So we now have a new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, and when he was Mayor of Greater Manchester, he set up something called the Good Landlord Charter.

I actually talk about it in the book, and I quote him in my book saying that good landlords mean people trying to do the right thing, or something like that. And I coincidentally came up with the same name, The Good Landlord Handbook. I'd already had the book title for a long time.

So this idea of good and landlord coming together, the adjective good as opposed to criminal or rogue, and the cover being green.

I'm wanting to change the narrative so it's the norm to have a good landlord, and to help people become good landlords. Or if they're good landlords, help them to understand the new rules, because the new rules are very complicated.

So what I don't get involved in is this right or wrong. Is it right that landlords can't do this or have to do this? Because as an in-house lawyer, it doesn't really matter what I think about the law. GDPR, goodness me.

Jo: Oh, dear. Let's not start on GDPR.

Suzanne: No, exactly. Because we've just got to suck it up. I liken it to the grief cycle, that people have been going through so much change and you have the anger, the depression—

Jo: Denial.

Suzanne: Bargaining, the denial, and then you get to acceptance.

For some people, the acceptance means they want to stop doing it. If you want to accept it and stay, you need to understand the rules. So I've deliberately just kept very practical and have kept out of all the politics of it.

I have, funnily enough, become involved because I'm now seen as an expert on the Renters' Rights Act. I've worked behind the scenes with the government to help, and give comment on government guidance for landlords.

I was even invited to a reception to mark the passing of the Renters' Rights Act at Downing Street with the previous prime minister, all whilst staying apolitical.

I won't let anyone make me be a mouthpiece for their political view. It's more, we just have to do this if we want to continue doing it. I've been very clear on that.

Jo: It's interesting you mention the grief cycle there, and you've also mentioned Claude and ChatGPT. I wonder if you might also just comment on use of AI for authors and for marketing and all this. Also with legal stuff, because for me now, if I'm looking at a particular legal thing, I tend to ask Claude.

I'm like, “Can you just explain this?” or upload a contract or whatever. Although it is not legal advice, it can be quite useful.

So give us your thoughts on using AI as a sidekick in your author business and also for wider life.

Suzanne: I now struggle to think what life would be like without Claude. I don't use Claude to write, at all, because I have a very particular voice and a turn of phrase, and if ever Claude writes something for me, it doesn't sound like me. It flattens me, and it makes me sound a bit American. So I don't do that.

I've used it in the back end of the business. For instance, my blog was down, and there was something called a recursive bot, which I don't even know what it was, and Claude helped me fix it for free. I went through, I did screenshots.

When I did an ElevenLabs audiobook and did it all myself, I was literally, for every screenshot, showing it to Claude. Claude said, “Do this, press this, press that.”

So I have all these different projects set up. One is the control room, where it's for my strategic thinking. If I have an idea, I want to think about something, I put it in there.

I have the engine room, which is for everything techy. Like when I had the recursive bot, or if I'm wanting to have some code on the website to make it look a particular way. Then I have other things for different subjects, and I put all the resources in there, and I use it a lot as a thinking partner.

I've noticed that Fable doesn't hallucinate as much, but the Opus used to. There's something called rental discrimination, and it was proofreading and said, “No, it's not rental discrimination, it's rental income discrimination,” and that was just a load of rubbish. So I would never let it go and change things without me looking at it.

I went on one of your webinars a month or so ago about MCPs and all the connectors, which is fantastic. It can go into my community and pull out all the questions for one of my live streams and put it into a document in order, by theme, for instance.

It can look at my MailerLite, because that's where my newsletter is with, and analyse the different open rates and click rates and things. It's so good for analysing everything, all the book sales. It helped me with my negotiation with Penguin, and it is pretty good on law.

It has sometimes hallucinated things, but not so much now. I think with anything, you've always got to go back to the primary source, and this is what we learn in academia: you have to check the primary source yourself.

I have a bit of a magpie brain. I'm very much a discovery writer, like you, and things occur to me as I'm doing it. I think that Claude, at the moment, is incredible. I've been quite open about it on social media that I have Claude as a business partner.

I'm a solopreneur, or whatever the word is. I have quite a big business now, and lots of different things, and it's just me doing it, because I can ask Claude how to do this, and how to do that. Claude can go and check my emails and tell me, is there somebody I've not replied to, which helps a lot.

Jo: Yes. I think it's empowering as a solopreneur as such. You talk there about the fixing the tech stuff. I have my web host come to me and say, “Look, you're getting so much traffic and bot stuff, and we need to put this thing in, and it's going to be $120 extra a month.”

I was like, “Can you just give me an hour? I'll get back to you.” And then I just had Claude code up, and I was like, “Analyse this and tell me what we can do.” It was like, “No, you just need to flip this switch and do that.” And I'm like, “Okay, fair enough.” Then the guy said, “Oh, no, okay, actually you don't need it.” Just stuff like that.

As a solopreneur, you're either going to pay somebody technically quite a lot of money, or you can get Claude or ChatGPT.

We should say, the ChatGPT Sol is very good, like the Claude Fable, for example. So, yes, using it as a sidekick.

I love your control room and your engine room projects as well. That's a great way of doing it.

Suzanne: I wouldn't be without it now, and I would have published the book a lot later without Claude, because Claude was helping me with the Shopify store and all the many steps of things. It saved me real time. It is just fantastic.

I think, like now when I'm updating my blog, I have a connection between Claude and my blog. Claude can go in, I can give it my Google Search Console results for the page: what should I change, are the headings right? All this kind of thing. And it will give me a view on every single page, which is incredible.

Jo: And YouTube, and just everything. Just super useful for that business sidekick.

That's what I want authors to think. I feel like authors get so obsessed with the creative side with AI, whereas actually, people like you and me, we're using it as that engine room for the solo business, which is what I love.

So we're out of time. I did want to ask one more thing, which is, one of the biggest issues with a specific book like yours is when they change the law again.

So do you have a plan in place for if, say, a new government changes the law again? Will you just be updating the book over time?

Suzanne: I think that there'll need to be a new edition of the book in three years' time, and I've spoken to Penguin about it. Not all of this new law has been implemented, and there's going to be case law and things. So I expect that I will update the book every few years.

I have some other ideas for books as well, but for the moment, I'm just taking a bit of a break. You always say we've got to refill our creative well. I really feel like that at the moment.

Recently I've just got myself a personal mobile phone so that I can turn off my work one when I'm on holiday and actually take time off. Because for all the time that I was doing the book, basically from Christmas until May, I didn't have one day off. That is not good. So I'm just trying to be a bit more balanced.

I had an idea to write another book for summer, but I've just decided not to, and I'm going to leave it until I feel the urge again.

Jo: Oh, well done.

Suzanne: Which will come.

Jo: Yes, well done.

Suzanne: I think there's nothing wrong with that. We just need to think what's right for us. I'm 58. So I want to be able to have time to enjoy things and not be working all the time.

Jo: No, that's great. It's a sustainable business.

So where can people find you and the book and your community online?

Suzanne: The easiest way to find me is theindependentlandlord.com. Or if you put Suzanne Smith and landlord into Google, you'll find me as well, and there's a link on there to the book, The Good Landlord Handbook. In the community, there's a link to that on my website as well.

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

Suzanne: Thank you.
The post From Blog To Community To Book: A Non-Fiction Author’s Journey With Suzanne Smith first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can building an audience in advance help your stories reach the people who make movies? And how can you prove there's demand for your book or screenplay before you've written it? Brooks Elms shares his advice after more than 20 years as a WGA screenwriter.

In the intro, what doesn't work for book marketing and what does [Amy Chan SubStack; Unsingle; Rephonic]; Goodreads giveaway for Bones of the Deep; FutureVision XPrize.

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

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

Brooks Elms is a WGA screenwriter with over 45 scripts, over a dozen sales, and he has directed two indie features. He is the creator of the Answer the Call system and has trained over 1,000 writers.

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

Show Notes

How to see the opportunity in AI when others only see the threat

How to test a story with samples, and what a 16-second movie can do

Building the trailer before you write the screenplay

Letting your audience finance the film once they have validated the idea

Why Hollywood still wants existing IP, and what makes them pay attention

Feeling safe enough to write the truth, and finding a concrete path forward

You can find Brooks on LinkedIn or email him at brooks@brookselms.com.

Transcript of the interview with Brooks Elms

Jo: Brooks Elms is a WGA screenwriter with over 45 scripts, over a dozen sales, and he has directed two indie features. He is the creator of the Answer the Call system and has trained over 1,000 writers. So welcome to the show, Brooks.

Brooks: Thank you. It's awesome to be here.

Jo: Fantastic. So first up—

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

Brooks: I started filmmaking first. A buddy came up to me in high school and said, “Hey, we're making a karate movie, do you want to help us?” I was like, “Oh my God, yes, that sounds amazing.”

So next thing I know, I had this karate outfit on, and we were just making this completely ridiculous and totally fun movie, and it was amazing. It was so fun.

Then it went to a whole other level when we shared it with a friend, this guy Jay Sharon, and he watched the movie and he laughed so hard he literally fell out of his chair. I was like, “Oh my God,” the fun I had making it could actually transfer to somebody else. I was hooked.

So from there I went to NYU film school, and then made a few independent feature films which were good but not great in terms of how they were received.

They were great for me in terms of enjoyment, but I knew I needed to iterate faster at that point. So then I was like, “Well, it's expensive and it takes a long time to make a movie,” at least back then.

So I pivoted to screenwriting, and pumped out two, three scripts a year, got signed at UTA, got writing assignments, and basically launched a screenwriting career. Then I still tried to get some stuff going, but it's hard when movies are so expensive.

It's not hard, it's just that it takes a lot of precision in the marketing, and a lot of conversations to find the right matches to finance something, and you're either interested in doing that or you're not. I just was like, “Well, I'll just mostly write screenplays.”

Then I started teaching at UCLA Extension and then coaching after that, along with writing. Then all the way up to the future.

What's great about moving forward is that with AI, shot-making is becoming very close to cinematic quality. You can actually match cinematic quality in moments in some genres, but probably by next year.

Right now you could actually do a really good horror movie all AI for 10, 20,000 bucks, depending on how much you're doing yourself or getting other people to do.

So the economics are going to absolutely explode. So I'm sitting on dozens of scripts that didn't get through the Hollywood packaging bottleneck because they're too expensive, and I now have this giant slate that's ready to go, and I'm just absolutely thrilled. It's been a lifelong dream for me.

Jo: Oh, so much to come back on there. Where to start?

I do want to talk about what you just said there, sitting on dozens of scripts and now seeing the opportunity. I actually wrote down in my journal about a year ago, I see what's coming with AI, and I think that the best thing I can do is create as much original IP as possible, so that I can make the most of the opportunity ahead.

So let's just get into the AI, because a lot of people feel it's a super bad thing.

Talk about the opportunities and the attitude that you've got [around AI], and that you've seen others have around this, for what is ahead in a positive way.

Brooks: It's fascinating to see how people respond to AI. I wonder, when the printing press rolled around, if there was some sort of backlash. Books must be handwritten. They can't be mass-produced.

Here's one of my theories. At a deep psychological level, it's so profoundly powerful that I think the default setting is, “Oh, crap.”

When I was a kid, some things were hard, and that power imbalance, when something big, new and powerful comes along: I'm going to get screwed, and so this is somehow a bad thing. I think that's the base psychological thing going on with most of the noise.

