The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers

How can horror writing help readers — and writers — work through psychological trauma? Why does cross-genre fiction take longer to find an audience, but pay off in the long run? Is running a direct sales store actually worth the inventory, postage, and learning curve? And how can SubStack work for fiction authors? With psychotherapist and award-winning author P.D. Alleva.

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

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

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

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

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

Show Notes

Why horror puts the human condition on display better than any other genre

Emotional trauma as the silent psychological killer most people overlook

The pros and challenges of cross-genre writing and finding your audience

Practical lessons from running a direct store, including integration and signed-copy fulfilment

How a 3 a.m. writing routine keeps the writing separate from the marketing and admin

Serialising fiction on Substack, multiple newsletters, and avoiding paid subscriber promotions

Why Facebook groups, TikTok Lives, and the three-to-one rule are working right now

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

Transcript of the interview with P.D. Alleva

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

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

Jo: Oh, good. Well, first up—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what was your business before?

Because I think business experience is so important.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jo: Okay. All right.

PD: That might give people ideas, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So how do you manage that practically?

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

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

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

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

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

Jo: Okay. Right.

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

Jo: And you get those from IngramSpark?

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

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

So is that all print on demand?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PD: Both.

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

PD: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Talk about that and serialising fiction and how Substack works.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is anything else working for you in book marketing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jo: Brilliant. Well, tell us—

Where can people find you and your books online?

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

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

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

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

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

Have you ever lost the joy in your creative work — that sense of fun you had when you were starting out, before the admin and the algorithms drained it away? How do mid-career creatives get it back, and what can a four-year-old teach us about play? Austin Kleon talks about productive procrastination, silly rituals, the case for paper reference books in an AI world, and how his newsletter went from a marketing cost to the day job that keeps the lights on.

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

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

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

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

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

Show Notes

Why Austin wrote Don't Call It Art now, and what his kids taught him about creative joy

Productive procrastination, silly rituals, and treating writing like Lego

Comedy as a philosophical position, and giving yourself permission to be bad in private

Sharing process in the algorithm era, and why your whole life is the process

Bibliomancy, paper reference books, and what AI can't give you that a dictionary can

Style, the Taco Bell distinctiveness rule, and how Austin's newsletter became his day job

You can find Austin at AustinKleon.com.

Transcript of the interview with Austin Kleon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They have this idea that, “Through blood and sweat and tears, I'm going to see this thing through, and I'm going to push it into the world, and I'm going to have my way.”

I think there's another way of working where it's more like, “I'm just a normal person trying to play with my environment, and take my experiences and put them into something interesting. So I'm going to play and use my wits, and we're going to see what we come up with.” Those really are two modes of life.

The pandemic taught me that it was really when we were keeping our sense of humour, when we were having a laugh and keeping our egos in check around the house and just acknowledging how goofy we all were and how ridiculous the situation was, that seemed to be when we were really thriving.

Versus, “Well, we're in this tough situation. We've got to make it into what we want it to be.” That felt really bad. But when we cruised along and we were just improvisational, when we went at things with a kind of lightness, that worked.

There's a great Italo Calvino essay about lightness in Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Lightness is really underrated. Even when we're going about heavy work, having a sense of lightness and play with it just makes the work better.

That's a philosophical position of mine. I aspire to comedy. I aspire to a comic outlook on life. I'm just a creature with a body who's going to die, and I'm fundamentally ridiculous. Life is pretty absurd. You just make the best of it.

Jo: There's certainly some truth there. Staying on a similar theme, you have a chapter in the book on permission to be bad.

Many of the listeners also have your book Show Your Work, and it shaped many of us into sharing our work in progress. It feels quite dangerous now, in a world where judgment is much louder than it maybe was when you wrote Show Your Work.

So tell us a bit about permission to be bad versus should we keep some of this private?

Austin: Permission to be bad is about the making part of things. It's the private part. It's permission to be bad when you're in private, when you're actually doing the work.

Show Your Work is a book about what you do after you've done the work, or while you're doing the work. It was never about putting up a webcam and running a 24/7 feed. It was more like, hey, what are the ways that I can connect with the kind of audience I can build while I'm making the work itself?

So the way I see permission to be bad is, you really have to give yourself permission when you're not sharing, when you're off screen, to really be as bad as you want to be. It doesn't necessarily mean quality-wise.

I think it also means letting yourself write stuff that you would never say on social media. Letting yourself read stuff that you wouldn't admit you were reading on social media. Letting yourself listen to stuff. Letting yourself really be that unfiltered, unhinged, private person that you want to be.

Then when it comes to sharing, you put some time in between that input time, that making time, and the sharing time, and then you share what you think is going to be useful or helpful or interesting to other people.

Jo: I think you wrote that book before TikTok, and how fast people are moving.

Do you think people need to slow down a bit in what they share, maybe?

Austin: I don't know. I obviously had a lot more faith in social media back then. I use all the principles from Show Your Work in my newsletter.

Newsletters are very much the new kind of great thing. They're doing a lot of the work that social media used to do, in that you're still able to have this direct connection with the people that you're trying to reach.

The big problem with social media now is that it's all algorithmically tuned, where the people that are following you don't see the stuff that you're doing most of the time.

What you have to do now, if you want the people who are following you to see your stuff on social media, is you have to make stuff that the algorithm likes. That's a whole different thing.

As far as the Show Your Work principle—which is share your process as much as your product—that carries over to any platform. In my newsletter every Friday, I share a list of 10 things that were going on behind the scenes here.

It might have been what I was watching on TV, what I listened to, a new pen I was trying out, or something like that. The Friday newsletter is almost always process stuff.

When I talk about process, my definition is actually very broad. For a lot of people, it's drafting, editing, whatever. For me, the process is the whole life. The process is almost everything except the finished thing.

A writer's life is 24/7. My friends who have real jobs really are like, “What do you do all day?” And I'm like, “Well, what do you mean?” They're like, “Well, I see you out on your bike ride.”

I'm like, “Yes, when you see me out on a bike ride, I'm thinking through something half the time.” If I'm watching TV, I'm thinking, “Hey, would this be good in the newsletter?”

I'm never off. My whole life—everything is copy, as Nora Ephron said. That's part of the job. It's very hard to turn off. So I see the whole life as process, and the question becomes, what little bits and pieces of that life and that process can you share with people while you're making the things that you hope to sell them later?

Right now, I'm in a cycle where I'm selling this book, but all these people have showed up because I've shared my process every week for the past seven years since I put out a book.

Jo: It's funny you say that. I was at the dentist yesterday, and—

My dentist literally asked me, “So where do you get all your ideas?”

This is a common question for all of us, right? And it just becomes so hard to explain that to people who don't walk around in the world just constantly getting ideas.

Austin: I can't believe I'm going to tell this story. I was getting my vasectomy after my second kid, and I was talking to this doctor just before the operation.

He said, “So what do you do for a living?” I said, “I'm a writer.” He said, “Oh, that must be cool. You get to use your brain.” And I said, “That's everything that you want your doctor to say.” I was going to say, “Please use your brain,” before he's about to cut into you.

He said, “Oh, no, no. What I mean is, I know what I'm going to do every day for the next 10 years.” He knew exactly what his day was going to look like. He said, “You have to use your brain. You've got to figure out new stuff.” I was like, “Oh, that's really interesting.”

That's the trade-off, right? He's got the job security. He knows what he's going to do. Every writer has a moment where they have to talk to a normal person about what you do.

Jo: I was going to say, I'm married to one.

Austin: Now, my wife, on the other hand, grew up the daughter of a writer, so she knows exactly what it's like. Nothing ever phases her. She's totally used to it.

She's used to me staring off into space, completely checking out of a conversation. She's used to me using lines on her that I'm going to put in a piece later. She's used to the whole rigmarole. It's very handy. I've been very lucky in that sense.

Jo: Coming back to the book, you talk about your use of bibliomancy for inspiration.

Since we're talking about that, tell us about it. I think all the book people listening will be happy.

Austin: I'm a person who still keeps a dictionary nearby—a paper dictionary. I keep a big old American Heritage. It's just a big, thick book.

When I really don't have any ideas, I will turn at random to the dictionary, close my eyes, stick my finger down the page, open my eyes, and just see what I come up with. Sometimes just that act will give me an idea.

I also do that with books. I'll go around the studio, pick up a book, flip to a random page, and just see what it says there, or read an old piece of marginalia that I've left in a book. I believe deeply in the power of bibliomancy, and I think it's a case for paper books.

I'm one of those people that still really believes in reference books. I've started collecting more and more of them. I have an old, big dictionary that's always open on my desk, and I look up words.

I learned from John McPhee, the writer, that you should look up words that you think you know. That was the first time I'd ever heard anyone say that. So I look up words that I think I know.

Instead of reaching for a thesaurus when I need a different word, I actually just look up the definition of the word that I already have. That's another McPhee tip.

The other thing that happened that I thought was really interesting is, I got a Roget's for the first time—a thesaurus. I don't think most people know what an actual thesaurus is.

Most people think of a thesaurus as a synonym finder, and that's not actually what a thesaurus is at all. A thesaurus is more like an encyclopaedia, weirdly. You look up things based on big concepts, and then it gives you a bunch of words to look up later. It's a very strange thing. It's not what most people think it is.

I have a couple of editions of Roget's in here. I like the really old Roget's from the 1900s because they actually have opposing ideas facing each other on the page. Do you have an old-school Roget's? Have you ever looked through one?

Jo: I don't have one now, but I certainly grew up with them. I was literally just thinking, I wonder if there are ones for Americans and ones for British people, because so often we say different things and mean different things.

I always hear Americans say, “Oh, that's a doozy,” or something, and it means the complete opposite thing here.

Austin: Like if you say “fanny pack” over there. That means something very different than it means here, right? Chips or fries, that kind of stuff. So I wonder if there are different ones for different cultural references.

Jo: I don't know.

Austin: As people, with ChatGPT and all these LLMs and stuff, people are like, “Why would you ever pick up a paper reference book?” And I'm like, “I actually like the friction.”

I like having to move in space and go over to my dictionary. I like flipping the pages. I like having to scan a page for the word I'm looking for, because—

This marvellous thing happens when you're looking for the word, where you bump into all these other words.

If you're a word nerd, you get to start thinking about the root of the word—oh, why is this word next to this word? Well, it's because they share the same root. Then you're going down all these fun rabbit holes.

The thing that I'm trying to do as a writer and a creative person is, I'm trying to get to the thing that I didn't know I was looking for.

The thing that people misunderstand about AI, I think personally, is that it's a great tool if you know what you're looking for.

If you're like, “Find me this thing. I want exactly this. I want to see a picture of a dog wearing a king's costume,” or some crap like that, then it can spit that picture out for you. Or, “I want to know what happened on this day,” and whatever. It can do that.

But that's not actually what I'm doing most of the time when I'm writing or making something. I start with an idea, but what really happens—the magic of writing and the magic of making stuff in general—is when you discover something that you didn't even know you were headed for. That's the real magic for me.

Sometimes I have an idea and I want to articulate it for people, but more often than not, there's something that bothers me or something that I want to talk about, and I sit down and write, and I figure out what it is that I actually have to say and what I actually think.

Every writer really knows this, and that's why the dictionary, stuff like that, those are ways of training you to get in that discovery mode. “Well, let me—oh, I bumped into this. I went looking for this one thing and then I ran into this other thing.”

That's why I love the library. I don't know what system you use over there, but you look for one book in the Dewey Decimal System over here, and then, okay, here's all these other weird books next to it. Then you end up with three other books other than the one that you were looking for. That's the magic.

To me, that's the magic of creative work, discovering what you didn't know you were looking for.

That was particularly important for me when I was writing this book because we discovered that my wife has a condition called aphantasia. It's very rare in the population, about 2 to 3% of people. There's probably some people listening to this right now who are like, “What is this? Tell me.”

Jo: Aphantasia actually more common in the creative industries.

Austin: Yes. What it is, is that you don't see—when I say close your eyes and picture an apple, you don't actually see the apple in your head. You can think about an apple and the qualities of an apple, but you don't actually see it.

Some people, and it's a matter of degree—some people like me, I can close my eyes, I can tell you what the apple looks like, I can tell you what colour it is, I can tell you where the shading is. Someone like my wife doesn't see the apple. She can tell you what an apple is.

It's really interesting because she has a degree in architecture, which is known as a very visual field. But the thing you discover about aphantasia is, it doesn't keep people from becoming artists. In fact, it's the opposite.

Someone like Ed Catmull, who co-founded Pixar, writes about it in his book, and so many of the great animators at Pixar are actually aphantasics. The reason is that they learned that they had to draw in order to see things.

