Joanna Penn is one of my most valuable mentors and I haven’t even met her.
Her Creative Penn Podcast has been one of the most profound educational influences in my life over the last five years. It’s influence perhaps even more significant than the education I gained from Joanna and my shared alma mater, Oxford University.
I have learnt so much from Joanna, her books, and The Creative Penn Podcast.
I’m going to run through a choice, extremely curated selection of lessons learnt from The Creative Penn, but first the question I ask myself on a weekly basis:
Are you working as hard as Joanna Penn?
Joanna’s been in the game a long time, since before indie publishing was cool and self-publishing still had the stigma of vanity presses.
But it’s not the length of time that has made Joanna a success.
It’s her brutal work ethic.
Joanna Penn has produced over 400 episodes of her fortnightly podcast, The Creative Penn.
When she’s not preparing for the upcoming author interviews, she’s researching the introduction segment for the podcasts which is hands-down the best resource for publishing news I’ve found anywhere.
She has 13 non-fiction books out under the Joanna Penn name, 18 thriller novels out under her J.F. Penn name, and collaborated on 4 more sweet romance novels.
Joanna has long and involved video courses available on Teachable. She has a YouTube channel packed with great advice videos for authors. She does regular webinars with the likes of Mark Dawson and Nick Stephenson.
Joanna writes in-depth helpful articles on her website, The Creative Penn, and has a thriving newsletter.
And she still finds time to network regularly at events like ThrillerFest with the likes of Lee Child, while also sneaking in research trips to exotic destinations across the world.
This is just the stuff we see on the surface.
I know there’s a whole lot more going on behind the scenes.
Like her screenwriting adventures which are kicking off.
Joanna is an absolute inspiration.
When you find yourself wishing you had more success, ask yourself:
Do you work as hard as Joanna Penn?
I’m guessing you don’t.
I certainly don’t (and I work damn hard).
The biggest takeaway I consistently get from Joanna is to up my game.
Here are a few more lessons I’ve learnt from The Creative Penn Podcast.
These were random ideas that were floating around my mind this morning and certainly not an adequate snapshot of what you can learn from The Creative Penn.
So I implore you to subscribe to The Creative Penn podcast here.
If you work in publishing in any capacity, or consider yourself a creative entrepreneur, it’s a must-listen to.
Now onto a few of these lessons.
1 – Shipping your product instead of perfecting your product makes you unskippable.
In a roundtable discussion with great directors like Quentin Tarantino and Danny Boyle, Ridley Scott mused that one of the reasons people don’t go to the cinema anymore is because the film market has become oversaturated.
If 1,000 films are produced each year in America, at least 500 of them do not need to be made.
It’s not just the film world that’s oversaturated.
It’s mainstream artistic content of almost every colour.
Constant blinking notifications.
Millions of Instagram posts to the point where beautiful photography from craftspeople who have painstakingly mastered their craft no longer means anything.
The ease of self-publishing means Amazon is one great big bargain bin.
In this world of instant gratification, many of us don’t have the luxury to write just one book or to take years between books.
Sure, you can come up with some examples of artists who do just that. But George R. R. Martin is the exception that confirms the rule (plus the dude was an old man before he finally left obscurity, and he actually was quite prolific).
This is not a call to putting out inferior products.
But you certainly need to sacrifice your perfectionist impulses and learn to ship what you create.
The world has been taken over by the Netflix binge model.
The top earning authors on the indie scene have a book launch every 2 months.
This is difficult, but the best are finding ways to do this.
So if you only put out a book a year, try to find ways to put out two.
If you’ve already got two out per year, what third piece of work can you put out so you stay relevant?
You can learn more about this plus many more great insights by listening to the Creative Penn episode with Jim Kukral:
2 – You have a magic bakery of intellectual property rights
Most writers don’t understand copyright and are terrible when it comes to contracts.
A ton of writers will be so thankful to have a contract thrown down to them like crumbs from the king’s table when some middling publisher deigns to put their book in stores that they’ll overlook a ton of crappy clauses written into said contract.
Don’t give away lifetime exclusive rights or any such nonsense.
You have to be shrewd when it comes to contracts and treat each of your works like a pie.
You don’t just give away the whole damn pie to one greedy guts, do you?
A piece of pie can be sliced many times.
You can slice it so thin that you have a lot of pieces of pie to go around.
As a publisher, you’re a bakery. And your works, short stories, novels, screenplays, are you magical pies.
Movie rights are different from TV rights, which are different from gaming rights.
Then you have translation rights.
One piece of your pie might be licensing your novel to an Italian publisher, another piece might be licensing it to a German publisher.
Then you have TV rights in English, TV right in French, gaming rights in Japanese, and so on.
Dean Wesley Smith, who is an endless source of publishing wisdom, goes deep into this subject and other great subjects (like why you don’t need an agent) in one of my favourite episodes of the Creative Penn.
You can, and should, listen to that episode:
3 – Keep your eye on the emerging markets (India, Middle East, etc.)
If all you did was listen to the Creative Penn podcast once a week, you would quickly become a discerning businessperson.
Most creatives get taken advantage of and end up failing and flailing not because they aren’t any good but because they don’t know the business side of things, everything from contracts to marketing.
But you’ll pick all of that up by listening to Joanna.
Joanna’s constantly musing on how best to approach different markets (in one of the latest episodes there was a very interesting musing on different book covers having different degrees of effectiveness for different markets).
One discussion that remained with me was the one on emerging markets.
Unfortunately I cannot remember who Joanna was talking to about this, but there’s a great article over at the Creative Penn about this topic:
Basically there’s a lot of opportunity at the margins.