Obviously there are some legit problems, in terms of copyright infringement from learning models, or from some of the environmental situation. So I'm not saying it's all rainbows and butterflies, but I think 90% of the noise around it comes from a fear of change.

Here's the other one—a fear of, “Oh, yikes, I'm going to get taken advantage of somehow by either robots, or the corporations are going to use the robots against me,” or something like that. I have real empathy for me when I feel that way a little bit, but I don't feel it much, and for other people that do feel it.

The other thing is, you know what it is? I think they fear their own empowerment even more.

I had a therapist who was really good. He said, people aren't so much afraid of failing as they are afraid of succeeding. Because if we fail, we're stuck in act one and we don't go anywhere. The fear is answering the call and going to act two, when everything effing changes in the new world.

So I think people are afraid of how goddamn powerful they're going to be when they can have a team of AI agents helping them do everything they want in business or life or whatever.

I think it's the same thing with the internet. People are like, “Oh, I don't like social media, blah, blah, blah.” And I get it. There's a lot of noise and a lot of crap. Yet we have access to billions of people, and the algorithms in social media right now I think are level three out of 10. They're just going to get better and better.

Even as it is now, if I do a post about something and it gets ignored, that's on me. The algorithms are trying to match me to my people. So if I'm not unique enough and authentic enough and aware enough of how virality works, that's on me, and it's a learnable skill that I can embrace and then change and then get better at.

So I think people then resist that change. They resist the empowerment of learning the art of virality, or learning the art of some sort of social media stuff or whatever.

The last thing I'll say about this rant is, I don't want to act like I'm the guru on the hill that has all the answers. I refuse calls all the time. I'm scared about all sorts of things. I'm certainly not perfect. I feel frustrated when I'm trying to put my big ideas into action and I can't get this technology thing to work or that one, and I throw tantrums.

I'm trying to come at it from a real human perspective, but by and large, I've got stars in my eyes. I'm like, “This is amazing. This is going to be so powerful.”

For so many people, you just have to be ready to embrace it and just go along for the ride, because there's going to be some big-ass changes. There already are, and that's going to accelerate.

Jo: You mentioned there learning the art of whatever it is. One of the things is, I've spent 20 years, and so have you, learning our craft and our art, and now it can be done very easily.

I'm generating video, as you mentioned, which is a craft I haven't spent 20 years on, but now I can generate. So things have definitely changed in that way.

Just coming to the screenwriting side. Probably about a decade ago now, I did my first screenwriting course. I've written screenplays.

Then I looked at the game you have to play and, like you said, the conversations you have to have, the events you have to go and network at, all the things that you have to do to put a screenplay in front of the right person at the right time.

I was like, “I cannot do that. It's just not going to happen. I can't do that along with everything else.”

So I put it aside, but now I feel maybe it's time to bring it back because things are changing. So can you maybe talk about, if someone has a screenplay now that they've written, or some IP like a book that they have now—

What would you recommend people do in terms of wanting to get that [IP] in front of somebody, or doing something with it themselves?

Brooks: It's such a good question. By the way, not even a screenplay—you could do the same things with a novel. Let me try to be succinct here, which is a good challenge for me.

A simple way to look at it is, you're giving samples. Let's say it's a lemonade stand, and you give out a little shot of your… maybe you have cayenne pepper lemonade, some sort of fun lemonade. If you give out a sample and people are into it, they're going to come back and they're going to tell friends.

If you give a sample of the lemonade and they're not into it, then you go back to the kitchen and you mix up a different flavour.

So that's some basic business, but the internet allows us to do that at scale. So what I like to encourage people to do when I coach them is come up with the minimum viable material. It can be a 10-second clip.

There's a writer in my community who made a really beautiful 16-second movie. It's one shot. I love it so much. It's two wine glasses. There's a lipstick smudge on one of the wine glasses. They're half full, and it's just that shot.

It's sitting there, and all of a sudden you hear this thundering, thumping down these stairs, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Then you see out of the corner of the frame one person runs by, and then the other person behind her runs by and goes, “Wait.”

That's it. That's the whole movie. It's 16 seconds. He did that with his phone.

So there's so much going on. There's a couple of basic elements, but he just did it with his phone, and you can evoke enormous emotional impact on people through social media, whether it's just words.

You guys have a big advantage as novelists because you're so good with words. Whether it's a little bit longer, like sudden fiction, that's a couple of pages or whatever. Even just copywriters are really in a good position for the future because they're super potent with two words or three words or 10 words.

Then novelists are probably really advantageous because it doesn't cost anything to just put some words out on the internet. The point is, if you put something out, it's a signal, and you're talking about billions of people who could find that signal.

If you do it and then you look at the response, and then you try again, you look at the response, we can do this iteration infinitely for free.

So you can do it already. You've been able to do it for 10, 15, 20 years, just with words. But now you're going to basically be able to do that with movies or clips or trailers. So the thing that I'm leading in my community of writers is having people build trailers in advance, or clips.

When a book or a movie is done, how the heck do we get people to see it? One way is a trailer or some sort of behind-the-scenes material. You can just do that stuff now before even writing the screenplay.

I saw that you were doing this project, a trailer for this competition. And then you mentioned, “Oh, I've got to write the screenplay.” Not really. You have to develop the story enough to know what you're referring to, and then it's about studying the craft of either trailer construction, or whatever the clips are, or viral clips.

They all have a structure, and then you just test it. If you enjoy that testing process, which I find absolutely thrilling, it feels like the filmmaking version of a stand-up comedian. If I did stand-up, I say a joke, they laugh or they don't laugh.

It's really beautiful feedback from the universe. Nerve-wracking, right? But we can do that now as storytellers. We put a story out there in any format, and the audience responds.

Just like you have to read any room, you have to learn how to read the engagement on social media.

What do likes mean? What do shares mean? What do comments mean? How do you deal with trolls? All that is just part of the new art. Once you get good at it, holy smokes, that's the key to the kingdom.

You can build audiences in advance, and for movies you could even have them finance your movie in advance, if you've built an email list of 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 people because you kept putting out all these viral clips around your story, novel, or screenplay.

Then you go, “Okay, now 30,000 people are on my email list and I tell them about me and my perspective and my world. We're going to make this darn thing with AI for 20,000 bucks. You guys have got to pony up some money. Put in a dollar, five, 10, or you get the VIP $500 experience.”

It's like crowdfunding, but much more sophisticated, because most crowdfunding was like begging friends and family to donate to your crazy dream.

What I'm talking about is going to the audience directly, developing enough of the story, then going to the audience second, and then only when they validate the idea, to the extent that you're happy with.

You could do a crazy idea that's going to have a small audience, and you don't have to have a blockbuster audience. You get to pick the audience size that you want, and then put the samples out there and see if you have a relevant audience size for this next project.

Once the audience tells you, “Yes, we want this,” then you go make it. So you're ultimately reducing risk to almost zero. It takes time and you have to learn how to do this stuff, but it's thrilling to me because we just have the capacity to test the material and listen to the audience upfront.

The last thing I'll say, and I've rambled a lot, I'm sorry. When I made a movie in 1994, a feature film right out of NYU, it took me three years to find out what the audience thought about that movie.

I had to make the damn thing, and then I ran out of money, and that took me years to edit it, and I finally got it, blah, blah, blah. And again, I loved it. I loved every facet of it, and it was fine, but it was super inefficient.

Today, I could take those same elements, create an AI trailer this weekend, put it in front of hundreds of thousands of people, and they could tell me right away, “This sucks,” or, “This is interesting,” or, “Holy smokes, this is amazing. I want this.”

If it's not, “Holy smokes, this is amazing, I want it,” I can go ahead and re-edit the whole damn trailer, and just keep reiterating at almost no cost.

Then once the demand is there, I can take that demand and that audience and go to Hollywood, and that's when they're going to want to work with me.

Then it doesn't take a million conversations and finding the needle in the haystack, because Hollywood sees the numbers and they go, “Oh, you're the people we do want to do business with. You've proven demand. We want to do business with you.”

Jo: Yes, it's so interesting. I can hear people listening and they're like, “Easier said than done, getting an email list of 40,000 people.” And in fact—

It's exactly the same as building up a career as an independent author.

This is as a filmmaker, as a visual person, and the industry is visual, so doing a visual trailer is the obvious thing. And as you say, the tools I use just to do this one, I use Midjourney, and I've used Seedance as the main video model.

It does take a while, but it is pretty fast now, if you have a visual image of what you want in your head, which obviously you're a visual person as well. But is it…

Brooks: Hold on. I want to push back on that a little bit, because I think it's really important.

So yes, that's true, but underneath that, my friend, it's a relationship. It's the relationship, and the media is secondary. You have been prolific in connecting with your audience, and that's why I think a lot of people like you, because you share and they get to know you in that sort of cadence.

I saw you in another podcast, you mentioned Seth Godin, who just said, “Hey, I want to be the type of person that has this relationship with my audience. I'm going to share some of my thoughts every day.”

He happened to do it with words, with his background in marketing, but you could do the same thing with still images. You could do the same thing with a five-second movie clip once a week. It's the relationship you want with your fans.

I'm not saying you snap your fingers and you have 50,000 people on your email list. What I'm saying is, what else are you doing?

If we're artists and our impulse is to create and share, and if you do it in this way, if I can create and share and inspire trust in this relationship with a stranger because they like my genre thing and they like the way they felt when they experienced my media, words, images, movies, it doesn't matter.

They just like the feeling, and they go, “Ooh, I want more of that feeling. How do I get more of that? Oh, this person has this email list or community.”

If I can do it with one, then I can scale it out. So getting the first one, or the first 5 or 10 samples, that is a whole process. But then once you do that, scaling up is more of a mechanical thing. It's not even that hard, especially when you can do paid ads.

So you can scale up very quickly if you have the sauce. If you don't have the sauce, it doesn't matter who you're related to, you've got to get the sauce right.

Jo: Yes, and again, it's so parallel to the indie author community.

I've just got to ask you, in the olden days, an author might write a screenplay, or a screenwriter write a screenplay, and then they would send it. They'd find an agent. They'd pitch an agent, and I guess then they'd hope that someone would turn that into a movie. So is that just dead now?

Is it realistically that you need to get yourself out there, build the audience in the same way that it often is for authors?

Brooks: So, no. I've got two screenplay deals going right now. So here's how it's going to work. Think about Broadway, or the theatre district in Britain. It's like West End or East End or whatever…

Jo: The West End.

Brooks: Sorry for my American ignorance. West End, okay.

So every town on the planet has a stage, but there's only one Broadway, there's only one West End, right? And every town has its own festival, but there are a few significant tastemakers. There's Cannes, there's Sundance, there's Toronto. Hollywood is always going to be a tastemaker in our lifetime, for sure.

What they don't have anymore, what they enjoyed for the first 100 years of the industry, is that they had a stranglehold on basically the equipment, the financing, and the audience, and that's all going away.

Do you want to hear a fun story about the birth of cinema? Do you know why Hollywood started in Hollywood?

Jo: No.

Brooks: So Thomas Edison invented the camera, or the type of model camera that they were using in, I don't know, 1910 or something around there.

They didn't want to pay his patent. They didn't want to pay the patent to make these movies, so they went all the way across the country, a bunch of outlaws, and they set up shop in California because he couldn't enforce his patent that they were basically stealing.