When you don't have a picture in your head of what you want something to look like, things appear in the drawing, and you find things that you couldn't even picture.

A lot of writers actually are aphantasics. John Green discovered recently that he has aphantasia. It turns out that it's a superpower for writers, because if you don't have a picture in your head, then you don't have to translate that picture into words. A lot of writers talk about thinking in radio, like they have a constant narrator.

My wife—she's probably going to kill me for talking about her this much—when she describes it to me, she's like, “Oh, it's like a radio in my head. I'm constantly hearing a voice, and it's a narrator.”

I was like, “Holy shit, that would be really helpful to me.” I don't have anything like that in my head. I read Mrs Dalloway for the first time, and I gave it to her and I said, “You've got to read this book. I think this must be what it's like in your head.” And she said, “Oh my God, it is.”

Part of the thing that I took away from that experience—this is a long-winded way of getting here—is that I take a lot of inspiration from people with this condition.

Most of the people I know in the arts or the creative fields, they set out with this grand vision, and then they start working on the thing and it's nothing like what they had in their head, and they get really depressed: “This isn't what I had in mind.”

Whereas if you set out without a picture in your head, and you just start manipulating things and you see what appears, that's more of the comic mode I was talking about earlier.

What would happen if we just sat down with our materials and we started playing and we saw what appeared on the page? What if we started typing and saw what appeared, and then we played with that?

That's the kind of joy. That's more like how kids operate. Kids are better at that. They're better at reacting to what's actually in front of them, instead of having these grandiose visions about what they're trying to achieve.

Jo: Just coming back on the longevity of a creative career. Your books are very distinctive. You have a very distinctive visual style, your handwriting and the way the books are done.

I wondered if another part of the ennui, perhaps, or the draining of the later career is that we get trapped into doing something that feels like it looks the same. Or we have a voice, and we're happy in that voice, but sometimes we want to do something completely different.

For authors, we have different names. I write under two different names, and that helps. But equally—

How do you define author voice, and do you ever feel like doing something completely different to your normal style?

Austin: Style, in a lot of ways, is self-plagiarism. Style is the repeated things that we notice in people's work. Hitchcock talked about this in films. Wes Anderson is someone like that—Wes Anderson has a style. I'm sure that he gets really sick of it too sometimes, but you also can't help it in some ways.

I thought a lot about this because people worry about style so much. A lot of the time, what we call style is what Adrian Tomine one time said: “Style is just the distance between what's in my head and what comes out of my hand.” I really like that definition.

With this book, I was trying to think, “Okay, if I do another book in this series, how can I push things a little bit?” And then I was reading this article about Taco Bell. You guys have Taco Bell over there, don't you? Do you have Taco Bell?

Jo: No.

Austin: So Taco Bell, for people who don't know, is this American Mexican chain, and they have tacos and burritos and stuff like that. They're well known for making these really insane… it's so American, this company. They make a taco with a Doritos as a shell. Doritos are crisps, I guess.

Jo: Yes, we have Doritos.

Austin: Okay. I spent time in England, I just don't remember if I ate Doritos when I was in England. Anyway, I was reading this article about Taco Bell. It was really funny. They have an innovation kitchen at Taco Bell, and they have a rule about new products.

The rule is called the distinctiveness rule, and the rule is: you can change the flavour or you can change the taste, or you can change the form, but you can't change both at the same time.

I got really obsessed with this concept because I thought, “Well, this could be kind of interesting.” If you're someone who's had success and you're known for something, this presents an interesting thing. You could do a complete break and do something completely new, or you could try the distinctiveness rule.

Okay, well, what if I play with this idea of taste versus form? What if I change the taste and keep the form?

So the idea for Don't Call It Art was, what if I do another one of these books, but the taste is more like if my kids made it? It had the texture of kids' art, it had lots of scribbles in it, it was loose and messy. That was kind of the idea.

The actual book ended up being more like the other books. It ended up looking like an Austin Kleon book, because I just can't help that.

The thing you said about having multiple names that you write under, that's kind of what I do with the newsletter. I think of the newsletter as very different from the books. The newsletter is this twice-weekly thing where I can be a little bit more of myself.

In the books, I'm this very helpful, happy version of myself. It's me, but it's me on my best day. I'm really helpful and interesting for you. The newsletter is still a highlight reel in a sense, but it's a little bit more of my weird everything-I'm-into. It's more of the unclipped version of me.

The newsletter becomes a place where I can do a lot of the weird stuff that's much different from the books. I have these little projects going all the time.

Sometimes I'll make a bunch of prints and put them online. Sometimes I'll make a bunch of zines on a topic I haven't covered in the book. Sometimes I'll do a mixtape.

As someone who's interested in a lot of different forms and genres and just different modes of output, having something like a newsletter has been really creatively fruitful for me.

It's kept me from getting too bottomed out with the books because the books do a certain thing for the reader, and as much as I'd love to do a book that was radically different, I also think I've been given a real gift with the form of my books, in that I kind of own the way that they feel and look.

There aren't a lot of books that look like those books and feel like those books, and so I like playing with that form. It would be hard to get rid of it now.

The pseudonym for me is kind of like the newsletter in a sense. The newsletter is a little bit more of where I get to be wild and wacky. Then the books are a little bit more of a chiselled thing.

Jo: The books are perfect examples of the form, as you say, but it's interesting about the newsletter. You mentioned at the beginning that we can be drained by the admin around the work.

For many people listening, a newsletter becomes admin. So how does the newsletter fit into your business? The books are traditionally published, they're very professional.

How do you have your independent side, and how does all of that work together in your business?

Austin: Thank you for asking that question. I run the whole show at the newsletter. The newsletter is just me, and then my wife edits it, and no one else is involved.

I don't have an assistant. I don't have a team. It is just me, and that's why I love it. I control everything. I pick who gets in there. I pick everything. I love that.

I grew up watching David Letterman over here, and Letterman had a nightly show, and I always thought that was killer. I thought, “Man, what a fun job. You have a show every night where you have a new guest, and you have all these wacky things going on.” It was like a variety show.

I always thought that would be really fun, so the newsletter is my version of that. I started the newsletter in 2013, and it was just a Friday newsletter. It quickly became a list of 10 things I thought were worth sharing.

I had a friend, Hugh MacLeod, who was like, “Hey, I have a newsletter. It's bigger than any conference you've ever gone to.” He was talking about South by Southwest here in Austin. He's like, “I have a newsletter now, and it's bigger than South by Southwest.”

Jo: Oh, I remember him.

Austin: He would say, “Every time I have a new print, I put it out, and there's a button, and then they buy it.” He was like, “You've got to get it. This newsletter thing is killer.” This was in 2011 or something.

Jo: Yes, I still have his books. Blogging in Your Underwear or something.

Austin: Totally. So Hugh's a whole different story, but I was just like, “Oh, I should really get a newsletter.” Letterman always had a top 10 list on his show. I just always thought a 10 list was really fun. And of course the books are lists of 10 too.

So it just worked to have a weekly list of 10. It felt good, and it felt like an infinitely repeatable format. What I'm looking for as a creative person is an infinitely repeatable format that can go on and on and on and be new every time. So the list of 10 is something that people know the form of.

It goes back to the Taco Bell thing. They know the form, but they're not sure what's going to go inside. They know it's going to be a burrito, but they don't know what's going to be in the burrito, and that's the exciting part.

The newsletter, business-wise, was always a marketing cost for about the first eight years of its existence. I paid MailChimp to send it out.

Then in about 2021, when I hadn't done a book for a while, my agent said, “You know, you should really think about doing a paid tier of your newsletter.” And this is to his credit, because he doesn't make anything off the newsletter. He said, “There's this thing called Substack now that makes that really easy.”

So we moved to Substack in 2021 in October, and I started doing a Tuesday edition of the newsletter that was just for paid people. That grew enough that it's gone from a marketing cost to something that's almost—it's not quite as much as I make on my books, but it's close. And to be candid, my books sell pretty well.

So suddenly the newsletter has become this really healthy income stream. The newsletter to me is actually the day job now. The newsletter is what really keeps the lights on.

It's also the perfect mix. It's the day job, it's the thing that keeps income coming in on a regular basis, but it's also the thing I like to do the most.

I'm not like a traditional writer who likes to just get lost in their book and take years and years and go away. I'm someone who loves to be doing a lot of different things. The newsletter is a perfect format for me. I'm talking myself into not quitting, actually. It's funny.

It's gone from this thing that was a marketing cost to now it's a significant part of our income. That journey—such a bad word, journey—that trip has been very interesting. It's been really cool. But I'm also just lucky. I've been really lucky, and I think part of my thing is, I'm always just trying not to squander my luck.

Jo: Well, the book is fantastic, and I know people are going to love it. And the newsletter, of course. So tell us—

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

Austin: The easiest thing to do is to just go to AustinKleon.com, and that has links to everything—the books, the newsletter.

I do actually keep an old-school blog still. I'm one of the few people that still maintains their blog and keeps it up to date. I'm hedging my bets because I think in the end everything will come back to a self-hosted website. I think in the end everyone's going to just go back to their little websites, or at least I hope so.

Jo: Well, that was great, Austin. Thanks so much.

Austin: Oh, thank you.

The post Don’t Call It Art: Rediscovering Creative Joy With Austin Kleon first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How do you write when your heart is broken? How do you go back into the publishing business after years away, knowing it's a very different industry to the one you left? With Jami Albright.

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

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

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

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

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

Show Notes

How Jami started writing fiction at 47 and waited a year before publishing her first book

Why she fictionalised her sister's terminal cancer story rather than writing a memoir

The difference between writing as therapy and writing for the reader

Reactivating an email newsletter after almost two years of silence

Going wide with a standalone women's fiction novel after years in KU and rom-com

Letting go of the frantic hustle of indie publishing and redefining what success looks like

You can find Jami at JamiAlbright.com.

Transcript of the interview with Jami Albright

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jami: 2017. Things have changed.

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

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

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

Because you did have real success.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I had that question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jo: Oh.

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

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

I was there for almost six months, if you count the time I was back and forth, because she was not doing great but she was still okay. She had always rallied and come back.

But once she got the diagnosis, I stayed. She would go home, but she would come back to my mom's during the day, because her husband worked. She was a teacher, so she was off during the summer. I was just there, and we all just took care of her.

When she decided to go on hospice, she wanted to be at my mom's. She didn't want to be at home—they lived out in the country. She wanted to be at my mom's, so we set her up in the living room.

We're redneck country people. We bring our crazy people in, our sick people, just out for everybody to see. She was just in the middle of the living room in her hospital bed, and the world just revolved around that hospital bed.

Once that happened, once I knew at the end of 2021 that things were not going to go well—I really did not believe she would die. But she died a month after she went on hospice in October of 2022.

That whole year, I was useless. I could not write. I couldn't think of anything to write. I write funny. How do you write funny when your heart's broken? I couldn't do it.

After she died, I knew it would take a while. I knew it would maybe even be a year. But as the weeks turned into months and the months turned into years, I haven't written—except for her obituary—I've not written a word since she died until I started writing this book a year ago. I started it on April 19th.

Jo: I mean, the stories of grief—there seems to be no way of escaping whatever it ends up being. You didn't choose your response. Your deep grief was just there, and you couldn't write. I feel like sometimes people just try and force it. It sounds like that's what you needed, and you have done that.

So what then gave you the impetus to finally write—and to choose fiction?

Jami: I didn't write memoir. I did think about doing a memoir, but I don't read memoir, and I don't know how to write it.

I was already behind the eight ball, trying to write a book at all because it had been forever. I don't need to learn how to write something completely different. Plus, it just felt too close to write the memoir.

I had been in Mexico City with my daughter, who has an event planning company, and we were there scouting locations for one of her events. Janet Margot lives in Mexico City, so I reached out, and we had dinner.

We were talking, and she had had two big losses about the same time that my sister passed away. So we were talking about how difficult it is afterwards, just getting your head back into a space of being creative at all.

She said, “You really should write this book. You should tell this story. It hits everything: middle-aged women dealing with middle-age things. You've got your parents that you were dealing with, and then your sister. You should write this story.”

I said, “No, thank you. I lived it. I don't want to write it.” But it just wouldn't go away. I couldn't figure out how I would tell it. Whose point of view? I couldn't do it from the dying sister's point of view because I didn't think I could be authentic.

I was afraid to tell it from multiple POVs because the book has a lot of characters in it. My family is gigantic—my immediate family, my sisters, husbands, nieces and nephews, my kids, my mom and dad—there are 35 of us. Almost all of those are in and out of my mom's house all the time. So I knew I couldn't do multiple point of view.

