Joanna Penn: Episode 57

Transcript

[0:00:37] Charlie Hoehn: You’re listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about books with the authors who wrote them. I’m Charlie Hoehn. Today’s episode is with Joanna Penn, the founder of The Creative Penn and the author of more than two dozen books. Don’t you wish you could just skip all of the trial and error that comes with being an author and an entrepreneur? So you could focus on the stuff that works? That’s what this episode is about. Joanna knows from experience that writing books can change your life but that experience comes from a lot of failed attempts, lost investments and time spent. In order to help other writers, she’s turned her wins and losses into invaluable resources on her site, The Creative Pen. In this episode, Joanna will share how you can avoid some unnecessary pitfalls so you can make a living through self-publishing and marketing your books. Now, here is our conversation with Joanna Penn.

[0:01:53] Joanna Penn: I was one of those people, you know, angsty teenager, writing journals, writing poetry but I never really considered that you might be able to make a career as a writer. It was definitely something I thought writers were up on this pedestal and you know, god like creatures where words just stringed magically out of their hands. I did a degree in theology and ended up working for a consultancy firm. You know, I’m sure many of your listeners know companies like Accenture, IBM, Cap Gemini, these kind of big corporate consultancies and I ended up for 13 years implementing accounts payable systems into large corporates, you know, mining companies and stuff like that. This is possibly one of the most boring and least creative things you can possibly do with your life. It’s kind of crazy because I’m sure, you know, you’ll understand too, you end up falling into a career if you don’t actively choose it. That’s kind of what happened and of course, once you do a career for five years and then 10 years and then 13 years. You end up being paid quite well. I ended up with this career that your parents think is great because you’ve got a house, you’ve got the right job and you’re a consultant and you go to the right parties and yet I was miserable and existentially miserable. You know, my life was good, but I had these golden handcuffs where you’re paid well but you just feel like your life is empty. I just didn’t know what to do with myself. This was sort of back in 2006 and obviously Tim Ferris with The Four Hour Workweek was happening and the early years of Gary Vanerchuk. I was reading Tony Robins and you know, I really just thought, “Okay, this self-help stuff, this is what I need to get in to.” I started by sort of thinking about all the things that I could do. Now, I have had some other failures in my life in terms of businesses. I tried to run a scuba diving company and tried to do some things in property investment but none of that made me happy either. I started writing –

[0:03:47] Charlie Hoehn: Wait a second. This is awesome, I love it. You started a scuba diving company and you said real estate?

[0:03:56] Joanna Penn: Yes. Okay, little things along the way. Like again, many people, I quit my job multiple times thinking, “If I just quit my job and start something, I’ll be able to make a living in a different way.” I loved scuba diving. I was living in new Zealand at that time and I thought, “I could just have a scuba diving company” and here’s a little tip people. Don’t run a company where you have to have a boat, an insurance and employees and the price of fuel, it just completely squeezes up your profitability.

[0:04:25] Charlie Hoehn: Where were you in New Zealand by the way?

[0:04:28] Joanna Penn: The scuba diving company was up in the Poor Knights which is up in the top of the north island, beautiful diving if people are interested in scuba diving. It was – I learned so much in that experience, it cost me a lot. But you know, what I learned form that was very important, I do not want a business where I have to be physically in one place, where I have massive overheads that I can’t control. The price of fuel, we can’t control the price of fuel, right? It’s just something that you can’t. Or the weather, if the weather craps out and you can’t run your boat, you have to refund people but you’ve still paid your staff, there’s so many overheads, this is another thing about being a writer, just to point out to everyone is. The overheads are tiny, you know, you can make huge profits from very little outputs. In terms of financial output. That was then and then I tried property investment and what I learned from that was, that I don’t actually care about property. You know, to make money in property in terms of doo-up’s and stuff like that. I’m sure everyone’s read various books on doing up properties and flipping them and all that.

[0:05:33] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah.

[0:05:34] Joanna Penn: I was just like, “I really do not care about the price of paint or getting the right deal on a kitchen” and again –

[0:05:40] Charlie Hoehn: Why did you go into it?

[0:05:42] Joanna Penn: Well, I was looking for that entrepreneurial thing, you know? I kind of knew I wanted – I knew I wanted a scalable business. This is a really important thing again about being a writer but business, like property investment, can be scalable. If you do get a property for a decent price, do it up, rent it out or sell it, it can be kind of scalable, you know? You can make much more money or ongoing money, you know, more than you could make in a day job or you could lose a lot.

[0:06:10] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, and the percentage of those who make a lot are very successful is vanishingly smaller and smaller, right?