And reason number two, LA enjoys amazing weather almost all year round. The weather here is either nice or really nice. You have mountains, you have beach, you have desert, you have all these different locales. So when it was really important to be on location, LA was the perfect place.

Anyway, that is all going away. For many decades, more people could make movies. In the early '90s, Robert Rodriguez made a movie for 9,000 bucks. There was a book in the '80s that I bought that I loved, it was Feature Filmmaking at Used-Car Prices. This guy, Rick Schmidt, I think his name was.

There were the independent filmmakers really in the '60s and the '70s. So the cost has been going down and down and down, and now it's less than ever. Once social media came along, now you have access to the audience, so why do you even need Hollywood?

That being said, there are tons of people. There are 400,000 people already working in the movie and the TV industry here. And they're voracious. We have a voracious demand.

Humans need stories. We need big stories, long stories. We need stories, and Hollywood is so good at giving them stories. And so they have a need for these things, and they're still spending a lot of money on those budgets.

So yes, there's still a demand for turning books and optioning them and turning them into movies. Books are great. Any sort of existing IP is great because there are marketing efficiencies there.

People already know that stuff, know the vibe of it, and so it's easier to market than something that's totally creative and new. When you're spending that much money, you want those marketing efficiencies. They're really important.

So the point being, the power is shifting away from Hollywood. Hollywood will still be a tastemaker, but you and me can reach anybody on the planet now. Almost. Billions of people.

If it's making a movie, right now you could make a movie that most people wouldn't realise is an AI movie. If it was a horror film, I know a handful of people that could make a feature-length horror film right now with AI and 99% of the audience couldn't tell, if it was professionally written.

Jo: I think the point here though is, I'm an author, the people listening are authors, and we don't want to make movies.

We want to license our IP to people who want to make movies.

Brooks: Yes. Great. Okay, good. So then you could, if you wanted, build an audience. Hollywood loves when something's already proven, so that's that IP thing, right?

So if you just have a great book, then it's all about the sales. You guys have Dragons' Den, we have Shark Tank here. And what's amazing about that show is these are people or entrepreneurs pitching an idea, and there's an amazing rhythm that happens.

They say, “We've got this great idea. It's this sort of company.” And the sharks, or the dragons, will listen. And there's a huge turning point when they reveal sales.

They're either really excited about the idea and then they go, “Well, how are the sales?” And the person goes, “Well, we don't have any sales yet.” And they go, “Uh,” and they're not interested.

Or they might even be like, “Eh, it doesn't seem like a good idea.” And they're like, “Well, how are the sales?” And they're like, “Oh, well, we've sold through the roof.” And then all of a sudden they perk up. So it's all about the sales.

So step one is writing something that you want. Step two is making sure other people in your target audience are also loving it as much as you do. Step three is proving in some way at scale that there's real demand for it.

So you could do that with trailers, you could do that with clips, you can do that as an indie publisher. There's all sorts of things that you can do. Humans are much more persuaded by concrete data than they are by just vibes.

So if you can bring Hollywood concrete data of any type, like viral videos, like audience, like obviously bestsellers. Awards mean something, but not quite as much as sales. Then you're going to get Hollywood's attention because that reduces risk for them.

So even now, when Hollywood's definitely shrinking and contracting, there's still very significant money being spent because it's a huge demand. If you ever walk around a studio lot, those things are opulent places. It's stunning. Like, how are they paying for all this stuff? These lots are enormous.

It's because humanity is voracious for stories, and movies are one premium type of storytelling. The demand for stories is steady if not going up. It's just that we have a wider variety of types of stories that we can do, whether we're an indie author.

So anyway, did I answer the question? You get me too excited with these questions, Jo. It's a problem.

Jo: Yes. I think there's a lot of opportunity and a lot of ways in, but the parallels with being an indie author I think are quite clear.

One of the things I found interesting about your profile and what you do is that you help clients who are already accomplished but not quite breaking through, and that sounds like a lot of mid-list indie authors, probably a lot of mid-list screenwriters, mid-list filmmakers.

This is a hard place to be because, on the one hand, we are grateful for what we have achieved and what we can do, and yet wanting more, wanting that big Hollywood deal or the Netflix deal, or wanting the massive bestseller or whatever.

So if someone wants to get to that next level, what are some of the ways that they can perhaps try and get there?

Brooks: It's a great question. Coaching is a really wonderful way to learn anything of this sort of complexity and challenge, especially if it's a hyper-competitive business. We need two things, I think, to write a great novel or screenplay or both.

A, we need to feel profoundly safe in our space. If we can't really feel deeply authentic about the things that are embarrassing, or that we feel shame about, or just our shadows, or anything that we don't feel completely comfortable saying and sharing in public usually.

We need to be able to touch those things, and be articulate about those things, and that's one part of it. Then we need a concrete path forward. Maybe you're thinking about some tragedy that you had in childhood, and how you dealt with it and how difficult that was.

So you need to be able to be real precise in those observations about what it felt like, and how you tried to compensate for it, and that didn't work and it made it worse.

Whatever your observations are about your life journey, you need to be really specific and really deeply felt. A good coaching relationship allows you to be in that space, to be really honest with yourself and authentic. g

Aood coach will push you back and say, “You know what? That sounds interesting, but maybe not quite as true to you deeply.” So that's one piece of it. Then there's a concrete path forward.

You need to have the emotional access to that truth, and then you need to know what to do with that truth in a step-by-step way. Because most people, the ones that you're talking about, they're accomplished in something else.

What happens is when we first start writing, and maybe this happens with novelists, but for sure it happens to screenwriters, you just start typing words. But you haven't really thought through the theme, the concept, the structure, the character, all the deeper questions that really matter.

The milestones, like a North Star: winning a major award, or getting a publisher. That's the direction that we're heading towards, and then you set it and forget it, but you want to keep checking it every week, every month or whatever. But you want it very specific.

“I would like to sell a book, or sell a book to Hollywood, or write a screenplay, or get a producer attached to a screenplay.”

Whatever the milestone is, make it really specific, really concrete, and then reverse engineer.

This is what I do on the concrete path. I reverse engineer every step to get there, starting with a really tiny one we can do today, and I make sure they feel really safe, and then we just walk through.

Then what happens is, if you do that, if you feel safe, if you're showing up authentically and you have a process that's repeatable, not just willy-nilly, it's got to be something that's proven to work. It wasn't an accident I wrote 45 scripts. I've got a whole system.

But by the way, the first five scripts took me forever. The last movie that I made took me three years to write that script. I can write a better script with those same elements in three months now, because I know I have a concrete path.

So if you want to do something new, whether it's playing the piano or getting six-pack abs or writing a screenplay, work with somebody who's got a system that's already proven, and make sure you relate to them, and then just follow the system.

Then when the doubts come up, and they will, that's where the feeling safe is really important. Because, oh, I want the six-pack abs, but I don't feel like going to the gym. I want the extra donut.

If I'm working with a really good trainer, they go, “Dude, do you want the six-pack abs or not?” And then you go back and forth, and I go, “Okay, now I can make peace with myself and say I can take one tiny bite of the donut and then still do my workout,” and then I'm moving towards that North Star. Does that make sense?

Jo: Yes. I think, like many independents, I resist anything that is systematised. I'm a discovery writer, and I follow the muse, and all of that kind of thing.

I think I would say something in a similar vein, which is sustainable creativity for the long term, because your 45 scripts are also years of work, and my books are years of work, and we get better at what we do. So my system, I do have a system really, because—

My system is that I do the work, and I write my stories, and I get them out there, and I do the marketing.

So even if it's not as systematised as such, it's still a process that I have repeated over and over again.

Brooks: That's fascinating to me. Would you consider yourself a pantser? You're like, “I've got an idea,” and you just start writing?

Jo: I don't use the word pantser. I guess I call it discovery writing, which is…

Brooks: That's a better term.

Jo: Yes. What I'm writing for this prize, for example, I know the characters, I know now what's happening.

When I had the idea, it was very much a vision and a theme, and the competition has a theme: a positive future with AI and technology. But the things that came around that, I then started playing with ideas around the treatment. I haven't written the screenplay yet.

I don't do a plot, or I don't follow Save the Cat or any of that kind of thing. When I write a novel, I just explore and I never write in order. Then at some point I stop and then I have to think about the structure and putting it all together, so the edits are quite big. But my fun is in that discovery, really.

Brooks: Oh, that's awesome. Okay, so let me ask, that's really fascinating. And by the way, that doesn't, to me, negate the system that I use.

The one that I use is ultimately… the thing is, these questions, the audience is wanting your unique answers to. You don't necessarily need to do it in a certain order. I think that's actually really cool that you write out of order and you have a few elements in mind. All that stuff sounds awesome.

The only thing that then makes me curious is, how's your pace? Are you actually completing novels at a pace that feels good, or do you feel like you go too fast, too slow?

Jo: I do one or two a year at the moment. Well, two a year, really. But I would say I'm not as successful as I'd like to be, so I'm not saying that my system is the best. I'm saying I want to be better.

It's just that my fun is this sort of creative chaos, which I then try and control later.

One of the things I really like about screenplays and treatments and doing this kind of thing for film is that it is much more structured, I think, than a 70,000-word novel. You can go in all kinds of directions, whereas with screenwriting you do have to be more disciplined really.

Brooks: Yes, so this is going to be fun probably, to hear my view for your audience, and the differences as I see them.

For starters, you're talking about what, 10, 20, 30 hours reading a novel sometimes, or maybe less, whereas a movie's a 90-minute experience, right? So that's different. Or if it's a TV series, you might see an hour and then an hour. So that's a very different experience.

What happens is when it's condensed like that, you're loading up layers. So every scene is stacked with exposition beneath the drama, and done in a certain way. So specifically, movies are only what you can see and only what you hear. Whereas novels, if you can think it, you can write it, it can be in there.

So you don't need to have a plot, but if you want to sell your book to Hollywood, it helps.

So I was very resistant about structure. I went to NYU film school, where we really just made short films. It was funny, I had friends that were in the dramatic writing department, and I was like, “You guys are wasting your money. You're just learning to write scripts. We learn to write the scripts and make the movies.”

What I hadn't realised is it's a different skill set to hold somebody's attention across an hour-long play, or a 90-minute movie, than it is to make a movie that holds their attention for two minutes or five minutes.

I found out years later when I made a feature that was like a lot of shorts patched together, and people were not… They liked it, but they didn't love it. I was like, “Well, what's going on?” And so then I learned to really love Save the Cat in particular. It completely changed me.

What happened was, I got a big old slice of humble pie. I had made my second feature, and I put everything I had into it, and it had loose structural beginning, middle, end, blah, blah, blah. But I was still, “Eh, Hollywood BS. What do they know? It's all fake.”

So I was very anti-Hollywood structure. Then I was like, now I've got two independent films out there, people saw them, liked them, whatever, but it wasn't getting me consistent work. It wasn't really advancing my career in the way that I wanted. And I was like, “Well, maybe there is something to the Save the Cat.”

So I went to the Save the Cat workshop with Blake when he was still alive, and he was delightful, a really awesome guy. He's got this kind of cutesy style, for people that don't know.

For context, Blake Snyder was a working Hollywood screenwriter, and he had this system called Save the Cat, which actually has some really interesting ideas.