One day, I was driving home to my mom's house, and it just hit me. The whole story laid out in front of me, and that's what I did. The first draft was pretty much just a retelling of what happened to us. I added some fictional elements, but I just wanted to get the story out. It was hard.

I started Adderall on April 19th of 2025—I know that, because that's the day I started this book. I do call this the book that Adderall wrote, because I could sit and focus for three or four hours, which I'd never really been able to do.

I would come to Starbucks and I would sit and write this book, and I would cry sitting in Starbucks, like a crazy person. People would walk by and slide a napkin onto the table and just keep walking, because I'm sitting there crying like crazy.

I was so superstitious, and things were working so well, that I was afraid not to come and write at Starbucks. Staying at home, I think, would have been really hard. I would maybe have sunk into a depression had I done this at home. So I just wrote the whole book at Starbucks.

After I wrote the first draft, I went back in and made it more fictional. But a lot of the book—especially her stuff—is a lot of what happened. She was just crazy. I tell a story in the book that, this is the absolute truth, this happened.

She was in college, and she had convinced my younger sister to go to a honky-tonk club because they were having a Miss Honky-Tonk contest. Before she could get up on stage to compete as Miss Honky-Tonk, she got in a fight with some girl, and the girl hit her in the head with a bottle and split her head open. She was bleeding.

My youngest sister was like, “We've got to go to the ER.” And she just refused, because there was a $300 cash prize for winning, and she needed it to make rent. So she borrowed a towel from the bartender, wrapped it around her head, competed with that bloody towel on her head, and won that stupid contest.

That story in and of itself was my sister. Everything about her is in that story. So a lot of the stories in there happened to her in one way or another. What happens to June in the book happened to my sister.

Jo: This is interesting, because the same thing memoir writers face is something perhaps you face: how much of the writing is therapy and how much is for the reader?

You said you sat there crying. Absolutely, writing for therapy is very important—but when you come to edit, there might be things that your therapy side of you is like, “That's so important to me.”

How do you kill your darlings when you're editing your sister's life?

Jami: That was hard. I had to take out a lot of what was in the first draft, mostly the stories. Once she came home on hospice, it was just a steady stream of people coming in, and everybody had a story about her.

What I found in editing was that Hope, the main character, was mostly a spectator in those scenes instead of being actively part of them. So I had to take those out, because they didn't serve the purpose of the book.

I committed early on to: while I wanted to tell the story, I did not want it to be self-indulgent. I did not want it to be a therapy session that I sold to people as a story. Because of that, I think that really helped. I really did think about that as I was revising.

I sent it to a developmental editor, and I don't know how great she was, but she gave me some really good advice about a couple of things.

One was, “There's just not enough conflict in this book. You say that Hope and the father have this really contentious relationship, yet we don't see it. There's a little bit of it here and there, but you're not really digging into that.”

It's hard, because while the rest of the world doesn't know, my family knows that this is a lot of our story. I just had to let that go and not worry about what my family thought.

They had all given me permission. I'd sort of said, “I want to do this. Are you guys okay with that?” I talked to her husband, and everybody was okay with me doing it. But I couldn't worry about what they were going to think.

I would repeat to myself: if they want to tell this story, they can write their own book. I'm writing what I saw and telling a fictionalised story that will hopefully honour her, but also help other people feel like they're being seen, and also be entertaining. If you're going to write a book, it needs to be somewhat entertaining.

Jo: I don't think you can help yourself. You're funny.

Jami: Yes. The book is really funny. I tell people that and they're like, “Hmm, really?” And I'm like, “It is really funny.” But it's also really sad.

Jo: Well, I think that's the truth—to defend myself. There is a lot of humour in grief. There is death and dying, and it's a human condition.

Jami: It is a human condition, yep.

Jo: There's comedy in all of the human condition. That's just the way it is, right?

I heard you mention on an interview, I can't remember where it was, that you feel very connected to this book, and you're worried that people judging it or giving it a bad review might feel like an insult to your sister.

How are you dealing with these kinds of fears about how to separate ourselves from our books?

Jami: I've been in therapy—like, literal therapy—for that, because I felt like that would be hard. So far, I've only gotten a few reviews back. They've all been good reviews. I haven't had anyone say they hate it.

I just have had to separate myself. It's not personal. Reviews are never personal. People not liking your book is never personal.

That's just a mindset. I've had to change my mind about that. Knowing that's a pitfall I could fall into, I really keep it top of mind. My family knows that's an issue, so they know they have to pull me out of that hole if I drop in. So that's really how I've handled it so far. We'll see.

Jo: Maybe it's time as well. You're almost back to the “book is your baby” situation. As the years pass, the book almost becomes separate, doesn't it? How you feel about your first bride book is probably like, “It's not even me anymore.”

Jami: Right. I learned early that your book isn't really your baby. Once you publish it, it's your product. So that has never been very hard for me. I still hate bad reviews, and I take them personally like everybody else does, if I let myself.

But ultimately, this is a book that I'm putting out for entertainment. Yes, it's very personal. Yes, it means a lot to me. But if people don't like it, it isn't because they don't like my dead sister. They just don't like my writing.

Jo: It's tough, but it's good to talk about, because this is something many people feel. My memoir Pilgrimage—it's not the same at all—but I was just so scared of judgment. The fear of judgment. What people would think of me. That's kind of different, but—

It's this question of how it'll land.

The reality is, not many people read these books anyway.

Jami: Well, I have worried about how it would land, but mostly I worry about how it would land with the people I love. My mom read it last week. I was there while she was reading it. That was no fun. She laughed, but it was devastating to her.

She's like, “It's great, and I hate it.” Because it is so raw and real to her still—well, to all of us. That's where I worry, how it's going to land with them. But again, I've had to let that go. I had to let it go during the writing, because if I worried about that, then I would not have told an honest story.

That was another thing—I didn't want it to be self-indulgent, and I wanted it to be honest. As honest as I could make it, even to the point of making people uncomfortable.

There's a line. Once you cross it, there's no getting you back after that. So I walked that line really carefully, because I did want it to be honest about how I felt, how other people I know who've been through something like this feel.

Also, just relationships. Because when you're in a big family like my sisters and I—we adore each other, but we can also go toe-to-toe real fast. It can get ugly, because we know each other really well. We're also a little bit redneck, so we don't pull any punches.

Your sisters are always the most honest people in your life. I wanted that to be true in this book too—both sides of that story.

Jo: Let's circle back to the business stuff and some of the things we talked about, because obviously this has been a really difficult time. There was no way to deal with it in any other way, but your business has changed. You had these great few years, good sales, and then you had other priorities.

So how are you rebooting the business? Lots of people end up taking a few years out for whatever reason.

How are you rebooting the business to try and sell some books?

Jami: To be honest, I have the remnants of a business. I have tried over the last four years to run some ads to get the Bride's books going, but here's something that's very interesting, and if somebody can tell me why this happened, I would love to hear it.

These books that have sold so many books—I mean, so many books—I could not give them away. It didn't matter what I did. I changed covers, I changed blurbs, I put them on sale, I took them off sale, I ran ads. Ads wouldn't really move the needle.

I know that at a certain point, when you haven't published and your books get pushed down in the algorithm, that is an uphill battle. But it was almost like, one day they just fell off, and once they started falling, I could not get them back. I just couldn't.

So that I didn't make myself crazy—because also during this time, I was just trying to keep my head above water—when I would deal with my books or go into my dashboard, I would feel horrible. I was already feeling horrible, so I didn't need to feel more horrible. So I just sort of let them go after a certain point.

I've now started running some Facebook ads. I have one Facebook ad that's working really well, knock on wood, right now for my first Bride's book. The problem is, this book and my Bride's books are different. The voice and the tone are the same, but they're really different in a lot of ways. They're the same in a lot of ways.

This book doesn't have any sex; the other books don't have anybody dying. But some of the things are really similar. So I may have some crossover.

For whatever reason, this ad is working. My book one is ranked better than it's been ranked in forever—really good. I'm not spending a ton of money to do it. So I don't know what changed. I don't know if I'll ever know.

I've revised my newsletter, and that's worked well. I still have around a 35 to 40% open rate on a newsletter that I didn't send out for almost two years. I was sending it out, but then I kind of stopped, and then I started again.

Jo: I was going to ask you about that, because I often get people emailing me. They're like, “I have a really old newsletter from several years ago. I haven't emailed them for years.”

So what did you say in that first email? Like, “Hey, I'm back”?

Jami: I mean, I'm just like, “Remember me?” It really was kind of like that. Just, “I'm back. You guys know life has happened. I'm sure you understand. If you're still here, thank you so much. I have been writing. I have this book that I think some of you will really love.”

That's really how it was. From the first email, even that first email had a higher open rate. I think it was close to 45%. I had not sent out a newsletter in two years literally.

Jo: People were like, “What happened?”

Jami: They're like, “Oh, she didn't die. That was her sister, not her.” But I've just been really fortunate. They've been really encouraging. Every time I send one out, I get really encouraging emails back. So I've sent out about the book.

The majority of my readers are KU readers because my books are in KU. But this book is going wide. One of the things I'm doing because I have been a little concerned about… Janet Margot does a lot of Amazon ads stuff and she knows a lot about Amazon.

We've talked a lot about whether I should use my real name, my pen name, or come up with another name. Should I worry about my readers buying the book and messing up my Also Boughts?

All of those things, because my readers are romance readers. Some of them read women's fiction, but for the most part, they're romance readers.

I've decided to stick with Jami Albright and not worry about it. There are just things you can't control, so I've had to hold everything with a really open hand with this book.

I am offering the book on my website. I'm selling it at $7.99—I chose a high price point, because I just feel like, to sit with the other books that I want it to sit with, I need that price point.

So I'm offering it on my website, starting at the end of this week, for $5. If they're KU readers and they don't buy books, but they want the book, they can get it for $5 on my website, which I think is reasonable.

Jo: Mm. Absolutely.

Jami: If that's too much for them, I understand and I get it. Time, things are hard right now, and if they can't do that, it's going to be in libraries, so they can request it at their library. But right now that's the plan.

Hopefully that helps with the Also Boughts a little bit too. Even though, again, I just can't worry about those things. As a gift to my readers, I want to do this for them as well—give them a discount.

Jo: And obviously this is a standalone, right? This is not—

Jami: Yes, it is.

Jo: Again, a bit like memoir, all the book marketing we talk about in fiction is “write a series.” It's much easier. So it is difficult to market a standalone in general. And this is something that happened, so it is a standalone situation.

So do you feel like you're back in terms of writing? Have you got plans for more books, or is this a business for you going forward?

Do you feel like you want to re-enter this whole world?

Jami: I do. I have an idea for a book similar to this one—not in the same kind of genre, I mean, of women's fiction, kind of midlife fiction stuff. I have an idea.

I had nothing for months and months and months, and a couple of months ago, this idea kind of came to me. I was like, “Oh, that's not bad.” So I'm mulling it over—I do a lot of mulling—and that's the next book I think I will write.

I don't know that I'll write rom-coms again. Not because I don't love them. I do, and I love my rom-coms. But I'm just different. You do not go through something like this and come out on the other side the same.

I don't know that I could carry an entire rom-com through without it being even more emotional than mine are now. So for right now, I'm going to write another one of these kinds of books where it's got a lot of emotion, family dynamic, tension and dynamics.

Jo: That's great. I do feel like once you've written the book that was waiting—your sister's book—then more things arrive, and it's great to hear that that is arriving for you.

And of course, we change. One of the nice things about writing for the long term and building more of a name brand is that you change, and your readers either follow you or they don't, but it's your life.

So I think that's a good reason to have one pen name. I obviously have two, but my fiction pen name I've written all kinds of genres under.

Why else would we keep doing this? I don't want to write the same book over and over again.

Jami: Right. Believe me, I've had to eat a lot of crow over the last four years, and it's tasty with ketchup.

I have decided that a lot of the stuff I said is true: about you write in one genre, you give the people exactly what they want, and you give it to them over and over again. I believe all of that. I still believe those things. It's just that I don't know that I'm capable of doing that right now.

Also, I'm older. I am about doing the things that bring me joy and are not a drudgery. I want to say this, because I miss the success. I miss who I thought I was during that time. I miss the recognition. I'll freely admit it.

I miss being the person doing the thing that everybody said couldn't be done. “You can't make money with one book a year.” Well, watch me. And I did. I miss that.

What I don't miss, and I've had to be really, really honest with myself, which has been difficult—I don't miss the anxiety that came with that. There was a lot of franticness. I think that if you are in a lot of groups, you see that franticness.

I've had to step back, like I've had to step back, and then go back into these groups, you hear authors and see authors, and there's just this frantic sense that we're losing everything, and we have to hold on so tight to everything.