Skate to where the puck is going.
While you certainly should focus your efforts on the American and UK markets, if you want to skate to where the puck is going you need to watch what’s happening over in India, the Middle East, and China.
What I really love about the Creative Penn Podcast is that it gets you thinking about long-term plays. Knowing what you now know about Bitcoin, if someone had told you to get in on it six years ago, wouldn’t you have gone big? Joanna’s got that sort of expert insight when it comes to all things publishing.
4 – AI is a great tool, but it will never beat the human touch
A topic you’ll hear again and again when you listen to the Creative Penn is that of artificial intelligence.
Joanna’s extremely interested in AI and is a massive proponent for it.
Unlike other authors who seem threatened by it’s approach, Joanna sees it as an exciting new tool.
In the near future, AI will do the bulk of the creative work typically always reserved for us mere mortals, but that doesn’t mean human creativity will be redundant.
We’ll see a proliferation of AI tools that make extremely accurate translations of works from one language into another.
These will be freely or cheaply available.
But there will still be a demand for boutique or artisan style craftsmanship and human translators will command a premium.
The same is true with all areas of the publishing and creative world.
Artificially intelligent proofreaders exist, but the human touch is always more Midas than machine.
AI can produce audiobooks, but again humans will always be here to give read works that special flavour.
You can read more about Joanna Penn’s thoughts on AI here:
5 – You have colleagues not competition.
Sounds like basic advice, but I’m sure this idea from the Creative Penn Podcast episode with Frances Caballo will be a revelation for a lot of people.
The writer community is certainly thriving, active, and engaging, but a lot of writers can be extremely guarded, even jealous, and don’t come from a place of abundance, believing the success of others detracts from their own success.
But the moment you adopt the mindset of having colleagues not competition, you’ll have a fully formed beneficial social media strategy you can put into place immediately.
As Joanna always says, writers buy books.
For every one book a writer puts out, they probably read at least another forty.
Think about Lee Child who puts out a book a year but reads three hundred books a year.
Or Stephen King who puts out a book a year but reads around seventy books a year.
Even James Patterson, who is extremely prolific and produces around forty books a year, was reading twelve books a week during his most prolific reading years.
The point here is other writers are not your competition.
So help promote them.
Don’t go to social media and just spam Twitter with links to your book.
Make friends.
If you read someone else’s book and you liked it, recommend it.
Be abundant and it will come back to you.
We’re all in this together and there’s more than enough to go around.
You can hear more about social media strategy, specifically to do with Instagram and Pinterest, for writers in this episode of the Creative Penn with Frances Caballo:
6 – Content marketing is king
Joanna started the Creative Penn podcast as a form of content marketing, but I see so many interrelated benefits outside of just marketing or earning more money.
Joanna has been able to build a strong worldwide network of fascinating authors, creatives, and publishers by elevating them through her podcast.
She focuses on them and their goals by interviewing them and promoting them and in return has ended up becoming the person to know in publishing.
The Creative Penn podcast is now over four hundred episodes in and although Joanna faced many struggles on the way it has become a multi-limbed beast.
She gets transcripts for each show so she can have an in-depth article for her website.
This is a good SEO technique because she then starts to rank for all the topics discussed in the show.
Joanna will also film the interview too so she has a video to put on her YouTube channel.
We often hear about the importance of having multiple streams of income, but likewise you need to have multiple entry points to your brand.
And if you can treat every piece of content work you produce like a magic pie (to borrow Dean Wesley Smith’s term), you can get a lot of mileage out of everything you do.
Think of leveraged moves.
Turn that blog post into a podcast that is also a video.
As the podcast went on, Joanna found ways to profit via Patreon and sponsorships, which helped keep the marketing and networking machine going.
If you’re just getting started with your own podcast, you can access Joanna Penn’s battle plan here and learn from her years putting in the work and finding out the best practices:
7 – Audio is going to be even more huge, so start building your “voice brand”
Audio is already taking over.
It wasn’t so long ago that podcasts were so niche that most people didn’t even know what they were.
But now it seems like everyone from your neighbour to your neighbour’s second-cousin’s dog has their own podcast.
Audio is on the way up.
It’s going to be huge, so now’s the time to start building your “voice brand”.
You do this by narrating your own audiobooks, doing your own podcasts, and literally getting your voice out there.
This might even mean lending your voice to voice AI so that you can narrate another author’s audiobook without reading a single line.
It’s these sorts of eccentric topics the Creative Penn Podcast gets you thinking about.
One of the greatest values Joanna brings to the indie publishing discussion is an acute understanding of author trends and how to structure your goals around them.
Again, it’s all about skating to where the puck is going.
You can read more of Joanna’s predictions and trend analyses here:
8 – You can only compete on brand
You can’t compete on speed.
Authors are pushing out a book a day.
Look at Bella Forrest’s productivity and ask if that’s a game you’re going to win.
You also can’t compete on price.
People get their books free from KU and free means nothing anymore.
If you take just one thing away from all the Creative Penn Podcast, it should be thinking about how to tap into what makes your art creatively yours.
The question to ask yourself is:
How can you compete on brand?
You can read more about this plus other topics like doubling down on what you love and publishing wide here:
Listen to The Creative Penn Podcast today
When I write these “lessons learned” posts my goal isn’t to collect everything I’ve learnt and create an exhaustive list.
That would be impossible for those things I get the most value form.
My primary goal is to pique your curiosity and then have you leave to go check out what I’m recommending.
So that’s what I’d like you to do now.
Go dig into the Creative Penn backlist, choose something interesting and relevant, and enjoy!
Check out The Creative Penn here.