He's got this very light, breezy sort of style. A lot of people don't like him and some people really love him, and everything in between. But I took his weekend seminar, and it completely changed me, because at that point, like I said, I took three years to write a script.

Then once he had a process and he had a way of thinking about craft that was just much more screenwriter-friendly, I was like, “Oh my God.” It was so much easier, because I was just focused on the right thing at the right time. So it just sped everything up.

After that, I was banging out two to three scripts a year, and better and better quality.

So for me, because I went from winging it and wrote five scripts in 13 years, and then wrote two to three scripts every year, I became a huge proponent of system and process.

Then my own system really came from that, but it's modular. I have a nine-step system, but you don't necessarily have to go in that order, other than the last three steps, but I won't get into the details. Sometimes you kind of jump from two to three and then back to two and then back and forth.

So I love that you get the feel for those elements, and then you just felt your way through. But writing screenplay pages doesn't make sense until you really understand concept, you get a deep sense of beginning, middle, end, character arcs, and these other threads.

There are just way better tools for those jobs than screenplay format, because it's a really weird format. It's got these weird slug lines at the top that are all in caps, because a screenplay is a blueprint for somebody else to make the movie. It's not an end-user document like a novel.

I don't let my clients even go to that format because it just gets them focused on the wrong things. What they really need to know is, what is your perspective about this theme? What happened in your life that you're fascinated with, that you'd even want to write about this? And tell me what your real life lessons are.

So we go into… again, I go back to relationship. What's your relationship to the universe? And what's your relationship to your best friends, or where you got your heart broken, or whatever you want to write about. And then we get that clarity, and then I show you how to express it in terms of developing a screenplay.

It's really long-form storytelling, and then the structure just makes it build on itself. But with the structure, because you're talking about so much money and people involved to make it, at least traditionally, what ended up happening was narrative structure that was not so much rigid.

Because here's the thing, you can look at 50, 100 years of European cinema and you can look at Hollywood cinema, and Hollywood laps them.

When I taught at UCLA Extension, I had lots of foreign students. Let's say there'd be two or three students… if there were 12 people in the class, two or three people would be from America, and everybody else would be from other countries.

I would go around, I'd be like, “What movies and TV shows have you been watching?” Almost in every single country, they watch half from their own country, half from Hollywood. So Hollywood storytelling works, that's just the data, and they're dominant.

The reason it works is what Aristotle was saying thousands of years ago.. There's a way of thinking about beginning, middle, end that just deeply speaks to the psyche, and you can ignore it if you want. I think Godard said, “You need beginning, middle, and end, but not necessarily in that order,” right? Which is great.

Just the way we experience life, there's a beginning, a middle, an end to this podcast interview. There's a beginning, middle, end to the day, a beginning, middle, end to me eating lunch.

So if you don't lean into the beginning, middle, end psychological aspect of your story, you're going to bore your reader.

But to your point, you don't necessarily have to sort that out in the beginning. It's more efficient probably if you do, but you don't have to. Go into it wherever the muse tells you to go, and then at some point, like you do, then you go, “Okay, now I go back and I edit.”

If you're saying there's another level, you have another gear in you, then yes, I'd be curious to slowly go through how you're making those decisions. Because what's happening probably is there are ways you're holding back a little bit. There's maybe something you're afraid of being vulnerable about.

That's usually where me or other writers are holding themselves back, and we can take a look at that. There are different ways I show writers to do it. Then you can go, “Oh, I was doing it here, and now I can do it there.” And it could be with process, or just a certain creative choice.

With story, it's clear and compelling. Those are the simple things. So, is this clear enough? Is it compelling enough? And there are almost always ways to up-level on any facet, whether it's one sentence, or a sentence that describes the whole concept of the book, or a chapter.

Each one of those can be looked at with that lens and we can just say, “Hey, this is 70%, 80%,” whatever, and then we say, “Well, how do we get a little bit more?” And then when you do that enough, it piles up. Then especially if you bring in an audience and people are flipping out for your work, they'll tell you.

Jo: Yes, I love a challenge, so thank you for everything you've shared today.

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

Brooks: Well, one way you can find me—if anything I said seemed helpful for you, if you have questions about Hollywood or you have a screenplay in your heart—you can just email me, brooks@brookselms.com.

You could look me up on LinkedIn. I'm at Brooks Elms. I also have a Skool community called Screenwriter Marketing, but it's really for any sort of storyteller, and it talks about my favourite way to engage an audience and get through it. So anybody can jump into that if you like my vibe.

If you really think anything I've said, or the way I said it, seems like it could be helpful for you, just reach out. Let me know what you're up to, and maybe there's a way I can help you.

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

Brooks: You're welcome. It was a total pleasure. It was lots of fun, and I really appreciate you.
The post How To Prove The Demand For Your Stories And Get The Attention Of Hollywood With Brooks Elms first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can organic writing and leaning into the pivot help your stories stand out? And how can you pitch a story as a discovery writer if you genuinely don't know what's going to happen next. Steven James gives his writing tips after more than 20 years as an author.

In the intro, Better Than Free in an Age of AI [Kevin Kelly on Tim Ferriss; Kevin Kelly on The Creative Penn]; Future Vision XPrize; A Different Kind of Bucket List.

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

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

Steven James is the multi-award-winning and international bestselling author of 21 novels across thrillers, YA, and science fiction, with more than a million copies sold, as well as the author of non-fiction craft books for writers, a writing teacher, and the host of The Story Blender podcast.

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

Show Notes

How to lean into organic writing, and what to focus on instead of plot

How characters unfold on the page, and why an attitude beats a background

Producing an outline for an agent or publisher when you genuinely don't know what happens next

Don't pitch the plot, pitch the pivot

The four choices you have in every scene, and why logic plus surprise is the engine of story

Faith, moral clarity and big questions

You can find Steven at StevenJames.net.

Transcript of the interview with Steven James

Jo: Steven James is the multi-award-winning and international bestselling author of 21 novels across thrillers, YA, and science fiction, with more than a million copies sold, as well as the author of non-fiction craft books for writers, a writing teacher, and the host of The Story Blender Podcast. So welcome to the show, Steven.

Steven: Thanks for having me, Jo. Good to be here.

Jo: Great to have you on the show. First up—

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

Steven: Oh, gosh. Well, the thing is, when I was a kid, I fell in love with stories.

My uncle would always, whenever we got together for the holidays—Christmas, New Year's and so on—he would take my sister, my brother and myself into a corner of the room while the other adults had coffee, and we would just sit there, and he would get this look in his eye and he'd say, “I'm going to tell you a story.”

We were transported to another world. We were swashbuckling with pirates, or facing down a grizzly bear in Alaska, or flying over the desert on a flying carpet, or whatever. I fell in love with imagination and stories and everything.

So I started reading as much as I could, mostly short stories. They had a programme at our library called the paperback book exchange, where you bring a paperback book and you leave it, and you can take any one of the paperback books that they had.

You could keep it as long as you wanted. If you wanted it for your life, that's fine, or you could just bring it back as soon as you finished reading it.

Anyway, I went crazy over the summers reading short stories, mainly. As I got older, I was like, “I think I want to be a storyteller.” So I actually got my master's degree in storytelling.

Then I started to travel and tell stories, but I had three little daughters at home, and I was like, “I don't want to be gone 300 days a year when they are growing up.” So I ended up starting to write stories instead of travel, and then it just kind of shifted in that direction.

That was in '97. Oh my goodness, that's long. '97, '98. So then I started to write books, and then eventually in 2007, I think, my first novel came out. Now, mainly, I've been writing novels ever since.

Jo: It's so interesting.

Was it a job, storytelling? Is that what you did before you became a book writer? Or did you have a different job?

Steven: I mostly would go to events, conferences, schools and so on, and do a family-friendly storytelling show. So I would tell personal stories, some folktales reimagined. I would go to different events around the country. Mostly it was that.

Then I started to shift. I wrote for magazines for a while—80 different magazines I wrote for over those years, a couple of hundred different articles, stories.

I was like, “I'm just going to try to make a living telling stories.” So the shift has gone back and forth between actually telling stories and writing stories, but these days, I don't know. I'm still speaking. I'm still out there teaching.

Jo: That's so interesting, because it's obviously a completely different thing to tell a story in person than it is to write a story.

So when you decided to shift that way, what did you have to learn and unlearn?

Because your thoughts on the page are so different to when you can make eye contact with an audience.

Steven: That's a good point. I kind of started by telling stories back when I was in college, so I sort of moved from telling to writing. And you're right, there's so much that's lost, whether it's eye contact or pauses.

On a printed page, there's always the same amount of space between every word—a space. But when you tell stories, obviously you pause for effect in different places, different areas, and so it's quite different.

So if I have an idea for a story, I usually have to decide, is this going to be written or told? And then I do it in that medium. Then if I want to, let's say, tell a written story, I almost have to relearn it, or retell it very differently.

You have gestures, body language. All of those things are obviously lost in text, so they are very different.

I think for me it's been good, because when I tell stories, I hear different characters speaking, so that when I write, usually dialogue comes fast to me. I can hear what people are saying.

I don't always know where they are. I don't always know the setting. I don't even know the scene necessarily, but I can hear the dialogue.

Then it also helps me to step into the characters, like when I'm writing different points of view, so that I think I can do a good job of getting into that character's mind, as if I were that person. I think some of that comes from just telling stories.

Jo: You've taught so many writers over the years, and it's interesting you said that you hear characters' dialogue. I see visual film in my mind. I don't hear any voice at all. It's all silent.

I struggle with dialogue, but I do great world building. Do you find that this really is different by the author?

I feel like we fall into these different groups.

Steven: Yes, I do. I kind of feel like that's very true as far as what comes first, whether it's a description of a place, whether it's the action.

I mean, basically a story has dialogue, narration—or we call it sometimes exposition—and description. Those three things. Every story has those three things, and those are the three that we use to tell a story, a novel.

So some people tend to drift into one or the other as sort of their default setting: dialogue, description, or action. That's true.

I think also something else that's interesting about writers is they tend to fall into either the camp of being a wordsmith or a storyteller. Not everyone, but I feel like some people are wordsmiths, where I read what they're writing, and I'm like, “Man, this is so powerful, evocative,” whatever.

Maybe there's no story there. It's just really interesting writing.

Other people just are natural storytellers, and they have to really work on the wordsmithing. I think that's me. I'm more naturally just a storyteller, but it takes me a long time to get the descriptions to where I want them, to choose exactly the right word. That takes me more effort.

Some people have to build up the storytelling muscles. I have to build up the wordsmithing muscles.

Jo: Well, part of the reason I wanted to talk to you is because you talk about this thing called organic writing in your book Story Trumps Structure, which is out now in a second edition. I call it discovery writing, so similar to you. But most people in the writing community seem to obsess about plotting and planning.

So talk about your process of organic writing. You say in the book, “Trust the fluidity of the process.” Tell us more about that.

Steven: Well, I remember in high school even, when my teacher got up front and he kind of got this very almost wise look on his face, and he goes, “A story is something with a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

I'm sitting there in high school like, “Well, so does a bratwurst. What are you talking about here?” A description of a chair has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The sentence, “Preheat the oven to 450 degrees,” has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

My view is that saying a story is something that has three acts is like saying that a pizza is something with three toppings. It might have three. It might have one. It might have five.