I was like that. I checked my ads constantly. I checked my dashboard constantly. My mom used to say, “This should be fun.” I'm like, “Mom, it's a business. It's not fun.” But I recognise that I loved that so much that I held onto it so tight. I don't want to go back to that. I don't have the energy for that.

Since this all happened, I've gained four more grandchildren than I had. I have six grandchildren now. I want to spend time with them. I want to spend time with my adult children. I want to spend time with my mom and dad.

So I can't be frantic about my sales—are they going up, are they dropping?—and give emotionally to the people I love in my life.

If the last four years have taught me anything, it is that the one thing you can never get back is time. You can never get it back, and that is so important to me right now.

With this book—and one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you when we were talking about when I would do it—I wanted to do it before it came out, because I've already won.

Writing this book, writing a book that honours the bravest person I've ever known and doing the second-hardest thing that I've ever had to do, is the win. That's the win. Whatever happens with this book afterwards is just what happens with this book afterwards.

It doesn't change who I am, and you told me that when we were in Vegas two years ago. That conversation really changed a lot for me, because you said, “You are a successful author.”

I was still trying to come up with a plan to be a successful author again, and you were like, “You are a successful author. You've had success. That makes you a successful author. You don't have to chase that.”

That changed so much of my thinking. If I could leave listeners with anything, it is that we need to recognise the things we can't control and just deal with the things we can control.

That's kind of how my sister lived. She could not control her cancer, but she could control how she responded to it and how she went forward.

I think a lot of times, when bad things happen, we want to make sense of them. We want a reason for them. And a lot of times there's just no reason. There's no reason my sister died. There's no reason she left two kids and a husband devastated and a family that just has a giant hole in it. There's no reason for that.

What defines us is not figuring out why that happened. It's what we do with that going forward. I think that's important for me to remember when I start getting caught up in all the franticness of this business.

Jo: Yes. Or not, as the case may be. You can just let the book be what it is. And I do feel like these deeper books, they're more slow burn. You wrote books that ran, ran like the bride. Now we're not running like the bride.

Jami: I'm tired. I don't run unless a wild animal's chasing me.

Jo: Exactly. Look, we're out of time, but just tell people, if they haven't listened, a bit about your podcast, Wish I'd Known Then with Sara Rosett.

Tell people what they can find over on that podcast and why you're still doing it.

You've been doing it throughout the whole time. While not writing, you've still been podcasting.

Jami: It absolutely saved my life. It's kept me in this business. While I haven't been publishing, I still know what's going on. I know about direct sales, I know about what's happening behind the scenes, with Facebook ads. I've kept in touch with those things because of our podcast.

It's an interview podcast like yours, but we talk to people about what they wish they'd known about indie publishing. Most people have some certain thing that they've been working on or doing, and we talk to them a little bit about that too.

We ask the same questions every week to every guest, and it's so interesting how different the answers are, and yet how similar they are.

I think that helps when you're going through it and you're like, “God, I must be the only one feeling this way.” But you tune into a podcast, and you hear week after week, “Oh, no, there are other people feeling the same way I'm feeling, or struggling with the same things I'm struggling with.”

Hopefully we give people things to shoot for and to aspire to. We have some amazing guests. They've all been really gracious and really honest. I don't know if it's the questions, or just because Sara and I are our style, but they're really honest with us when they answer the questions.

Jo: It's a great show. I recommend it a lot.

Jami: Thank you.

Jo: Where can people find you and your books online?

Jami: You can find me at JamiAlbright.com—that's J-A-M-I-Albright.com. I'm on all the socials as Jami Albright Author. My books are on Amazon right now, but this book is actually now on all the retailers. So that's where you can find me.

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

Jami: It was an honour. Thank you so much.
The post Writing Through Grief And Rebooting an Indie Author Business With Jami Albright first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How is AI transforming accessibility for indie authors — and why should you care even if you consider yourself able-bodied? What happens when the tools designed to help people with disabilities end up making everyone's creative business better? Jeff Adams, accessibility expert and romance author, explores how AI is opening doors that were previously closed.

In the intro, Spotify Audiobook Innovations; The Economics of Convention Life [The Indy Author]; Friction in your Author Business [Self-Publishing with ALLi].

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

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

Jeff Adams is the author of YA thrillers and gay romance, and the co-author of Content for Everyone, a practical guide for creative entrepreneurs to produce accessible and usable web content.

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

Show Notes

How ending a long-running podcast made space for more writing — and how to know when it's time to let go of a good thing

What accessibility really means for indie authors and why your digital content might be excluding part of your audience

How AI agents like Claude Cowork are removing physical and cognitive barriers for authors with disabilities, chronic pain, or limited energy

The culture of shame around AI use in the writing community and why blanket anti-AI statements can be ableist

Practical tools including NotebookLM, ElevenReader, and ChatGPT for marketing copy, metadata management, and multimodal research

Exciting futures in personalised reading, real-time translation, and AI browser agents that could change how everyone interacts online

You can find Jeff at JeffAdamsWrites.com. Jeff also now has a SubStack at
contentforeveryone.substack.com

Transcript of the interview with Jeff Adams

Jo: Jeff Adams is the author of YA thrillers and gay romance, and the co-author of Content for Everyone, a practical guide for creative entrepreneurs to produce accessible and usable web content. Welcome back to the show, Jeff.

Jeff: Thanks so much, Jo. It's good to be back.

Jo: It is. You were last on the show in March 2023, so over three years ago now.

Give us a bit of an update on your writing and publishing business and what it looks like at the moment.

Jeff: Sure. I think the biggest thing that happened is that my husband Will, who is also a writer, we ended the Big Gay Fiction Podcast at the end of 2024, after 470-something episodes. It was basically time to do that. So we both focused on writing from that point.

In 2025 we had some of our biggest successes in getting writing out into the world. I refound my groove—my difficulty in writing went away finally. We talked a little bit about that back in 2023 too.

Will started a new pen name and started producing again, and it was really good to be able to move in that direction.

Jo: Was this the hockey romance that really hit at the right time?

Jeff: You know, I wish I could have capitalised more on Heated Rivalry when it came out, but I did get hockey books out, and I think I did get to ride that wave a little bit there too.

Jo: Yes, and if people don't know about that, that was a super popular streaming series. Was that based on a book?

Jeff: It was, yes. Rachel Reid was the author of that book and that series that then Jacob Tierney optioned and made into what fairly turned into a global phenomenon at the end of 2025.

Jo: Yes, absolutely. Although I particularly liked Red, White and Royal Blue. That was the one I liked. Not so much into hockey.

But anyway, I just wanted to ask you about the Big Gay Fiction Podcast. As you say, you did hundreds of episodes over many years. You and I met over podcasting. You've had lots of connections with people. You ended it, and I know you struggled with ending it, but it sounds like it went really well for you. So maybe you could talk a bit about—

How do you know when it's time to end something—a good thing rather than something bad?

Does that make more space for writing, essentially?

Jeff: It absolutely did make more space for writing for both of us, in particular for me because I have a day job. I balance everything on the creative side with the day job.

Will and I had been talking about it for over a year. It just was like, it's really time. After nine years, getting to that 470 mark, we thought about trying to get to 10 years and we thought about, if not 10, then getting to 500 and ending on a milestone.

As we looked at everything in our creative business, it was like, this is fun, we enjoy it, but we're not getting as much out of it as we might be if we were actually also writing books, which we also really want to do.

It became a time thing and what was the best use of the time. We absolutely miss it occasionally. The whole Heated Rivalry thing, I would've loved to have had episodes to talk about that on, but in the long run, it was worth it.

Jo: I mean, one of the things with a podcast, particularly around fiction, was that it was a marketing angle for your fiction. This show is a marketing angle mainly for my nonfiction.

So what did you replace the podcast with, in terms of book marketing?

Jeff: It was really stepped-up email marketing. I'd always had a list. Will started a list, of course, as he started his new pen name. So it was really turning on that, focusing on that, getting some email marketing with a Bargain Booksy and a Fussy Librarian and a BookBub occasionally to do that work.

To be honest, even though we covered things in our genre that if you like what we're talking about, you should like our books, there was never as much of a connection there as you'd want there to be.

Even from that book marketing angle, these other things that we can do, it's also a better spend of the money to get those types of promos than it was to continue running the show.

Jo: Yes, that is interesting. I mean, obviously I think about podcasting a lot since I have this one, and I put Books and Travel on a hiatus and that was meant to help my fiction and definitely didn't help my fiction sales. But I want to bring it back again because I love doing it.

Do you have this hankering sometimes? Do you think you'd ever do the podcast again?

Because you are also quite into all the technical stuff and all that.

Jeff: It's possible. I've toyed with the idea of doing a short accessibility podcast geared towards creatives, tilting to the same audience that Content for Everyone does.

Then I come back and look at the time—is my time better served writing new fiction or perhaps starting a Substack, which I also toy with the idea of, for accessibility stuff?

So it bounces around in my head to do another show, but I haven't really decided to jump on that yet.

Jo: Yes, and I think that waiting is really good. As you say, you quit a big thing and you don't have to rush to fill it again.

I love that you guys are writing more books. So I wanted us to talk about that up front because I know people who listen to this show—I encourage people to start podcasts if you want to, but equally it can take a lot of time. So that's fantastic.

Now, you mentioned accessibility, and I feel like the word can be quite difficult for people. So let's just start with a definition.

What is accessibility? Why do you care and why should we care?

Jeff: So accessibility is really about making sure that whatever the thing is, whether it's something out in the physical world or in the online world, that everybody has access to it.

Access to the information, access to getting into a building or being able to cross the street appropriately, whatever that is—that the accessibility of the thing is high. So that regardless of who is approaching it, they can interact with whatever the thing is.

If we put that into the digital world, it's about making sure that text on a screen can be perceived by anybody, whether they're trying to read it visually or if they're trying to read it through a screen reader or through a braille monitor.

Whatever that is, they need to be able to interact with it, get the information they need, do all the functions of whatever it is on the screen. Check out on Amazon, check out at their favourite e-commerce place, be able to get the products in their cart, check out, et cetera.

For creatives, it's about the things that we do: the websites that we build for ourselves, the e-commerce platforms that we use, our email marketing, our social media posts.

Making all of that as accessible as we can so that we're not perhaps missing a part of our audience or our prospective audience from being able to engage with our work and in turn, hopefully, buy our books and enjoy our books and become a fan.

This became important to me because of my day job. I hadn't really considered this—like, I think most people don't—until I started working at UsableNet. It's going to be 15 years I've been at that company come this autumn, and I really started to see the impacts because UsableNet is all about accessibility on the digital front.

I really started to learn, being a project manager for them, what all of that meant and how it impacted people who couldn't buy something online, couldn't book a hotel room, couldn't book an airline ticket. It just really became something I got passionate about.

I ended up writing the book because I realised that nobody talks to creatives about this. Nobody tells the independent author what they should do to help make their digital stuff accessible so that they don't miss people.

I never expected my day job to interact with my creative side so much, but this certainly has over the last few years.

Jo: I mean, has it got better? Like we said, you were on here three years ago. We did talk about some of the things around EPUB formats and taking off DRM and what we need to do on our websites—labelling images, for example, and that kind of thing.

Do you think accessibility has gotten better?

Jeff: I think the awareness of it has improved, both within the creative community and in the broader web ecosphere, that the awareness is better.

There's so much knowledge that needs to go into creating something that is accessible. Sometimes there's so much that you have to think about with colours and alt tags on images and all the little bits and pieces, if it doesn't really come to muscle memory, it's easy for it to fall off.

There's a survey that's done by WebAIM every year about the top one million homepages out in the universe, and they surveyed those for just the things that an automated scan can detect, which is a small portion of overall accessibility, and the number of errors across that top million actually ticked up this year.

Even though there's all these laws around the world—people get sued all the time in the US—the number of errors ticked up for the first time in a few years.

So I think the awareness is up, but I think being able to take action on it and make the time to take action on it isn't where it needs to be.

Jo: So last time you gave us all those tips. I'll refer people back to that and also to your book Content for Everyone, which has got loads of great stuff in.

I wanted to talk to you for this show because I was sitting watching Claude Cowork—now I use Claude Code a lot more—but updating 140 titles on IngramSpark, where me clicking things and there's like 15 clicks per record on IngramSpark updates for pricing, is an absolute nightmare.

I was watching the AI do the work and I realised this isn't just saving me time, it's actually saving my wrist and my arm from repetitive strain injury. That's when I thought about this accessibility thing.

As you mentioned, for example being physically accessible into a building, say someone's in a wheelchair, they can't necessarily get into a building if there's no ramp.

I was thinking that for many years, being an indie author, being a writer online, there's also been these physical barriers because there's a lot of plumbing and clicking for us. So I wondered, starting with an attitude around a shift in who this is opening up to—

How is AI starting to help people with these accessibility issues?

Jeff: Yes, there's so much opportunity around this. We should note, just to timestamp this, that we're talking on 14th April 2026, because who knows what will change, even in an hour from now.

I think Cowork was one of the first things that we saw, and that's only been out since the very top of this year. Being able to do actual agentic tasks. Other things have sort of gotten there, but Cowork really opened it up.

You mentioned the repetitive stress that you would've had clicking all of those forms on IngramSpark across 140 books. But there's that type of stress, chronic pain, cognitive drain for somebody who may have some cognitive disability and trying to work through that form.

The cognitive energy just might drain out and maybe knock them out for several days after trying to get through that, or the tasks take them multiple days to do. Someone who has lower vision, someone who's trying to work through that form with a screen reader—all of that draws energy, draws focus.

Now we've got something where, with plain language, we could say something like: here's all my pricing information, I've logged into IngramSpark, go update these books. Obviously the prompt's going to be a little more than that, but in broad terms, that's what we're going to tell it.

Jo: Hmm.

Jeff: And being able to have it go through and do the thing. If it gets stuck, have it come back and say, “Hey, I've got trouble with this. Please help me.”

That can just free up so much of the drains that people can have—the things that can take them out of doing the part of the work that they need to do for an author business.

They can go write the book through whatever process you're going to use to do that, rather than getting caught up in something like having to update all those books on IngramSpark.

Jo: You mentioned writing the book there. I have this real sense of being an able-bodied indie author in terms of my computer use and my ability to write a whole book, a 70,000-word thriller that I write regularly.

We're all special in some way, but I do have a reasonably normal brain where I can do this work without too much strain. It's hard work, but I can do it.

I meet people who are now using AI to help them write, to help them organise their work—maybe someone has dyslexia or ADHD or cognitive issues or pain—there's just so many things that I take for granted that don't affect me.

I hear from people who, at this point in time in the community, are almost shamed for using AI to write.

So I wanted to bring this up to discuss it under the terms of accessibility. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Jeff: I have real difficulty with people who will say anything in the broad range of, “I don't need to use this thing, and therefore you should not either.” Which is adjacent to indie anti-AI speak that there is out there.

Certainly we're living right now at probably the highest point that it's ever been, where more and more there's a sentiment towards not using AI for whatever the reason is.

I totally respect that people can have concerns about the environment and about energy use and water use, et cetera. Not to mention all the other things that are on the more difficult side of AI.

To shame someone who may not be able to put their story out there without the use of that AI, whichever one they're using, or to shame them because they're using AI to run part of their business—updating IngramSpark, doing other things like that—I think it can come down to there being some ableism there.

Ther is some privilege behind that too, where they're just like, “I don't need this, and you shouldn't have it either.”

I want to give people just a sliver of an idea of what this can mean for someone who is disabled and what AI can unlock for them. There is a person on LinkedIn that I follow whose name is Hannah Desmond. She's an ADHD coach and a former software developer, and very recently she posted this on LinkedIn.

This is a paraphrase of what she said, but: having something that can meet you where you are and help you bridge that gap is what I think I have found so helpful about using AI.

Here's what I keep coming back to. Without that support, I wasn't more motivated or more capable. I was just stuck. That's the bit that gets lost.

We've been taught that struggling is how you know you're doing it properly. So when something reduces the struggle, it can feel wrong—even when it's the thing that actually makes the work possible. Because there's a difference between avoiding thinking and being able to think at all. I think that rounds it up.

She's talking about her time as a software developer, but you can apply that to any realm of AI when we're thinking about trying to shame someone for why they may be using it.

We may not know that they have a disability because we don't always share that part of ourselves. So I really feel strongly about that and how we are in this culture of shame.

Jo: Yes. It drives me up the wall, actually. But I will also say: you don't have to have a disability or accessibility issues in order to use AI in whatever way you personally decide is okay—talking to the listeners now.

I think Orna Ross from the Alliance of Independent Authors says it well, which is you should have your own AI policy. So you personally decide where your lines are, how it helps you, what you want to keep for you, and what you want help with.

I was also thinking in terms of accessibility around money. Again, for many of us, professional cover design, professional editing, professional human-level translation, these are things that are pretty pricey for many people. So again, this makes it more accessible.

One of the reasons we got into the indie way and being indie authors was to try and remove the barriers to entry to people who have been excluded from the environment of publishing.

So, yes, it is really hard to talk about this, and yet that's why I wanted to talk about it, because—

There's so many variables for each individual and there's no situation that's the same, really, is there?

Jeff: No, not at all. The things that I may need to do my work in the most efficient way possible is different from the way that you're going to work, is different than the way my husband's going to work, is different than every other person and the way that they're going to work.

Which is why any kind of blanket statement about “I don't need something and therefore you shouldn't need it either” can just be so problematic, because we have no idea what someone else is going through.

Either it's a permanent part of their lives or maybe it's something that is happening temporarily with them where they might need to leverage other tools.

Jo: Yes. Talking about that temporary, I think I really got the first sense of this when I had COVID the first time, which was really bad. I remember I was so sick, the only thing I could do was listen to an audiobook. I couldn't think, I couldn't read. It was really probably months of not having my brain back.

Then the other thing that's happened as I age, as women age, is menopause kicks in and the brain fog is a real thing. I've heard from other people too who've said having Claude or whoever, an AI tool, to help with the brain fog is so important because otherwise I just wouldn't be able to gather my thoughts. Again, as you said—

Even if we don't need these things now, it's quite likely we're going to need them at some point, given ageing, given the potential for injury and disease.

I mean, we don't escape this alive, do we?

Jeff: Yes, that's a great point because unless we're extremely lucky as individuals, we're all likely to have some sort of a disability in our lives at some point.

I know for me, as I age and my eyes get more and more tired after being in front of a screen all day for work, and then whatever creative stuff I do in the afternoon on a book—when it comes near bedtime and I do want to read, I probably want to do that with an audiobook, much more audio, especially for any long reading project.

That can also be like, if I have a long document or a long article to read, I am likely to give it to ElevenReader, let it load itself up, and then listen to it, because I take the information in better than trying to follow words across a screen.

Jo: Yes. Jonathan, my husband, now also listens to a lot of academic papers on ElevenReader. Most of us will know it as where we publish some audiobooks from ElevenLabs, or you can also publish other things there. So it is super useful to think about what we can do with ElevenReader.

Another thing that I found really useful recently is NotebookLM. On NotebookLM, there is a free tier. You can put various things in there and then create a custom audio.

So this is something I've been doing as part of research. You can put in, say, 10 YouTube videos or some PDFs or your book or whatever, and then you can create a custom audio. Then I'll go for a walk and I'll listen to the custom audio, and then I'll go back and look at the detail of what it was.

It gives me the framework of whatever I'm thinking about on a broader level, and then I can come back to the details. So again, it's this multimodal approach that can help us manage our energy, I guess.

Jeff: And it's all about the managing of the energy, I think, too. That is a great way to think about the accessibility of it all.

You mentioned a great use there for NotebookLM. That could also be putting your book in there and having it help you build a world bible or something like that. Or building marketing materials off of that.

There's a lot of things now that NotebookLM can do in terms of helping you create FAQs maybe for a newsletter or for your website, and building video stuff off of the material that it has.

So there's a lot of options there, and ever-growing options that can be useful for someone to manage any number of the things that they may need in their creative business.

Jo: Yes. In fact, talking about Claude, there are a lot of Claude plugins now, skills and integrations. Shopify just released a Claude plugin and many of us now have Shopify stores.

I have a lot of products with a lot of different variations and the metadata. There's so much metadata. And again, I'm just so pleased now that I can work with Cowork and get it to actually update directly into Shopify.

In fact, coming back, you mentioned updating alt tags earlier. That's something again that AI could help you update—the back list of your alt tags on a website. I've now got my Cowork doing EPUBs so I could finally update all my EPUBs with back matter and all of this kind of thing.

So I feel like perhaps we could go beyond accessibility to talk about amplification.

All the things that we didn't do because it was too tiring and we just couldn't be bothered, or it would just be way too much work, that now it's opened up as a possibility because of these tools.

Jeff: Absolutely. I mean, you look at a backlist as large as yours and the things that you're now able to do. I didn't know that Claude had a Shopify plugin. So the abilities that we have now to maybe do things in the business that we hadn't before.

One of the things I've been working with Claude on is rewriting my website and creating a more proper website for Will.

I'm really making sure that it is not only SEO prepared but also GEO prepared, with all the metadata and all the backend code schema that it needs so that LLMs can find me, can understand what I do, can understand the books, branch out to the other areas that it needs to.

Doing that through WordPress would've been so much more difficult, even with Claude, that to be able to rewrite the site in a way that is going to let me manage it better so that I will do it on a more consistent basis.

Whatever that thing is, we're now able to do these things. That could be updating keywords in Amazon or making sure we're aligned across all of the sales platforms that we might be on and things like that, that Claude can do and do well.

Jo: Yes, I think marketing is just the killer app really for people, isn't it? I think most authors do not enjoy marketing. I find Claude better for creative work, for strategic work, for doing work through Cowork or Code, but—

ChatGPT with marketing copy is very, very good.

So I've actually been using that as we record this. I've got a Kickstarter launching next week, so I've been getting it to do ad copy and social media copy and all that kind of thing.

This is stuff when you have to produce—give me 20 taglines, give me 20 hooks, give me another 20 and another 20. I mean, we just cannot do it as humans, right?

Jeff: Yes, I have found GPT wildly helpful. I mentioned trying to get Bargain Booksy and Fussy Librarian promos.

Jo: Mm.

Jeff: And you have to give it the marketing hook, and it can't just be the blurb that's on Amazon—it's got to be something fresh, and they each have slightly different requirements.

Having GPT—here's the blurb, give me a dozen different options—and then I may take pieces of all of them and create one of my own. But it reworks that much faster than my brain was ever going to try to find the right thing I want to give to Bargain Booksy.

Jo: Yes, you are right. Or it says write this in 300 characters or less.

Jeff: Yes.

Jo: I do exactly the same. That kind of transformative work can be really good.

In fact, there was somebody I know who has been rampantly anti-AI for years and then said, “Would this help me? I have to do a synopsis for an agent, so I've got this 100,000-word book and it needs to be a 10-page synopsis. How would I do that with AI?”

So I was encouraging her to take each chapter and ask it to summarise the chapter, and of course read through it and everything. But I mean, doing a synopsis once you've actually written a book—that can be super useful. So I think what we're saying is—

There are levels of need in terms of both the author and the audience.

Then there are levels of your personal use from one end of the spectrum to the other in terms of how far you want to go in every area of the business. And in that way, it's just different for everyone.

Jeff: Yes, and I think getting to that mindset shift that we were talking about a little bit—it can be so easy to dip your toes in. That one author came to you and said, “Do you think it could do this?” And I think that's the beginning exploratory area for perhaps anyone.

People are going to hear us talk about this and it might inspire them to go try something that we've talked about.

But these things, whether it's Claude or GPT or Gemini or whichever one it is, you can come to it and say, “I'm an author, I have X, Y, Z going on in my life”—whether that's a disability, whether that's a time constraint because you have a day job and maybe you have kids and a family that need your attention—”I have these time constraints, I want to do X, Y, and Z in my business. How can you help me with that?” It's going to tell you what it can do to help you with that.

I would even say, if you have the ability to have multiples of these, you could ask the same question to GPT and Claude, and they're going to give you similar answers in some instances, but they may also have different ones because of the abilities that the different platforms have around these things as well.

That can help you make that mindset shift of, “Well, now I see that it can do that. Could it also do this?” And then ask it if it could do that. Because I know for me, Jo, I've taken so much from you and your journey with Cowork that it's like, “Oh, she did that. I wonder if I could do this.” And all of that piles on top of itself.

Then eventually I think your brain starts to think on its own, “Oh, I have to do this task. Can Claude maybe do this for me? Let's go find out.”

Jo: Yes, and if it couldn't do it for you yesterday, you never know, it might be able to do it tomorrow.

Jeff: Right? Because I haven't tested yet its new ability to actually use your computer.

Jo: Mm.

Jeff: And I'm curious what that might open up. Because one of the things that I've seen that I wish it would do is be able to take the EPUB that's on my drive and actually put it into a platform I'm trying to upload to.

Cowork on its own hasn't been able to cross that barrier, but I wonder if with computer use added to that, if it could. Like, “here's the EPUB, upload that over there,” be able to pick it from the file picker, essentially.