So the idea for me is not to worry about structure, trying to tick off the boxes of a template, a formula you find online, a fill-in-the-blanks kind of a thing. But instead, to actually look at what lies at the heart of the story—the character, the tension, the struggle, the pursuit, the pivots and plot twists, and the payoff at the end.

As you develop those aspects of the story, I feel like you need to worry less and less about following a formula. The more you understand what lies at the heart of a story, I feel like the less you need to plot and the less you need to write by the seat of your pants.

A lot of people say, “Oh, you write by the seat of…” No, I don't write by the seat of my pants, because I know what a story contains, so I know that in a certain scene a character will make certain choices that are unpredictable but that escalate the tension, and different things like that.

I'm a huge proponent of discovery, as you say, or organic writing.

I won't get the quote exactly right, but Ray Bradbury said something along the lines of, “Plot is the tracks left in the snow after your characters have run by on their incredible destinations. It cannot precede action. It is the chart that remains when an action is through.”

So he's saying plot is not what precedes action. After the action, you have plot. So the whole idea of trying to plot out a story before you write it is going about writing exactly backwards. Plot doesn't precede action. It's the result.

So I always tell people, “Don't worry so much about the plot. I want you to look at the pursuit.”

A plotter might say, “Well, what should happen?” And they'll just come up with something. But an organic writer—a pursuit-based question would be, what does the character want? Now, when I know what the character wants, I will know what should happen. So literally, it will lead me to the story.

Focusing on plot will not necessarily lead you to the story. It might lead you down the wrong track.

Jo: Then in terms of your actual writing process—

Do you start writing without knowing the ending? Do you write in order? Is the organic side also in the process?

Steven: I've never started a book where I know how it will end. So I usually start with either a character that's fascinating or, in some cases, a premise, a question. Then as I write, I explore the possibilities of where it might go.

I've tried to outline a scene—like one scene, not a whole book—and it never works. I can't even outline one scene. I've tried, and I'm like, okay, that's… What I end up with is completely different from it, so it's just a waste of time and effort for me to try to outline or plot out a story.

I'm much more interested in the pathway the characters will take as they face obstacles and setbacks in their pursuit. As the struggles and the tension develop, what choices will they make? That's how the story will unfold for me.

Jo: I'm similar. Then I also wonder—

Do you do character sheets and character bios, or do the characters also unfold organically?

Steven: Absolutely, I don't do any of the sheets and bios and stuff. The characters really come to me as I write. I begin to get to know them.

I always tell people, a character with an attitude is more interesting than a character with a background. So a lot of people will spend a lot of time on, like, where's this character gone to college, and what's their first pet's name, all that stuff.

I'm not trying to dump on that idea. I get that that can be helpful. But I'm like, how would I know that until I've spent time with them?

Then once I begin to spend time with them, I'm writing and I'm like, “Nah, this doesn't seem like what that character would really say or do,” so I have to go back and rejigger the story to hopefully make it fit with that character.

Then I like to give the characters some sort of attitude. I'm not talking about a negative or judgy attitude, but an attitude about something that is unique or different, and that makes them not a template character, not an archetype or whatever, but unique.

Sort of this constellation of unique traits, characteristics, maybe wounds, flaws and so on, that create a character where you're like, “This is a character like none I've ever seen before. I want to spend time with this character.”

Jo: Then you're spending time with the character by writing what's happening, as opposed to writing loads of stuff beforehand and then starting to write.

You're actually finding all of this out during the process of writing.

Steven: Yes, and I think it's kind of like getting to know someone. If I were to say, “Okay, I'm going to write down Jo's bio,” or whatever—okay, I'm making stuff up, because I don't know you super well.

If we were to spend time together, hang out, whatever, talk, over the course of time I would start to know, oh, she likes this, she doesn't like that. This is important to her. This is what she would weep or pound the table over—whatever, all of the things that come with time. It's like a friendship in real life to me.

So I can't sit down and tell you what a character in real life would think and say and do if I don't know them, but the more time I spend with them, then the more I'm able to predict that accurately.

I think the mistake a lot of people make is they think, “I'm going to get to know this character with a background,” and then they start writing it, and instead of looking at the context, they look back at the—I don't know what you call it—the background or something like that.

I always feel like what you mentioned earlier is, like, hold it loosely in your hand. Trust the fluidity of the process.

As you're writing, you have an instinct. “Ah, I think this character would say this or do this.” So trust that. Trust that instinct. Trust that moment in the story, instead of trying to go back to an outline, back to a character description, or whatever it might be.

So I'm a big proponent of looking at the context—not just what happened, but what is the result? So looking at the impetus and the implication of the choices and the activities. When something occurs, what would the character naturally say or do or think or respond?

Then what would that cause? What's the implication that that would have on the rest of the story, on the rest of the characters? So, really trying to keep your finger on the pulse of the story, and adapt as you move forward through it.

Jo: I love all of that, but I also am very aware that you've been in traditional publishing for over 20 years, and one of the things with agents and publishers is that they often ask for an outline.

So how do you manage that? Or how did you more earlier in your career, because I imagine they just trust you now.

Earlier in your career, or people listening who want to pitch but they write in this organic way, how do we deal with that kind of thing?

Steven: Well, okay, so there's two good questions. One is about producing an outline for an agent or editor or publisher and so on. The other is how to pitch a story.

So the first: I would write the premise down, and maybe a paragraph or two, and then where I think it might go. Basically, I would focus on the questions that the characters will face, maybe the moral dilemmas, the sacrifices they have to make, the world they live in.

I kind of know that stuff, and I can write a couple of paragraphs about that. But beyond that, I just don't know what's going to happen, so I can't really provide more.

I'm looking at my shelf at the books that I've done, and mostly that's what I've done is kind of a couple of paragraphs focusing on the premise and the problem, the struggle, and so on like that.

As far as pitching a story, I always tell people, “Don't pitch the plot, pitch the pivot.”

I think that there's a screenwriter—I think that he talks about this a little bit. I've not read the book Save the Cat, but people have told me, “Oh, he kind of brings this up in that book.”

The idea is to pitch the irony instead of what occurs. So sometimes when I tell people to pitch, or I give them ideas, one process that you can use is: when, must, before, or else. So, when this occurs, this character must do something before this, or else.

So you have the character, you have the struggle, you have the inciting incident, you have the stakes, and you have the countdown. It works well for thrillers.

So for instance, like Jaws. When a man-eating shark starts eating people in a small seaside village, the sheriff must stop him before more people die and the town loses its economy. So there you have when, must, before, or else.

Now, no one's going to buy the story based on that, because there's no irony, there's no pivot. It's just a description of the plot, and that's what most people pitch.

So I always tell people, pitch the part of the story that you wouldn't expect. So for instance, in there you might pitch: when a shark starts eating people in a small seaside village, the only one who can stop him is afraid of the water.

Now you're like, “Oh, well, that's interesting. How does that happen? What happens there?”

With my book Broker of Lies, the pitch was something like, when a high-level Pentagon redactor ends up on the run, he must stop a terrorist attack before he's neutralised by the people he trusts the most.

So the pivot is that the people he trusts at the Pentagon the most are actually trying to neutralise him because he's on the run, and all that kind of stuff. So why would they be trying to do that? Well, that's interesting.

So it's always looking for the irony, the pivot. Why is this character the last one in the world who would ever be equipped to tackle this problem or face this issue?

So that's one way to do a pitch. Obviously there's lots of them, but I think your goal with a pitch is to get them to say, “Tell me more.” It's not necessarily to summarise the whole story.

Jo: That's great advice. So you teach writers—I first saw you at ThrillerFest, I think it was 2012—and you do events, you run writing retreats. So you work with a lot of authors, and I wondered, what are the challenges that you see from authors with, say, five books?

So not the beginner authors, because obviously there's a lot of challenges. But those who, let's say they've got the three to five books, things are going all right, but they're like, “How do I get to the next level?”

What are the craft issues, or the business issues as well, that mid-list authors face?

Steven: Well, business, I'm not the guy to ask. I could try to answer that, but I mean, basically: meet your deadlines and write something amazing. Try to be easy to work with, but also stand up for what you wrote as far as working with editors. It's sort of a fine line you have to walk.

The one thing that over the last few years I've really noticed in a lot of writers who are in that space is that they don't have many pivots. They tend to write predictable stories, and that's why they tend to stay where they're at—whether it's because they're following an outline or a plot formula or whatever it is.

So when I talk about a pivot, I mean a moment in the story where something happens that's both unexpected and inevitable.

For instance, if you're reading a story, you want things to make sense. You want them to be logical. That's one thing. But you don't want them to be too predictable. If it's too predictable, it's boring. It's like, I'm not interested.

So we also want surprises. We want these two things. We want logic, and we want surprise. When those two things meet and you have a moment in the story where it's like, “I didn't see that coming, but that totally makes sense,” that's what we want, and we want that in every scene.

I feel like a lot of authors don't have that in every scene. Now, you might say, “Well, every scene?” Well, yes, because basically those two factors, logic and surprise, can only meet in four different ways.

You could have something that's very logical but has no surprises. That's going to be boring. It's going to be too predictable. We don't want that.

You could have something that is very surprising but not logical. It makes no sense. A lot of stuff is surprising, but that's not what we want, because it's unbelievable, and it's like, what is going on here?

You could have something that has neither logic nor surprise, which obviously we don't want that.

The only other option is to have a moment that is both logical and surprising. So you have a choice in every scene. You have four choices, actually. You can have it be predictable and boring. You can have it be nonsensical. You can have it be unbelievable. Or you can have a pivot.

So I find myself trying to really coach people on pivots.

They'll say, “Oh, well, do I need it in every scene?” I'm like, “You can choose, but do you want it to be predictable or boring or nonsensical, or do you want it to really drive the story forward?”

I think it's because people have been taught structure and plot and three acts and all this kind of stuff, but they haven't been taught this idea—even though it's not something I made up.

Aristotle, in Poetics, thousands of years ago, put it a little bit differently, but he said, “The reversal of the situation”—what I call the pivot—”is the moment at which the action veers around to its opposite”—that would be what I call surprise—”subject always to a rule of probability or necessity”—which is the logic.

So he's basically saying the same thing in just a little bit different language, but you have these three factors. You have logic, you have surprise, and you have them come together in a specific moment.

I don't know why it's not taught more. I have never found anyone who teaches pivots. I have not found any books, so I wrote a book recently about how to use pivots.

It's so central, and I think great storytellers naturally do it. You'll read a book, or you'll maybe watch a show, and you're like, “Oh, I didn't see that coming. That totally makes sense.” I don't see anyone else out there really focusing on teaching that.

So that's a huge thing for me, really, to help people move up in their writing, elevate it to a different level.

Jo: Is that Delve, Pivot, Propel?

Steven: Yes. That book came out a couple years ago. We just re-released it. I updated it some, but it talks pretty much in depth about pivots and how to actually use those to propel the stories forward.

Jo: Maybe you could just give us one tip on how to do that, because going back to the organic writing—let's say I've been organically writing, and every time a character has a decision to make, I think at that point about what I want to write and I write it.

Are you suggesting that we go back in the edit and look at the end of every scene and redo it?

Because I can't imagine that I would get this right every time. I would need to do that in an edit, I think.

Steven: I think for me, when I'm writing, I'm always asking myself a series of questions. One is, what would the character naturally do? I want to make it believable and natural. Let them do it.

I want to escalate the tension, so I'll ask myself, “How can I make things worse?”