Jo: Yes. I think, well, a little tip for everyone:

I wouldn't give access to your entire file system to the AI.

Jeff: That's a good point too.

Jo: Yes. I have a Claude folder in my drive and it only has access there. So if you put files in that drive, it might be able to do that. But I know what you mean. I have been using it to help me publish things in German on KDP. Now I can use the browser, so you can actually do that.

In terms of uploading the actual file, I know what you mean. These things will change.

As we record this, again middle of April, we are almost about to get the next models being Mythos, which might be Claude 4.7 Opus, or also ChatGPT has a new model coming, and these models are getting very powerful. With every shift they can do more things.

So as you say, the very first thing to do is ask it, “I want to do this—what are my options?” And some of them, for example, doing an AI-narrated audiobook, ChatGPT and Claude don't do that. You want ElevenLabs or one of the other services for that, but they can tell you what your options are.

So that's one thing, but I wondered if you have any thoughts on the gaps that you are seeing. You mentioned one there around file uploads, but—

What do you hope might come and some of the things that might be exciting if they arrive?

Because you never know, they might be here already.

Jeff: There's certainly some movement in some areas. One of the things I'll share is, in March I was at the 2026 CSUN Assistive Technology Conference—CSUN is California State University, Northridge—and they've run this conference for some 40 years now.

One of the sessions I went to was from Tara Maisel—I hope I'm pronouncing her last name right. She's a senior project manager in books accessibility at Amazon, and she was doing a session specifically on readability. She had all kinds of statistics and information about what goes into making something readable.

One of the things she talked about with AI was the future of personalised reading. If you think about the Kindle app, for example, there's a lot of settings you can make there—font size, colours, brightness, text spacing. There's a lot of tools in there.

She was pointing out that potentially readers don't even know what they actually need for the optimised visual reading experience. She sees a world where AI can perhaps do an analysis of your reading behaviour and then help you find the optimal settings.

Maybe even multiple optimal settings for, say, if you were reading in a room that had daylight versus at bedtime, and the ways you might shift it. I was almost thinking of this like when you're at the optometrist and they're like, “Which lens is better—this one or that one?”

Jo: Oh, sometimes that is very hard.

Jeff: Yes. It's that AI could step you through that a little bit to help you find that optimal reading experience in that moment. And then it might even notice, potentially, if you're changing something in the way that you're moving through a page, that it might flag to say, “Hey, do we need to adjust something?”

Some other areas that I think are really exciting, for everyone and perhaps particularly for people who are disabled and needing the support of some assistive technology, is what we're seeing in the browsers.

OpenAI's Operator has been out for quite a while now, since sometime I think autumn of last year. Perplexity Comet has been around even longer. Then we've got browser extensions from Gemini and Claude that are available, that can let you just type natural language.

You know, “Please go find for me jeans in this size that are on sale on this website. Find me the best price for blue jeans on this site and this size,” and it'll just go do it.

Which can certainly speed things up for people in the disabled community to find things quickly, to spend time navigating less, and maybe ending up with the AI coming back and saying, “I found these five things. Which one would you like me to buy for you?” Or, “I found this one thing that you do need and it's waiting for you in your shopping cart.”

The ability for that on the horizon is an amazing jump from an accessibility point of view. But really it's one of those things that accessibility will then help everyone because we can all just shop that way, if we choose to. These are early days for these browsers and these extensions.

The other side of it comes back to basic web accessibility too, because I've seen these types of activities not work so well on a site that may not actually be accessible on its own.

A great example is something I ran into with Claude Cowork about a month ago. I was testing to see if it could help me navigate and get things uploaded together for a site where I wanted to upload books, knowing again that it's not going to upload the actual file, but it could fill in the metadata from my master database of metadata stuff.

There were areas on the site that it actually couldn't hit the button, because the site itself was also not functional to a screen reader. So there are gaps there. It's early days, but I really see that as an interesting future that'll really help people with disabilities—but again, help everybody too, just manage time better.

Jo: I know exactly what you mean there. I've done some collaborative work with Claude Code when it's like, “I can't click the button,” and I'm like, well, I'll click the button—you fill in everything else.

Jeff: Exactly.

Jo: It's actually quite a funny situation. But goodness, coming back to IngramSpark again—these things need APIs. We need better functions.

It's funny because I think a lot of traditional publishers have these APIs or backend upload things that you can do. I'm like, well, we need to get to that with these systems. But I think things will change.

Another thing that I think has also shifted is the use of voice. Voice for dictation—it used to be with dictation that you would have to say “comma,” “open quote,” “new line,” and all of that. And you'd also have to make sense.

Whereas now I feel like you can just dictate a whole load of things to these AIs and then say, “Tidy that up,” and they will do a lot more than the old situation. So I think voice will also help.

Also automatic translation. I don't know if you know this about X, and if you're on X anymore, but just this week they've made it multi-language. So I can read tweets by people who've posted in another language in English.

I can read something from Korean or read something that someone French has posted and it gets translated. It has made a huge difference to the content I'm seeing, which is fascinating because I don't think we've ever had this kind of automatic “everything is translated into your language” situation.

It's really got me thinking about how [automatic translation] might work for eBooks or other things if the rights are there.

I don't know. Have you seen stuff like that?

Jeff: There's so much available now with voice and the ability to not have to speak all the other stuff that went with it—comma, full stop, next line. It was a little mind-bending sometimes, trying to think about quote marks and all that stuff. And now it's so good. Different platforms do it to different degrees of ability.

Even being able to speak your prompts into the very platforms themselves without having to type all of it. Chronic pain comes to mind, any kind of mobility thing—all the typing would be a drain or maybe even impossible. So the voice ability is so powerful there and unlocks more things.

At the same time, those translation abilities—I believe AirPods now have the ability, if you've got the right stuff on your phone, that you could be talking to somebody, they may speak back to you in a language you don't speak, but your AirPods will give it to you in your language.

Jo: Hmm.

Jeff: Google has, I believe, a live captioning app that you can use. I think there's even a split screen—I don't know if that's available now or something in their future—where you could put the phone on the table and tell it who's looking at what side of the screen, and it'll put the language that I need on my side and the language the other person needs on the other.

So there continues to be such a shift in how we're being able to translate stuff that really opens up communication and can open up our books to so many more people.

I'm very interested to see—I haven't pulled the trigger on this yet—but how Amazon's auto-translation rolls out and how that's received in terms of the accessibility around our books and being able to put it in someone's hands who doesn't speak—I think it's only English to other languages right now—but who doesn't speak the language it was written in but wants to read that book.

We could never, as indies, or really even big five publishers, wouldn't have the money to create custom translations everywhere. But if the AI can help do that and spread those books around so that everybody could have the story they want to read, I think that's such a win for the reading audience.

Jo: Yes, I think it's so exciting to think what might be coming, and that's what I want to stay on the side of on the AI discussion. There's enough negativity out there and you can get that information somewhere else, but for me I want us to stay on the positive side of how this helps both the author and the reader.

And hopefully the community, to create more and read more and enjoy being human more. Right? Because I find that I do get out more and listen to stuff, or I'm out walking instead of at my desk, and I mean, that's what it's about.

I'm pretty excited about the future. How about you?

Jeff: I am. I think there are, quite honestly, some scary things that could be out there in the future. I mean, there's been a lot of talk about what Mythos is capable of. But on the other side of it, there are all these advances. I also look back at Google and AlphaFold and what DeepMind was able to do there for science.

There's more of that stuff out there, and individually for each of us, spending a little bit of time—and I do have to say, I think you need to spend time on a paid plan because the free stuff doesn't give you the idea of what these platforms are actually capable of.

So if you only drop in, even briefly, to experiment on one of the $20-a-month plans and give it your situation, ask it what it can do for you, I think you'll see where, on a personal level, AI will help you unlock some things.

It can help you move some things to the next level in your business that for whatever reason you haven't been able to do.

You don't have to use it for everything. You may decide that it's still not for you for whatever reason, and that's fine. But I think there's so much to explore here and to let your curiosity run for a little bit to see what's possible and what you might unlock with it.

Jo: Brilliant.

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

Jeff: So pretty much everything lives at JeffAdamsWrites.com.

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

Jeff: I loved it, Jo. Thanks for having me..
The post Accessibility And AI: How New Tools Are Opening Doors For Indie Authors With Jeff Adams first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you supercharge your creativity in an age when AI is reshaping everything — including how we write, edit, and market our books? What does it look like to use AI as a genuine creative partner rather than a shortcut? And could professional speaking become an income stream that complements your writing career? With James Taylor.

In the intro, Audible's new royalty model; New royalty model details [ACX; Kindlepreneur]; Public Speaking for Authors, Creatives and other Introverts; Why Indie Authors Should Ignore the Market’s Mood and Focus on their Mission [Self-Publishing with ALLi]; Lichfield Cathedral;

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

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

James Taylor is a nonfiction author, professional speaker, podcaster, and entrepreneur who helps people unlock their creative potential. He hosts the SuperCreativity Podcast and his latest book is SuperCreativity: Augmenting Human Creativity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

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

Show Notes

How to define creativity and why it's becoming the most valuable skill in the age of AI

The five stages of the creative process — and the stage most people skip

Three types of creative purpose: play, self-expression, and legacy

How James used multiple AI tools alongside human collaborators to write, edit, and market SuperCreativity

Bulk book sales, industry-specific editions, and revenue models for nonfiction author-speakers

Practical tips for authors who want to break into professional keynote speaking

You can find James at JamesTaylor.me.

Transcript of the interview with James Taylor

Jo: James Taylor is a nonfiction author, professional speaker, podcaster, and entrepreneur who helps people unlock their creative potential. He hosts the SuperCreativity Podcast and his latest book is SuperCreativity: Augmenting Human Creativity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Welcome to the show, James.

James: Well, thank you for having me as a guest. I'm looking forward to this conversation today.

Jo: It's going to be really good. First up—

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

James: Well, today I'm a professional keynote speaker, so I deliver about fifty to a hundred keynotes per year in twenty-five-plus countries. Primarily I speak on creativity, innovation, and artificial intelligence.

Go back into my deepest, darkest history—I actually used to manage rock stars. That was my old job. I used to be in the music industry for many, many years. I worked with members of The Rolling Stones, and for our listeners in the UK, I managed bands like Deacon Blue.

Then I went to the dark side. In 2010, I moved to California to work in Silicon Valley, to work in the world of tech. That got me involved in artificial intelligence.

Right about 2017, I was speaking at an event in San Francisco and someone came up to me and said, “You realise you could probably speak for a living, you could do this for a living.” So I thought, well, how does that work? And he told me.

Then I embarked on the career that I have today, which is primarily as a speaker, with writing now coming a bit more to the fore.

Jo: Wow, I remember Deacon Blue.

James: Yes.

Jo: “Dignity.” That's crazy. Very, very cool backstory there, but we'll come back to the career side of things.

Let's get into super creativity, because my listeners are certainly creatives. Most of the listeners will have a book either on the way or they might even have lots of books. So we all do want to be super creative.

How do you define creativity, and why is it important to keep focusing on this even if we do identify that way?

James: For me, creativity is about bringing new ideas to the mind. Innovation is about bringing new ideas to the world, but without creativity, there is no innovation. So creativity is really the engine of innovation. Whether that is designing new products, new services, or creating new works of art and new books.

The reason that creativity is becoming more important is because of what we're seeing right now in terms of artificial intelligence. AI is going to replace a lot of the non-creative tasks that we currently do in our jobs.

If you look at things like the World Economic Forum, there was recently a study with a thousand global business leaders, and work from companies like LinkedIn—they all highlight that creativity is going to be one of the foremost important soft skills for this new future.

So creativity, strangely, will actually become more important, not less important, as we go ahead. That's the creativity side. Probably for many of the listeners here, they'll consider themselves to be creative. That is not the norm.

As I mentioned, I speak in about twenty-five countries a year, and if I ask the audiences—primarily corporate audiences—to put their hands up if they consider themselves to be creative, only between ten to forty per cent of the audience will raise their hands.

So part of my job is to show them why they are more creative than they think they are and why we're all born with this creative potential.

Then moving into the super creativity side, it's really to show them how they can augment that creativity by collaborating more deeply with other people or machines—things like artificial intelligence.

So SuperCreativity, the book that I've written and the speeches I give on it, is really about how we can augment our individual creativity by collaborating more deeply with other people or artificial intelligence.

For me, that's been the thing I've been fascinated by for the past few years, and probably for many of our listeners who are now using AI in their writing, their researching, and their marketing of their books, they're probably getting into this space as well.

I really wanted to dive into that—both the collaboration with other people and with machines and AI.