Then I'll always ask myself, how can I add a pivot to this scene? So as I'm writing a scene—again, I don't know how it will end when I start it—but if I use the first idea that comes to mind, probably a lot of readers would guess that as well, because it's the first idea that comes to mind. It's probably logical and probably predictable.

That's why most stories end up being too predictable. It's because we go with the first idea that maybe we had. So I try to discard that. Maybe the second idea, just discard it. Then I start thinking, okay, now if I've discarded the obvious, what is going on? What's below the surface?

So to answer your question, I'm looking for what isn't what it appears to be, or who isn't who they appear to be, or a surprising way to bring together plot threads that I didn't see related before. So it's always looking for the unexpected, the surprise, because most of the time that is what we're missing.

Now, if you have a great surprise, then you have to lean into making it believable. So you've got to move into that idea of, well, what would the character naturally do? You can't just have him do something ridiculous and then say, “Oh, it's for my twist.” No, you can't do that. You've got to play fair.

So it has to be believable, causally related, logical, and surprising. That's what you're shooting for.

Those are the questions going through my mind. So as I'm working on a scene, I'm like, “How could I end this?” Or include something that people won't see coming right away. The best ideas always come to me then.

It's so interesting. A lot of people will say, “Oh, don't write organically,” or, quote, “by the seat of your pants,” whatever they'll say, “because then you might write yourself into a corner.”

I'm like, “Yes, absolutely write yourself into a corner. That's what I'm trying to do in every scene.” And then you write yourself out of a corner in a way that's logical and surprising.

The best twists I've ever come up with have been when I'm in a corner. So why would I warn people against going to the place where the best ideas await them? That just seems mean. Why would I do that?

No, I want you to have the best possible ideas. So yes, look for corners, write yourself into them, and then write yourself out of them in a way that's both logical and surprising.

Jo: I guess also it needs to be genre specific. We write mainly thrillers, and there is this fine line, isn't there?

I love Stephen King, but one of the most unbelievable endings is Under the Dome. I still remember feeling betrayed. I don't know if you've read that one, but—

Steven: Oh, no.

Jo: I was like, “I'm sorry, you've just changed genre in the last chapter of the book. What is going on here?”

Steven: That's actually interesting. The fourth question I ask… So I ask, what would the character naturally do? How can I make things worse? How can I add a pivot? But the fourth question is, what promises have I made that I have not yet kept?

So genre, to me, is a promise. You build up a promise in your writing at the beginning of the book, and then I feel like as we write, we have to honour that. So if we bring something up that's super interesting, bring it back or whatever. Keep your promises. Keep your narrative promises.

It's true of really any genre. Let's say you're writing a romance. You want to respect the conventions, but not fall into the clichés. So there's going to be a moment where the lovers meet, right? They haven't met before. I don't know what they call it, a meet cute or a cute meet. I think they call it a meet cute, I guess.

Jo: Yes. They do.

Steven: Anyway. So they're going to meet, right? And you're like, “Oh, I'll just have them meet.” Well, try to do it in a way we haven't seen before. Add something else to the scene. Add a third element, as my friend Bob Dugoni likes to say.

Add something a little bit that we're like, “Huh, I've never seen that before.” We know they're going to meet, but let them meet in a way that we don't anticipate, that we can't predict right away, that isn't exactly by the numbers, and then you're going to be on the right track.

Jo: So then, talking about reader expectations and genre, I wondered if I could also ask you about your Christian faith, because many people listening are people of faith, and some people want to write a Christian book.

Other people want to bring their faith into, say, a mainstream type thriller in an authentic way.

So how do you balance your faith and your writing?

Because I think you have some series that are more sort of Christian than others.

Steven: It's interesting. When my first novel came out—The Pawn, like a chess piece, The Pawn—back almost 20 years ago. Gosh, 20 years ago. Nineteen. But anyway, when it came out, someone wrote to me and said, “Is this a Christian book?”

I'm like, “What would make a book not Christian?” I'm like, maybe if it has a lot of idolatry, or witchcraft, or maybe sexuality or graphic violence. Then I'm like, oh, wait, that's… No, that's the Old Testament.

So it's interesting, because people have asked me similar questions over the years. My books are not sermons in disguise. I'm trying to write great stories that anyone of any background or faith will enjoy.

I always ask big questions. I let my characters wrestle with questions that matter, I think. Do my choices matter? Is there hope? Is there a God? Is there no God? Do I have free will? Can I find forgiveness? Can I offer forgiveness? Can I extend it, or whatever? So I always try to base the stories on something deeper.

I do believe that there is good and there's evil in the world. That's part of my worldview. So when people talk about moral ambiguity, I don't want to write or read something that's morally ambiguous. I want moral complexity, but I also want moral clarity.

So whenever you write, the question is, what are you justifying and what are you condemning? And if you're justifying something that's morally—I would say wrong, actually—then I don't feel like that's the kind of book I would want to write.

So I want to write stories that explore good and evil, that explore our world, human nature, in an honest way. I feel like when you write honest stories, people, no matter what their background or whatever faith, then they will connect with it.

I think a lot of people, if they start off with an agenda—whatever that agenda might be, let's say it is a Christian agenda, like I want people to trust in Jesus, let's say—so they write a story. Well, what you're doing, you're actually starting your story with an answer, and drama is not built on answers, it's built on questions.

So you're actually diminishing the amount of tension. You're also diminishing the possibility of a pivot, because we all get where you're going. It's predictable, but there's probably no surprise. You're diminishing the payoff at the end, because we're like, “I saw that coming. I exactly knew where you were going with this.”

So instead, I don't start with an answer. I always start with a question, or in some cases a moral dilemma, like, what's more important, protecting the innocent or telling the truth? That's interesting to me. If I had to choose between the two, would I tell the truth or would I protect the innocent?

It's interesting, because people might come down on different sides of it. They might say, “Oh, you should always tell the truth,” or they say, “You always should protect the innocent.” I'm like, okay, well, let's explore it. Let's literally ask the question.

So I come from a certain worldview, but I've written characters who have very different worldviews from me.

I'm always just trying to be honest with the character, ask big questions, tell a story that examines human nature and sort of the paradoxes of the human condition in a way that will resonate with really whoever the readers might be.

Jo: And of course that worldview is part of your author voice and part of what readers come to you for. I also notice that you have some pretty diverse different series.

How do you manage that diversity of series under your one brand? Do you find your readers move from one to the other, or do you have different readerships?

Steven: You mentioned the B word—brand. That's what publishers are always telling me: “What's your brand?”

I'm like, “I don't know. You tell me what my brand is.” I've done fantasy, science fiction, conspiracy. I've done spies and police procedurals and crime and suspense, thrills, whatever.

So I would say the one thing that really ties all my stories together is probably just suspense. They are stories with suspense. Some are more high concept thrillers, some are more dark fantasy, but they're built around suspense.

So I guess that would be intelligent suspense, maybe, if I was trying to come up with a brand. Something like that. Because I don't want them to be dumbed down. They're not dumbed down stories, so they're a little bit more complex than you might find in other places, but always built around the idea of suspense.

Suspense to me is basically—my definition is apprehension born of concern. So we're concerned about a character, and we're apprehensive because there's peril around the bend, or right in front of them.

So I want the readers to really care about a character, and then try to build the story and the suspense around that empathy or sympathy that we have for the character.

Jo: I think it's really interesting, because again, you mentioned 2007—we're coming up on 20 years since first published. The publishing industry has changed a lot.

So what do you think has changed most in publishing for you, and what are your thoughts on routes to market for new authors these days?

Or even established authors who are finding that things have changed, which they obviously have.

Steven: Well, I'm not a marketer, I'm not a businessman. I'm just a storyteller at heart. So I just keep writing stories that I would be intrigued with reading, stories that I feel like are resonant. Then I look for publishers for those.

I've been to a variety of different publishers over the last decade. I've done some different types of stories. I feel like you have to just write the story instead of trying to write for a specific market trend or something like that.

So I might not make as much as some of my friends, I might not sell as many books, but I feel like I have to write certain stories if they grab ahold of me.

There's a Native American—I think the Pawnee tribe, anyway, in the United States—but they were saying that all the stories that exist are out there already, and when one finds you, it's your job to share it with the world. I think that's kind of interesting.

Sometimes—maybe it's just true for you, I don't know, Jo—but it's like a story will grab hold of me, or an idea, and I'm like, “I can't shake it.” That's a story that I want to tell the world.

I would say that stories are becoming shorter, dumber. People are trying to write faster. They're trying to write several books a year, and as a result of that, some of the quality has gone down. This is all unfortunate.

I'm still sort of a dinosaur. I still tend to write longer, complex stories. But people have shorter attention spans and whatever, and they're not reading as much.

The structure of stories, I think, is changing slightly, where people will have to spend more time on a hook to really grab the attention of the readers. Then there might be a longer slow period, or more info dumping, which I'm not a fan of.

So they kind of look like, “I want to get readers hooked at the beginning, and then get them to flip pages.”

So I tend to set up my stories a little bit differently than that. So I'm not the best guy to ask about marketing and sales and stuff like that.

I feel like, write a story that will not let you go. And if you do that, I feel like that's the kind of story that will resonate with readers, because there's a deep honesty to it. You care, you're passionate about it. It's not just something you're trying to spin out just to sell books. That's my view.

Jo: I guess I also feel that writers are doing other things. So you have non-fiction, you have your podcast, you do events. I see you sell books direct from your website.

It's like the business expands into multiple streams of income, so that the art doesn't have to pay all the bills.

Steven: That's interesting. I do love to teach writing at conferences, events, and speak at different things.

So I guess if you think about it that way, my brand might be just story, or storytelling, or something like that. Really trying to get out there, and whether it's speaking or writing, just tell a great story.

So it's so interesting when I work with publishers and they'll ask, “What's your brand?” Basically it's like, “What's your box?” is really what they're asking. What box can we stick you in that will make it easy for us to package you and sell you?

I know myself, and just a lot of authors that I know, we don't think in a box. Every one of my stories is not boxy. It's not the same. They're different. I know a lot of authors like that too.

So it's unfortunate. I get it, that it's part of them trying to market and sell the books. I understand that, but I think being honest, genuine with the story, doing the very best you can, writing a worthy book, and then letting them come up with a way to categorise it, is probably the best bet. I don't know.

Jo: We're almost out of time, but this is obviously a podcast, and you have a podcast.

So tell us about The Story Blender Podcast and what people might find over there.

Steven: Yes, I appreciate it. Basically, I interview some of the leading writers and storytellers in the world every week, and the goal is for great storytellers to share the secrets of great storytelling.

So I basically pick their brains, kind of like what you were doing with me today, and find out what projects they're working on, and really just try to get insights into storytelling.

So it's tons of fun. I've been doing it now for a number of years, and I guess I've interviewed over 250 different authors and writers from around the world, and so I always enjoy it. It's a ton of fun. It's The Story Blender, and people can find it anywhere.

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

Steven: Probably the best place is StevenJames.net. I think I'm on different socials @readstevenjames, so you can look me up there—Facebook, Instagram, X, and so on. I think they're all under readstevenjames.

Check out the website, drop me a note. I always enjoy hearing from readers.

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

Steven: Thanks, Jo. I appreciate it. Good luck.

The post Organic Writing And The Power Of The Pivot In Fiction With Steven James first appeared on The Creative Penn.

After more than a decade of releasing this show on Mondays, I’m moving it to Wednesdays, and this is the first episode of the new time slot. 

On the one hand, this might sound like nothing at all, but it’s also a big deal, for you and for me, and in this episode, I explain why I'm making the change, and past guests give some tips on sustainable creativity for the long term.

Joanna Penn is an award-winning New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, dark fantasy, short stories and travel memoir under J.F. Penn and also writes non-fiction for authors and hosts The Creative Penn Podcast.

Why the podcast is moving to Wednesdays

(1) Take time out to question what you’re doing

(2) Learn to pivot if you want to keep going long term
(3) Set a sustainable pace, and don’t build reader expectations you can’t deliver on

(4) Don’t try to do it all, and try to identify the fear that might be driving your choices

(5) Question what still serves you, especially as things continue to change
(6) Consider different approaches to creativity. It doesn’t have to be every day, or every week
(7) Creative humans evolve. Build a body of work for the long term.

You can find the backlist episodes at TheCreativePenn.com/podcast, just click into the episode to find the transcript.

Why The Podcast Is Moving To Wednesdays, And 7 Tips for Sustainable Creativity

Here’s my big news! After more than a decade of releasing this show on Mondays, I’m moving it to Wednesdays, and this is the first episode of the new time slot.

On the one hand, this might sound like nothing at all, but it’s also a big deal, for you and for me!

I know many of you have a routine of listening to the show during a certain thing on a Monday, so I’m sorry to have to disrupt that, and I hope I don’t lose you along the way — although I guess you could just save the episode for Monday!

For me, it’s a much bigger deal, because a Monday show has meant I have often recorded the intro and edited and scheduled the episode over the weekend.

The main reason is that I need to record in the mornings when I have energy and when the house is less noisy, since Jonathan is often on the phone since he works from home as well. So I would prepare the episode on Fridays, and I type out this intro before reading it, and source the news and my thoughts and all that — and then I’d record it Saturday morning, or Sunday morning if Saturday was busy — and so recently, I have felt like something has to change. 

Moving the show to a Wednesday means that I can prep on Monday and Tuesday, which is perfect.

Its so funny because I agonised over this, in the same way I agonised over changing the theme tune a few years back. Some of you may remember that — and it also turned out to not be a big deal at all. We build things up in our minds and then sometimes the problem can be solved in a different way.

So instead of going to ad hoc episodes, or once every two weeks, I hope that moving to Wednesday makes the show more sustainable again, because let’s face it, there’s a lot going on, and if I did a show every 2 weeks, I might have to make them longer to get through everything!

So, same show, just on Wednesdays from now on.

And this change underscores what today’s episode is about: sustainable creativity over the long term.

How do you keep writing, and publishing, and podcasting — and creating for years — and I am now at two decades — without burning out, and without becoming a slave to the algorithm, or the market, or even your own audience’s expectations?

The goal is not to just survive this year’s release schedule, or to keep feeding the machine until you crumble under the speed of it all.

The goal is to still be creating, and still be enjoying it, next month, next year, in five years, in 10 years, in 20, in 30. Who knows how many years we all have left — but for sure, we are NOT machines, we are not AI — and we cannot churn it out – and what is the point of that anyway? 

So in today’s show, I’ll share some thoughts and tips from me and also other authors from the show on this topic, and you can find the full episodes in the backlist, and links as ever in the show notes on TheCreativePenn.com/podcast 

(1) Take time out to question what you’re doing

In early 2024, The Tim Ferriss Show, one of the biggest podcasts in the world, hit its ten-year anniversary with over a billion downloads and over 750 episodes, and Tim decided to take a sabbatical.

He paused the show for four months and seriously questioned whether to continue. Not because it was failing, it was hugely profitable and he enjoyed talking to people, but because the landscape had changed. 

Podcasting had gone from a wide-open space in 2014 to a saturated market, and his question wasn’t “can I keep competing?” It was “is this still the game I want to play?”

Just a little note here, I started The Creative Penn Podcast in 2009 when there were even fewer shows so I know a lot about a changing podcast market!

After four months, Tim came back from what he called a sabbatical with a blog post on My New Rules for Podcasting — To Keep Things Interesting.

He starts with the sheer number of podcasts, saying,

“Having a good show is no longer good enough. Having a great show is no longer good enough. If you want to survive in the mindshare of listeners, you need differentiation.”

I think this is true for us as authors as well as podcasters, or YouTubers, or social media, or anything. But the good news is that your differentiation can be you.

Regular listeners will know that I have questioned ending the show over the years, worried that I was no longer useful, or that my voice no longer mattered when there are so many podcasts on similar topics. But after your wonderful feedback, and the fact that the show still gets a lot of downloads every week, and the growth in my Patreon Community, I don’t worry about that anymore. It’s unlikely that any of us will have a podcast as big as Tim Ferriss’s or sell as many books as The Four Hour Work Week, but that’s OK, because we are not Tim.

I am Jo Penn and you’re here because you find my take on the publishing industry is still useful in some way. When it’s not anymore, you will go elsewhere, and I find myself at peace with that.

Back to Tim’s article — he asks some questions of himself, including:

If I get to do this for another decade, or had to do this for another decade, what new rules might I create to keep it interesting?

Of course, we all have different ideas of what this means for us. And I have already implemented one of these rules, which is that I interview people on topics I find interesting. I frequently get pitched by more famous authors and bigger names, but most of the time I turn them down, and choose to talk to people who are not famous but are more interested in serving you, my audience, because that is the point of this show.

I also have people on that I enjoy talking to, because checking in with my friends while you listen in, can be useful too, since my friends are often authors who’ve been in the industry a while now. I have to make the interviews time that I find interesting or useful or fulfilling as well.

But the point is to stop and take time to consider what might need to change, even if you are really successful. You cannot be a slave to the algorithm, to the media, to your audience, for the long term. You have to put some circuit breakers in sometimes.

It’s the old adage about the small business. You have to work ON in the business, not just IN the business, which means you need to step away.

This does sometimes mean that you have to get away physically. I had this realisation while we were in Bruges in Belgium talking to Jonathan about what changes I could make because I just felt a lack of freedom — and freedom is my highest value, so I really need to honour that.

So, the first question for you is: If you feel like you need a change, if your routines are becoming too much, or your workload is too much, or you are eating into time you need for rest and recovery or family or whatever you need, can you schedule time out to have a think about what you need and how things can change?

You don’t need to burn it all down. You might find the answer is just moving the show from a Monday to a Wednesday!

(2) Learn to pivot if you want to keep going long term

I love talking to authors who have been doing this career for a long time, and in December 2025 in episode 839, I talked to Jennifer Probst, the New York Times bestselling romance author of more than sixty books, about why some authors build decades-long careers while others vanish after one breakout.

Jennifer has been through the indie gold rush, the fallout, traditional deals, Kickstarter, all of it, and I asked her how she thinks about how everything keeps changing, and we start with marketing but it goes much further than that.

Writing Free: Romance Author Jennifer Probst On A Long-Term Author Career

***

Jo: In terms of how we do marketing, TikTok is still a thing, and we can see maybe generative AI search coming on the horizon and agentic buying. A decade ago it might have been different, more Facebook ads or whatever. Then before that it might have been something else. So there’s always things changing along the way.

Jennifer: Yes, there definitely is. It is a very oversaturated market. They talk about, I don’t know, 2010 to 2016 maybe, as the gold rush, because that was where you could make a lot of money as an indie. Then we saw the total fallout of so many different things.

I feel like I’ve gone through so many ups and downs in the industry. I do love it because the longer you’re around, the more you learn how to pivot. If you want this career, you learn how to write differently or do whatever you need to do to keep going, in different aspects, with the changes.

To me, that makes the industry exciting. Again, perspective is a big thing. But I have had to take a year to kind of rebuild when I was out of contract with a lot of things. I’ve had to say, “Okay, what do you see on the horizon now? Where is the new foundation? Where do you wanna restart?”

Sometimes it takes a year or two of, “Maybe I won’t be making big income and I cut back,” but then you’re back in it, because it takes a while to write a few new books, or write under a pen name, or however you want to pivot your way back into the industry.

Or, like you were saying, diversifying. I did a lot of non-fiction stuff because that’s a big calling for me, so I put that into the primary for a while.

I think it’s important for authors to maybe not just have one thing. When that one thing goes away, you’re scrambling. It’s good to have a couple of different things like, “Well, okay, this genre is dead or this thing is dead or this isn’t making money. Let me go to this for a little while until I see new things on the horizon.”

***

I love that from Jennifer, because there are always new things on the horizon, and we try new things and we pivot, and we bring in other streams of income as some drop off, and we go again and we keep creating. Authors with longevity are authors who pivot over their careers. They may lament the end of one era, but they don’t stop, they find a new way forward.

(3) Set a sustainable pace, and don’t build reader expectations you can’t deliver on

Kevin J. Anderson is one of the most productive writers alive, with hundreds of books, most of which he writes with dictation while out hiking, and he has been on this show many times.

In January 2025, in episode 791, we talked about building a long-term author business, and how authors need to be careful about setting reader expectations around pace of releases.

Building A Long Term Author Business, Dictation, Kickstarter, and Short Story Collections With Kevin J Anderson

Kevin: Now, again, we get back to the longevity of a career. It is exhausting to write lots of books a year, and most people can’t keep doing that for 20 years or 30 years.

That’s one of the reasons, especially indie authors, where readers expect you to write several books a year. Some indie authors I know are writing a book a month. I couldn’t do that for any long period. Well, I couldn’t do that probably for a single year.

You start building expectations, and when you fail to meet those expectations, they will leave you very quickly. That’s why you should have Plan Bs.

If you really, really can’t stand writing your steampunk vampire romance series after book number 29, well, make sure that you have some other series you’re starting and building up.

Well, Hugh Howey’s got several series that are going. Michael Anderle has all kinds of series, and Craig Martelle has all kinds of series. You don’t just put all your eggs in one basket. You need to have Plan B and Plan C, to circle around to what I started with.

***

Whatever cadence you choose, for your books, your email newsletters, or or your podcast, or your social media, choose a pace you can still be keeping up in a decade, because this is a long term career, and longevity in the market is one of the most important things. It’s better to pace yourself than burn out.

(4) Don’t try to do it all, and try to identify the fear that might be driving your choices

I couldn’t do an episode on sustainability without Becca Syme!

Becca is an author coach who has worked with thousands of writers, she is the creator of the Better-Faster Academy and the Quit books, and the QuitCast podcast — and In January 2023, in episode 668, at the end of our conversation about intuitive writing and marketing, I asked her what authors who sustain long careers have in common.

Intuitive Writing And Book Marketing With Becca Syme

***

Joanna: So in terms of sustainability, let’s talk about that. You coach writers every day, you see writers on every spectrum of every personality type, and people who write differently and release differently and publish differently. So what do you see as your recommendations or, I guess, commonalities for authors who want this sustainable career as a writer for the long term in order not to burn out? What are you seeing in terms of the best way to be sustainable in a creative career?

Becca: Conquering the fear that we have that we’re not going to get what we want out of the career, like 100%. Because the fear is the thing that’s driving us to burn ourselves out.

The fear that if I don’t do it this way, I’m not going to make money. If I don’t do it this way, I’m not going to have a long career. I’m going to miss out on something if I don’t do absolutely everything.