Jo: In terms of the super creativity then, do you have any practices or ideas? Before we get into collaboration, many of us authors work alone—and of course we can come back to the AI stuff in a minute—but in terms of super creativity, are there ways that we can even supercharge what we do already?

Then, of course there are people listening who might not feel creative.

So give us a few tips on how we can potentially change our mindset or become even more creative.

James: In the book I talk about what I call the eight Ps of super creativity, which are purpose, personality, practice, people, process, place, product, and persuasion. Persuasion is really the marketing piece at the end.

Probably the one that could be most useful to many listeners today is the practice piece—the practice or the process side of things.

For many of us, what that usually consists of is just having some type of daily creative practice. Different people do it in different ways. Many of your listeners will know the works of people like Julia Cameron—the morning pages style of having some type of daily practice. Other people do it in slightly different ways.

The process bit is really interesting. I talk about this creative process that we all have, and I talk about these five stages of the creative process.

The first stage, let's say if we're writing a book, is really that preparation stage. That is usually the stage where we are trying to absorb as much information as possible about the thing that we're going to be writing about.

The topic, if it's nonfiction, or going to the places, visiting the scenes that we're going to set certain things within for the book. So that preparation stage is really about absorbing as much information as possible from the outside. It's not going to look very creative. We're just absorbing at that stage.

Now the mistake that a lot of people tend to make is they immediately try to jump from that preparation stage to looking to generate ideas. But what all the studies show us is we should spend a little bit of time in what we call the incubation stage.

This is where it's often very useful if we've done some research, that we put things to one side for a little while, maybe a few weeks, move on to another project, think about something completely different.

Your brain will continue to work in the background. Your unconscious brain will work on that content you've been absorbing.

Then what often happens as a result of that is we come to this third stage, which is that insight stage—that aha moment. That happens for various different reasons and you can seed that in slightly different ways so you're more likely to get inspiration in your day-to-day work.

Then as we know—as you are a writer of many, many books—many people think, “Well, that's it. I've done it. The idea for that book or that chapter has come to me.” That is really just the first five per cent of the process.

The next stage is where we look at all the different ideas we have and decide which ones we want to pursue, which ones are going to make the grade. This is what we call the evaluation stage.

Once we've done that, we move to that final stage, which is the elaboration stage. If it's a startup, this is when you're building your minimum viable product. As a writer, this is where you're actually doing the work, putting those words out onto the page.

It's a very iterative process, so it's not necessarily linear. You'll go back and forth.

Even as you're getting input from readers and audiences in that last stage, that is then giving you the material to move back to the preparation stage and think, “Oh, I wonder if this next book in this series, maybe I go in a slightly different direction with this character.”

So each of those different stages, you can do different things to increase your levels of creativity.

Jo: I love all of that, but can we go back to purpose? Because you mentioned that as one of the Ps and I think this is something that a lot of us need.

As we are recording this in April 2026, the world is an interesting place. There are lots of things going on that have people worried.

Well, we are not talking about politics, but I think one of the things that people struggle with is, what's the point in writing this story, for example, or what's the point in trying to get my words out there when things are difficult?

I feel like coming back to purpose is perhaps the thing that helps people even take it into the process as you were talking about. And then of course, just from a practical angle—

Is purpose about making money or reaching people? So maybe you could talk about the purpose side of things.

James: Yes. So I talk about three different purposes, and it's not that there's just one that predominates, but usually there's one that maybe predominates on different projects.

The first one is creativity as play. It's what we're basically, as humans, hardwired to do—this instinctive joy that we get just for creating for its own sake. There's nothing that really sits beyond that. We just have fun. We find pleasure in creating something.

That could be a musician creating a piece of music, a sculptor creating a sculpture, an entrepreneur creating a new business or product or service. There's just this sense of play.

One of the things I talk about in the book is this idea of being childlike, not childish. If you look at children, you see this very instinctively. If you see a three-year-old or a five-year-old, you give them some crayons and they will just naturally create. That's part of who they are and it's pretty abstract.

Then what happens is they go to school and they're taught useful conventions—”this is how you should do it.” You even see their work start to change. You start to see them move from abstract paintings to more formal structures.

Then you get your peer group, then you go to college or university and the world of work, and you're taught all these useful conventions.

That's fine, but as adults, it is our responsibility to become what we call post-conventional, where we see these conventions as a useful signpost but we're willing to challenge them. We're willing to have a playfulness in what we do. So the first one is just this hardwired thing—creativity as play.

The second one, and this is maybe for a lot of your listeners the reason that they are writers, is self-expression. It's a way of placing something out into the world.

I was actually just in France recently, and I was talking to a young visual artist, a painter from Hungary, and she had to go up and give a speech. She really hated doing it. She was having to talk about her work and she was really uncomfortable.

I could see the discomfort and my heart went out for her, because that is not the way she primarily expresses herself. She expresses herself through her art form, which is painting.

For many of us, we might struggle to get on a stage, but we can express ourselves in the written word. We have something we want to say, a position we want to have, and we want to express that and get that out into the world.

The final one is just this idea of legacy. That is not going to be for everyone. I can tell you, for me personally, legacy is not the reason that I write and do a lot of the stuff that I do.

Maybe that changes—maybe as we get a bit older, we want to leave a body of work. So those are the three main purposes that we tend to see.

Then you mentioned the financial side of what we do as well. This starts to come into that self-expression, because we need to be able to get people to buy our books or download our books and read our books in order to give us the ability to write new works and create new things.

The financial side is an important component of it, but it is not the only one. I think there's a great question any writer should ask themselves. One of the first questions that I asked myself as a relatively new nonfiction writer is: why am I writing this book? What is the purpose of this book?

For me, primarily it is a form of self-expression, and then you have to go, “Well, that's fine, but I also need it to have some type of financial basis for it.” It doesn't need to be the main driver of my income, but I need to have some type of revenue model.

I'm happy to talk about revenue models, because probably the type of revenue model that I have as a writer is going to be different from other listeners. I tend to focus more on bulk selling of books rather than individual selling of books.

Jo: Yes, I definitely want to come back to revenue models and business, but a few other things first.

I want to circle back to collaboration, because I've certainly co-written with some humans, and I know a lot of listeners either have co-written or collaborated with other humans—and some of it works and some of it doesn't. You have some great information on human-plus-human creativity and collaboration.

So maybe you could give us some tips on how we can be more effective collaborators with other humans.

James: So there's a whole section about this idea of creative pairs. Often if you look at great creative work or innovative companies, very often when you strip it all back, you'll find at the core lots and lots of creative pairings.

That is usually two different but complementary personalities who are willing to develop and challenge and improve each other's ideas.

We think of Jobs and Wozniak in the world of business, or Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. For authors, often that relationship is the work with their editor.

There was a documentary I saw—I think it was a New Yorker documentary that came out a while ago—talking with a writer of history books about his relationship with his editor. It was a really beautiful relationship. These were two very different personalities, but what worked was the fact that they were different.

A core component of having these creative pairings is a sense of trust—or what some people today would call psychological safety—that you are willing to challenge someone's ideas, but in a space of trust. The Germans have a great phrase for it. In English it translates as “someone to steal horses with,” which I love.

Hopefully our listeners have that person where you can go to them and say, “I had this idea for a book or a chapter or a character,” and that person is a “yes, and.” Like, “Yes, and have you thought about doing it this way?” or “What would happen if you did this?” They stress test your ideas. They make your ideas better.

For many of us, maybe it's our husbands or wives, our partners. Some of us are lucky enough to have editors.

When I started rewriting this latest book, I actually had someone like that—a human, not an AI—that I worked with, especially on taking all these random thoughts and ideas I've been expressing in keynotes and putting them into more of a book form.

The format and the structures that we use for telling stories in a speech are quite different from the structure that we would use for a nonfiction book. I didn't have as much experience there, so I wanted someone who could say, “Have you thought about structuring it this way?” or “This is a great story arc you might want to think about.”

So I don't know, for you, who is your creative pairing? Who is your “someone to steal horses with”?

Jo: Well, it's funny. I really think since the arrival of Claude Opus 4.6, it is absolutely Claude.

James: Yes, yes.

Jo: All the way. I mean, so we could come onto that next in terms of how AI has changed, because I do still work with a professional editor for both fiction and nonfiction, but it is very much in the “make my finished work better” stage. It is not in the exploratory phase.

I find particularly the latest reasoning models to just be fantastic at this. And my Claude is not sycophantic. The Opus 4.6—I'm sure you've been using it too—it just doesn't behave in the way that a lot of people think these AIs did. They did behave like that, and now it's changed. So let's talk about that.

What are your thoughts on collaborating more effectively with AI tools, especially as they become more and more powerful?

As we record this, Claude Mythos has not come out, but it's certainly rumoured to arrive. I'm pretty excited.

James: So because I've been doing this AI thing for a little while, it's given me the ability to experiment with things—the early versions of what many people are using today.

I'll give you an example. Even before I started writing the book, I decided to write a book proposal.

Even though I could pretty much sense I wanted to independently publish this book through my own publishing company, I thought it's a good practice to put it down into a proposal form, even though I don't go to a traditional publisher or a hybrid publisher.

One of the things I did within that was get a sense of who my ideal readers are. I used a very early version—this was a few years ago—of an IBM AI tool, creating what we call a psychometric map of my ideal reader.

This basically tells me, over about seventy-two different factors, how this person thinks, how they feel, what their value system is, very broadly for my ideal reader. I pulled in different sources. I knew the kind of magazines and books they were reading and what their general worldview was.

So I created this—going one step beyond just creating your ideal reader to really understanding their psychometrics.

I do this in my keynotes too. Before I ever give a keynote or an important pitch or a presentation, I use AI to analyse the psychometrics of the audience I'm going to be speaking to.

This might tell me, for example, this audience values humour a little bit more, or this audience values a bit more practicality so they want actionable next steps, or this audience is going to be a little bit authority-challenging so they're going to push back.

So even in those very early stages, just starting to think about the book—who was I writing this book for, what was the purpose of the book—I was using AI to understand the psychometrics of my absolutely perfect, ideal reader.

I gave her a name. It was a female reader. There was someone similar to her that I already knew.

Probably for some of your listeners, they do this instinctively anyway. They maybe have a person or a few different people they think of in their head.

Then from that stage, because I've been delivering lots and lots of keynotes—and this may be an important distinction in the way that I have decided to write books as opposed to how other people write books—my family were all jazz musicians.

The difference between a rock musician or a pop musician and a jazz musician is this: a rock or pop musician will go into the studio, create this opus, this work, and then tour that for the next two years.

A jazz musician, on the other hand, goes out and performs the songs and the things from the album that they're eventually going to create hundreds of times, thousands of times, to find out what works with audiences, and then they go into the studio and record the stuff that works best.

So I created a book more like a jazz musician. I'd delivered keynote versions of the book hundreds of times before I ever decided to actually write the book. So it had been stress-tested with real people to a certain extent.

Then, getting into it, I thought—well, what works as a keynote is not necessarily going to work as a structure for a book.

So what I did was start using ChatGPT models at that point to think about the structural edit of the book. What was the structure going to be?

What was great is you can basically feed it every single keynote you've given over the years, all the notes, everything you've done, and it could start to give me something to riff with and really get into thinking about how I was going to create this. I was using it a little like that creative pairing we spoke about earlier.

Then once I'd done that—so I've now got an idea of a structural edit essentially—I then go back and speak to some humans about it. “What do you think about this?” “What do you think about that?” And try some things out over dinner conversations. “I'm thinking about doing this—what do you think?”

Then once I did that, I just did the thing that I really didn't want to do, but I guess you absolutely have to do: sit in a seat for multiple weeks and just get that crappy first draft done. That was just me writing, from my voice, in my way of doing things.

Every so often I would use an AI to research a particular thing, but I didn't want to slow down the pace too much. I was focused on getting that word count done.

Once I had the first draft, I then brought the AI back in. In this case, I was still using OpenAI at this stage, to act more like an editor. To tell me what was weak about the book. At this point I was starting to give it the overall framing. What was weak, what chapters needed to be improved.

I then went back, started reworking each of the chapters, and worked chapter by chapter using that AI as a sparring partner. But once again, the AI is not really writing my words for me.

It's maybe saying, “This part could be said better. You might want to think about doing it this way,” or “You are missing a really powerful case study or example here,” or at the very end of each chapter, I have actionable next steps, and “You're missing some things here.”

So I've gone through that entire process of writing, and now I'm essentially at the second draft. At this point, what I'm doing is using another AI tool—Claude, in this case—to have a different perspective on it. I gave it the work.

I mentioned a couple of editors that I really respect and different writers I respect and said, “I'm going to create a virtual beta readers group. Give me feedback on this now.”

For someone that's listening to this, and we're recording this in April 2026, here's some good news for you. There are now a bunch of tools out there that use AI swarms, as we call them.

You can basically feed it your book and it will create synthetic readers—thousands and thousands of synthetic readers that read your kind of style of book—and it will then give you feedback from these synthetic readers.

Essentially, I was just doing an early version of that. So I got the feedback from the synthetic readers, the AI readers, and then reworked a little bit. Some of the stuff I just decided not to do because it didn't align with what I was trying to say in the book.

Then the next stage was I had a beta reader group of about thirty human beta readers—my ideal readers. I sent the book to them, they gave me feedback. I then used AI to give me an overview report of all their feedback, and then I was able to go back into reworking the book.

That's still really just draft three of the book, not the final book at this stage. But just to give everyone a sense of opening up the process: you could see how the human and machine were working together.

Jo: Yes, I love that. I also often say to people who are speakers first that you can, if you have recordings of your talks or if you use your slide decks to record them as MP3s and then just use that transcript as the basis of a draft.

Obviously it's not the book or a chapter, but it can actually preserve your voice—your speaking voice—which I think can be really effective for speakers.

I like your multi-step process there. And then of course, if you have audience avatars in AI, that can help you design your book marketing.

So take this into book marketing and how you're doing that.

James: So I still decided to go old school with a human editor—a book editor that someone had recommended to me. I used that human book editor just to go through the book. At that point we're talking about style, some stylistic things that we wanted to do, and they can pick up other things as well.

So I've got that book, and then I'm obviously starting to use AI to understand what tags, what kind of copy do I want to have in terms of putting it onto Amazon, putting it onto IngramSpark, and all these other platforms I want to put it out into.

I'm using Claude here in particular—and with Claude, you have something called Cowork. It wasn't quite fully happening at that point, but there were early versions of it and Claude Code—to almost start working with and creating a virtual marketing team.

I give it the book and then they could start thinking about: what is the marketing strategy for this book? What does the campaign look like? What are the things that we need to do?

That was then starting to break it down. We're now three months out or so before the book is due to get released, and I'm starting to deploy that particular campaign.

So for example, I'm on a podcast right now, and we try different versions. We have a human going out and reaching out to potential shows for me to be a guest on, but I also have an agent.

There's also one going out and finding and researching podcasts and reaching out to those podcast hosts to have me as a potential guest. So they're doing some of the tactical work there at the same time.

One mistake I made—and I don't know if you've experienced this as well—if I was to go back, one thing I would do differently is this: I decided to record the audiobook version after the physical book was already committed and ready to go out.

Jo: Mm-hmm.

James: And I noticed so many small errors or things I would change after having spent two days in a studio recording the voice for the entire book—changes I would have made.

This is something other people did ask me: why are you not using ElevenLabs or an AI clone of your voice to read the script? There are some things I feel quite personal about, and my voice is one of those things. As a professional keynote speaker, I decided I wanted to keep that and have it in there.

So it's going to be different for everyone which things they decide to offload to AI, which things they decide to give to a human member of their team, and what they decide to keep to themselves.

Jo: Yes, I mean, I human-record my nonfiction, but I have an AI voice clone with ElevenLabs for my fiction now. But obviously, for people listening, you can't put an ElevenLabs voice-cloned audiobook on Audible, and a lot of your sales will be on Audible, especially for a book like this. So I think that's also important.

I agree with you on doing the audio edit. There's always things you want to change.

But as you mentioned, you're self-publishing this, so you can just go in and change your files.

James: Yes, and that was the other reason, and this was part of the marketing—now we're moving into the marketing and the business model behind the book. For me, the book doesn't have to be a financial driver in its own sense.

The way that I sell books, and usually people like myself—professional speakers—is we bulk sell books to our clients. Let's say I'm speaking at four different events this month. Each has about a thousand people at them. Those organisers will buy, say, a thousand copies of the book.

So at the end of that month, you might have sold four thousand copies—not individual copies. Anything that sells on Amazon or in other places is almost like a positioning piece.

Obviously you want people to buy the book and learn things from the book, but in terms of the distribution model, it's slightly different because I'm primarily selling through bulk sales.

Now, here's a little twist you can do on this, and this is a decision I made even before we released this version of the book. I speak to lots of different industries.

There was a speaker and author—I've forgotten his name now, I think he was from Florida—and what he decided to do was to write a slightly different version of his main book every year, but for a different industry.

So what this allows him to do is, let's say in my case, I'm doing a version of the SuperCreativity book just for legal professionals because I speak to a lot of law firms and legal groups. I've already started working on a version of the book which is a little bit more attuned to that audience.

As a speaker, it allows me to go to all these law firms and legal associations and bar associations and say, “Hey, I've just written the book on creativity and artificial intelligence for the legal industry.”

That makes you a very bookable proposition for a client. And then obviously you can sell books from that as well. And that's before we get into the foreign language versions.

That's just a model that happens to work pretty well for my part of the industry, but obviously it's going to be very different for other types of authors.

Jo: No, I think that's great.

For nonfiction authors, as you say, there are different revenue models.

Your income, I guess, would be what, eighty, ninety per cent speaking revenue? Or do you have other things as well?

James: Yes, primarily it's the keynote speaking, and anything that comes from the back of that. Sometimes it's boardroom advisory work that I do as well. But primarily it's the speaking side. So really the book is just the simplest form to get my ideas out and the most affordable form.

Jo: Mm-hmm.

James: Because the other thing is, you want as many people getting your ideas as possible, and there is no better, more affordable way of getting someone's ideas out there than in the form of a book.

I think it's just the most unbelievable transmitter of knowledge—a book. That's why I love to write the book as well. A lot of my friends say, “Listen, books are old hat. You don't need to do a book any more. You can do these other things, other forms, online courses.”

I've done lots of online courses in the past and membership sites and all those things, but there's just something that is great about a book—to be able to summarise your ideas at a particular point in time.

It's also a great transmitter of value to other people. And it is affordable. Any book, someone can download a book on Audible or wherever they want—that's just an affordable way of absorbing that content.

Jo: Yes. Well, of course we are all fans of books here. I do speak—I don't tend to do keynote speaking. I do more content speaking at conferences.

For people listening, keynote speaking is where you tend to get the higher revenue. So if people listening have books already—let's say they have nonfiction books or even fiction books that could be turned somehow into different topics—if people want to get booked for speaking gigs, preferably ones that pay—

How would you recommend authors think about moving into speaking if that's something they want to do?

James: So obviously it's much easier for nonfiction authors to do that. I mean, I'll give you an example. I was speaking at an event last week in New York for L'Oréal, the hair care and cosmetics company.

They had six different speakers. One of them was a speaker on macroeconomics and geopolitics. Another was an expert on communications. Another was an expert on AI. Another was an expert on storytelling.

So you have to think: does my topic have value for that type of audience—that corporate audience?

An easy way of finding that is if you just go onto any of the speaker bureau websites, type in “speaker bureaus,” look for the speaker bureaus, and then type in your topic area—emotional intelligence or whatever the topic area is—and look at the other speakers.

See if there is obviously a number of speakers talking on this area. Importantly, look at how busy they are and look at their fee levels as well.

I did an online summit a few years ago called the International Speakers Summit, where I interviewed a hundred and fifty of the world's best professional keynote speakers.

I interviewed Sally Hogshead, who's an author and a speaker, and she said to me, “James, you're going out speaking about creativity, but if you just twisted it a little bit and spoke more in terms of innovation rather than creativity, you would earn an extra five thousand dollars per keynote.”

So creativity and innovation—an extra five thousand dollars. That's just a simple thing that, as you get to understand the industry, you learn.

Then once you do that, it's like any business—you have to treat it like a business, obviously. What makes someone a great storyteller on stages is not the same as what makes a great storyteller on the written word. So depending on where you're at, you might need certain training and skills development.

If you are listening to this from America, there are things like the National Speakers Association, the NSA. If you're living in the UK, the Professional Speakers Association. These are great ways just to develop your skill set and learn from other professional speakers.

Here's the good news, I didn't know anything about professional speaking until 2017–18, and it was only from having a conversation with someone who said, “Listen, you have some original thoughts. You can get paid to speak about this on stage.”

Then I spent the next year really researching and understanding and looking at how to do it and creating a minimum viable product—a speech—that was a very short period of time, a year.

Most of the listeners here have gone through that process of writing a book, which takes many, many months. So you have the stamina to do this type of work. You just need to find out where you fit.

I thought I was going to be a speaker in marketing. I thought that was going to be my thing. And it turns out that's not what the market wanted from me. They wanted me to talk about creativity and artificial intelligence.

So you have to listen to the market, like you have to listen to your readers.

Jo: Yes, I think that's really interesting. I was also a member of the PSA here, and I learned in Australia with the NSAA as it was.

James: Yes.

Jo: And that thing about who you speak to—I mainly speak to author conferences, who, I just want to be frank, don't pay very well, if at all. So exactly what you said there—

If you want to be a highly paid speaker, you have to pick the audience who's going to pay, as well as a topic that works with them.

It is a very different thing to writing a book, I think.

James: It is a different model. This is what was interesting when I interviewed those hundred and fifty professional speakers—the thing that came back loud and clear is there is a model to suit everyone.

Jo: Mm.

James: So the model that works for me—getting paid high fees to go and travel around the world, speaking on stages to primarily corporate audiences—that is not the only model.

There is another model, which is called the “sell from the stage” model, where you maybe don't get paid anything to go and speak on the stage, or very little, but what you're doing is you're selling your consulting, your online course, your books, your other products from the back of the stage. That's another model as well.

I have friends who have young families and they are writers and they don't want to schlep on planes like I do. I know one speaker in particular who never leaves his own city.

He is a very successful professional speaker. He happens to live in Orlando, Florida, which is one of the busiest cities for conferences. So literally, he's home with his kids every night. He gets to do all this cool stuff he wants. He never has to step on a plane if he doesn't want to. That just shows you the range.

I remember I once interviewed a person whose title was a Buddhist monk, French speaker, and author. He figured out he could live very affordably by living in Thailand. So he lives in Thailand for part of the year and he's very into meditation, mindfulness, yoga, and writing.

He figured out he only had to give two keynotes per year to pay for his entire lifestyle. That was it. So that gives him a lot of freedom.

He does those two corporate keynotes a year and for the rest of the year he's doing his yoga, his meditation, his writing, and surfboarding, whatever he's into as well. So you can see there's a whole range of different ways you can design that life.

Jo: Yes, we talk a lot about definition of success and it's great to hear those different examples. So before we finish up, I just want to come back to your journey into the writing side, into books and self-publishing.

We all understand, me and the listeners, how hard it is to write a book and also to market a book, but we've got the bug. So we wonder: how much have you got the bug?

Do you plan on doing more writing, more books, or do you still want to lean more heavily into speaking?

James: Primarily the income for me will still come from speaking.

I remember listening to Elizabeth Gilbert once when she talked about her writing. She said she always wanted to have other things, so she never had to push onto her writing that it had to be the income stream for her. If it was successful, great, that's fantastic. So I have a little bit of a similar view to that.

In terms of my own writing, I've got about five different nonfiction book ideas I'm now looking at. Some of them relate to speeches that I already do. Some don't.

I'm looking at different versions of the SuperCreativity book, so there'll be other versions coming out—different industries, different languages. That gives you a few years of work.

The other side that I want to develop is the fiction writing side. I'm already starting to work on a fiction book at the moment—a little bit like this idea of one for them, one for me.

Jo: Mm-hmm.

James: So one for them is for the corporate audience, that world that I live in, and the other one is for me, for my own creativity.

My hope—and I don't know, maybe we need to speak in a year's time when I've written and published it—is that by doing the fiction side, it will make me a better storyteller on stages as well for my corporate audience.

It will help me understand story arcs, slightly different ways of expressing stories, building emotion, building the anti-hero characters within a book, for example. So I'm hoping that they both feed off each other. But we will see.

Jo: Yes, we will. All the best with that.

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

James: The easiest place to go is JamesTaylor.me, and you can find the book, which is called SuperCreativity, there. Or just go to wherever you buy your books—your local independent bookstore—and get a copy of SuperCreativity. The audiobook may already be out by the time you're listening to this as well.

If you want to learn a little bit more, we also have a podcast called the SuperCreativity Podcast, where I interview lots of wonderful guests talking about this area of super creativity.

Jo: Well, thanks so much for your time, James. That was brilliant.

James: Thank you, Joanna. Thanks for having me as a guest on the show.
The post SuperCreativity And KeyNote Speaking With A Non-Fiction Book With James Taylor first appeared on The Creative Penn.