And then I think the most important knowledge that we can have is that everyone in this industry who’s a nonfiction person, including me, is giving you a perspective on how author life can be done.

Every single one of us, not the perspective on how it should be done in order to have success. And if we could just change our expectations of how we look at the people who are helping us who are being good, helpful people who are very sure that their way is the correct way and who should be, again, because like all experts, they’ve had success doing what they are doing.

But the downside is from someone whose job is to sit with authors for 45 minutes at a time, all day, every day, I see the outcome of the people who have tried to “do it all,” in quotes, with capital letters, and who are burned out because they were doing everything out of a fear place.

And I think one of the best things that can happen in our — and what burnout often does is it forces us to reckon with the fact that we were doing all of this because we were afraid. My book isn’t going to sell, I’m not going to be able to do this, I have this dream that I’m holding on to and what happens if it doesn’t manifest itself.

Then we make a lot of our decisions about how much to take on based on fear, and we don’t know it.

Because we don’t realize that our brains are wired for survival, and so anytime fear kicks in, your brain is like, well, we have to do that because if you’re afraid of it, then that must mean that we need it in order to survive. And we don’t.

We will survive if our books don’t sell.

We have to calm that fear and answer the question. Like, what will happen if in five years, I have not sold more than $1,000 on every book that I am writing? Like if each of the individual books that I write have not made more than $1,000. And I have to reckon with what might happen if that happens, because if I don’t, that fear is going to drive me to burnout over and over and over and over again.

That is why we’re making so many of our decisions, including: do I pay for this class or conference? Do I pay for this book? Do I spend money on this advertising? Do I hire this expert consultant?

So many of us are making those choices out of fear and we don’t realize it. And that’s why when we do our public live coaching, and whenever I’m at a conference, I’m always listening for, “but what are you afraid is not going to happen? Or what are you afraid is going to happen?”

Because if we don’t deconstruct that part of yourself and calm your survival mechanism down, you’re going to continue over and over again to make those decisions out of fear.

Then you’re going to not listen to your intuition because you think it’s risky to listen to it. And so I really think, and some of this might include therapy for some of us, I’m just going to acknowledge some of us have trauma around not getting what we want or around not actualizing our desires, and we can’t just talk ourselves into letting the fear go.

But some of us do just need to consistently confront the fear and make a plan for what happens and then act in spite of that fear because we are not making good decisions when we are in survival mode.

***

Becca is very wise, and also pretty hardcore! So if you feel like you are trying to do it all, and you are on the edge of burning out, can you identify the fear beneath it?

(5) Question what still serves you, especially as things continue to change

Sometimes we keep doing things the same way, even when things have changed.

What is lost if we give things up? What is gained? And what kind of game do you want to play?

In episode 845, Claire Taylor, humour and mystery author, owner of FFS Media, certified Enneagram coach, talks about how social media has changed and why she gave it up.

Leaving Social Media, Writing Iconic Characters, and Building Trust With Claire Taylor

***

Joanna: One thing I know will have perked up people’s ears is: “I left social media.” Tell us a bit more about that.

Claire: This was a move that I could feel coming for a while. I didn’t like what social media did to my attention. Even when I wasn’t on it, there was almost a hangover from having been on it.

My attention didn’t feel as sharp and focused as it used to be, back before social media became what it is now.

So I started asking myself some questions: What is lost if I leave? What is gained if I leave? And what is social media actually doing for me today?

Because sometimes we hold on to what it used to do for us, and we keep trying to squeeze more and more of that out of it. But it has changed so much.

There are almost no places with sufficient organic reach anymore. It’s all pay-to-play, and the cost of pay-to-play keeps going up.

I looked at the numbers for my business. My Kickstarter was a great place to analyse that because they track so many traffic sources so clearly. I could see exactly how much I was getting from social media when I advertised and promoted my projects there.

Then I asked: can I let that go in order to get my attention back and make my life feel more settled? And I decided: yes, I can. That’s worth more to me.

Joanna: There are some things money can’t buy. Sometimes it really isn’t about the money. I like your question: what is lost and what is gained? You also said it’s all pay-to-play and there’s no organic reach. I do think there is some organic reach for some people who don’t pay, but those people are very good at playing the game of whatever the platform wants. So, TikTok for example—you might not have to pay money yet, but you do have to play their game. You have to pay with your time instead of money. I agree with you. I don’t think there’s anywhere you can literally just post something and know it will reliably reach the people who follow you.

Claire: Right. Exactly. TikTok currently, if you really play the game, will sometimes “pick” you, right? But that “pick me” energy is not really my jam.

And we can see the trend—this “organic” thing doesn’t last. It’s organic for now. You can play the game for now, but TikTok would be crazy not to change things so they make more money. So eventually everything becomes pay-to-play.

TikTok is fun, but for me it’s addictive. I took it off my phone years ago because I would do the infinite scroll. There’s so much candy there.

Then I’d wake up the next morning and notice my mood just wasn’t where I wanted it to be. My energy was low. I really saw a correlation between how much I scrolled and how flat I felt afterwards.

So I realised: I’m not the person to pay-to-play or to play the game here. I’m not even convinced that the pay-to-play on certain social media networks is being tracked in a reliable, accountable way anymore. Who is holding them accountable for those numbers?

You can sort of see correlation in your sales, but still, I just became more and more sceptical. In the end, it just wasn’t for me.

My life is so much better on a daily basis without it. That’s definitely a decision I have not regretted for a second.

****

To be clear, we’re not saying you should give up social media, but it’s about questioning how things make you feel, and what you can sustain and how you want to spend your time.

I did question once again whether to give up this show entirely, but it is an important part of my creative body of work, and quite frankly, I reach more people with the podcast than I do with my books, and I still love talking to people, and I learn, and it underpins my business.

I don’t do much social media though. I learn about AI things on X and I do post photos and things on Instagram but I don’t do much else. You have to decide what is right for you, but also, what is right for you might change over time. If we have a long term career, or a long term anything, things will change, and we will need to move on sometimes, or at least question whether it is still working in the way it used to.

(6) Consider different approaches to creativity. It doesn’t have to be every day, or every week. 

In April 2026, in episode 858, I talked to Sara Rosett, USA Today bestselling mystery author and co-host of the Wish I’d Known Then podcast, about low-key marketing, and a more seasonal approach, or phased approach to podcasting as well as writing.

Special Editions, Seasonal Podcasts, and the Art of Low-Key Book Marketing with Sara Rosett

***

Jo: Although I must say I had forgotten about your Mystery Books podcast and going to seasonal. I also had my second podcast, Books and Travel, which is now on a kind of hiatus, but going to a seasonal approach is actually really interesting. Do you find that listeners come back to that podcast?

Sara: Yes, and it surprises me because I’ve always thought you have to be weekly with a podcast to gain any traction at all, which I think is the best way to do it. You can build an audience quickly then, but I just knew I couldn’t sustain that.

So when I set out, I started with maybe seven to ten episodes and I did them each year — each year has had a season — and I do five to ten episodes. Readers find it, and I have highlighted specific books. I think maybe they’re searching for a podcast about the Thursday Murder Club or something like that.

They find it that way, and I get downloads, just steady downloads throughout the year, and I don’t do much. I do some Pinterest pins for that, and that’s about all I do. This is one of those things — it’s the kind of low-key marketing that’s low threshold, but it does work.

I think if your readers are looking for stuff to listen to about the topic you write about, it could be a good way to do some low-cost, long-tail marketing. I love it. I keep doing it because I love it.

Jo: That just seems more sustainable to me. I didn’t like doing everything every day or every single week.

Sara: Me either. I like switching it up, and I do enjoy the different phases of writing. I like the research and then I like doing the — well, I don’t like the drafting that much, but once I get a draft done, I like the editing. And then when it comes time to promote it or do a special edition or whatever, I enjoy that part. Finding whatever I’m going to use for the interior photos and stuff — just things like that. I enjoy each phase and I like switching it out.

Jo: I think that’s really good. Some people think this writer’s life is you write new words every single day and you manage your ads every single day. That seems to be what some people do, but that’s certainly not us, is it?

Sara: No. And that’s great if you want to do that. I just don’t want to. And I think we’ve come to the point now where each person can do this as they want. Hopefully people don’t feel the pressure to meet these self-imposed deadlines or parameters that don’t exist. There’s no rules for writing or publishing. You can do whatever you want.

***

I am definitely a seasonal creator, I don’t write every day. I never have. I binge write when a book emerges, or binge create. As I record this I am working on the treatment and trailer for what is now called Cathedral Zero, a positive futurist sci-fi feature film that I am entering in the FutureVision X Prize in the next week or so, and then I will move to the next project. I also love Kickstarter launches for this reason. They feel much more sustainable because it’s such a focused marketing push.

My Books and Travel Podcast is still on hiatus, but I may still resurrect that at some point. I still feel the pull of it. And of course, this show remains weekly, but the Wednesday shift will hopefully help keep it this way. I can’t see me going seasonal with this, but never say never!

The main thing is to consider seasonality, or consider phased approaches to your work, rather than trying to do exactly the same thing week in week out.

(7) Creative humans evolve. Build a body of work for the long term.

Roz Morris first came on this podcast in 2011, and in March 2026, in episode 853 we talked about her memoir, discovery writing, and slow, sustainable book marketing. Roz is an award-nominated literary author and former bestselling ghostwriter, an editor and I always appreciate her perspective as she has been doing this far longer than I have.

****

JOANNA: Do you still actively choose indie for a particular reason?

ROZ: I do. I really like building my own body of work, and I’m now experienced enough to know what I do well, what I need advice with, and help with. I mean, we don’t do all this completely by ourselves, do we? We bring in experts who will give us the right feedback if we’re doing a new genre or a genre that’s new to us.

I choose indie because I like the control. Because I began in traditional publishing—I was making books for other people—I just learned all the trades and how to do everything to a professional standard. I love being able to apply that to my own work.

I also love the way I can decide what I’m going to write next. If I was traditionally published, I would have to do something that fitted with whatever the publisher would want of me, and that isn’t necessarily where my muse is taking me or what I’ve become interested in.

I think creative humans evolve throughout their lives. They become interested in different things, different themes, different ways of expressing themselves. I began by thinking I would just write novels, and now I’ve found myself writing memoirs as well.

That shift would have been difficult if someone else was having to make me fit into their marketing plans or what their imprint was known for. But because I’ve built my own audience, I can just bring them with me and say, “You might like this. It’s still me. I’m just doing something different.”

****

Inspiring words from Roz there —

“It’s still me, I’m just doing something different.”

And indeed, I am a very different Jo from the new author who started this podcast back in March 2009. I have evolved and this show has evolved and this is not the end, it is a new phase. It’s funny because it’s just a shift of two days, but it also breaks a habit, for you listening and for me creating. It changes a time slot, and that itself can be a way to change energy, to change direction, to shift what matters and how we do things. 

So that’s what I want to leave you with today. A question around how shifting something, even something small, might make a big difference to your creative body of work, the quality of time you have for yourself or your family, and I’d love to know what you think about today’s episode and what we covered, as well as your thoughts on the Wednesday shift. 

Please leave a comment on the show notes, or the YouTube channel, or email me. I will see you next Wednesday, so happy writing and I’ll see you next time!
The post Why The Podcast Is Moving To Wednesdays, And 7 Tips for Sustainable Creativity first appeared on The Creative Penn.