[0:06:19] Joanna Penn: That is true but you could say the same for book sales, you and I both know the vast majority of artists or business people. I mean, we both know the stats you know? In your first five years, what is lit, like 40% that businesses fail so you know, The Creative Pen, my company now, this is like my fifth business. I think the lessons I’ve learned along the way have really helped. That property investment taught me that if I don’t care, if I’m not interested in the nitty gritty of everything I’m doing. I’ve been doing publishing and writing and everything, book marketing for years and I love it, I can’t get enough of it. If you don’t feel like that about your business then it’s a day job, and why would you want to do that as kind of a “Lifestyle design,” to quote Tim Ferris. You know, that’s what I was looking for – was going back to being miserable and kind of crying.

[0:07:10] Charlie Hoehn: Just to pause you one second there Joanna, that is such a valuable lesson. Man, that’s so good. If you don’t care about the finer details, if you’re just kind of glossing over them and not finding yourself obsessing the small stuff, you’re probably going to hate it over the long run.

[0:07:30] Joanna Penn: Yeah, exactly. Do you really want to design yourself another job? You know, like in your stuff around play to weigh and you know, thinking about the fun side of life, if you’re miserable in your job, why would you create yourself a business where you’re also miserable.

[0:07:46] Charlie Hoehn: Right.

[0:07:49] Joanna Penn: Anyway, I learned that from the property investment and also, the massive overheads that you had to – or I guess the money that you had to invest. I didn’t like the debt either and I felt that I was doing my day job in order to service debt on a mortgage and I still felt it was a physical thing that held me to one place. I was in Australia at that point. I lived quite a lot of places around the world. A that point, I was like, okay, I’m going to write this self-help book back there.

[0:08:16] Charlie Hoehn: To help yourself?

[0:08:18] Joanna Penn: Yes. To help myself and as you guys know everyone has delusions of grandeur with their first book. Yeah, so I thought, “I’m going to change the world with my – I’m going to make everybody happy in their jobs.” Actually, my first book was called, How To Enjoy Your Job Or Find A New One. Little tip everyone, that’s a terrible book title.

[0:08:43] Charlie Hoehn: Wait, had you done that at that point? Had you found a job you enjoyed?

[0:08:48] Joanna Penn: No, but I thought by writing the book, I would discover the sort of tips that I wanted to tell myself. I distilled all these self-help knowledge that I’ve been reading and it was probably like a hundred books and audio courses and all of that. You know, like do and you distill it into something and this is important I think, you know, obviously writing a book from your knowledge is really good but you can also write a book by researching from other people’s knowledge and that’s important too. Yes, so I wrote that book and I should say that about three years later, I understood SEO or search engine optimization for book titles and I rewrote that book, we published it under Career Change which is a much better book title and it still sells.

[0:09:35] Charlie Hoehn: That’s good. I’m curious, what were the books that really stood out that you’re like, “These are the top three that really have the gold” of all the ones that you’ve read.

[0:09:49] Joanna Penn: Well, definitely, Jack Henfield The Success Principles is probably the book that changed my life because the first principle is, well, the tag line is, How To Get From Where You Are To Where You Want To Be. The first principle is take a hundred percent responsibility for your life and before I said, you know, I fell into a career and I had to take responsibility for where I had ended up. I was implementing accounts payable in mining companies because all the little decisions I’d made along the way, had me ending up there. The very first decision I had to make was “Okay, well where do I want to be in another 10 years-time.” Which is you know, now I’m kind of 11 years later, it’s pretty cool that what you set out, can actually happen. I was like, “Okay, what do I want my life to look like in the future?” So I know where I want to be and so many people don’t define where they want to get to? I mean they know where they are and they’re unhappy where they are but they might not know, “Okay, I want to make a living with my writing” and what does “a living” mean? You know, “I want to be a multi-six figure author,” that was basically my goal. Jack Henfield, The Success Principles. The Last Lecture by Randy Pouch, you know, he died of pancreatic cancer around then and then the book came out and it was again, it was about kind of living every moment as if it was your last. Then, funnily enough, Tim Ferris’ Four Hour Work Week – and I know you know him but at the time it was like, “Okay, lifestyle design, you don’t have to have a job that you hate.” Again, it’s like, well, how do you want to live your life? And I love travel. So I wrote down, “I want to travel, I want to read.” I love traveling and reading so I want a career where I can travel and read and actually, I’m an introvert, I don’t particularly like a lot of people. You know, why would I want to be on a dive boat with people all the time. That was my –

[0:11:43] Charlie Hoehn: Especially tourists of all people.

[0:11:47] Joanna Penn: All really needy and like, “Help me go scuba diving,” you know? No, keep your fun separate to – anyway, there we go. Those are kind of some books that really impacted me at the time and The Success Principles had a 10 year anniversary addition and I still really read that book.

[0:12:05] Charlie Hoehn: That’s fantastic. You wrote that book, and shockingly, or to your surprise I’m imagining it didn’t change the world. Maybe it changed your life in that it changed your thinking, the process made you a better person, it got you on the right track. What happened after that?

[0:12:26] Joanna Penn: Yes, again, the shocking thing when you publish a book and nobody knows you exist is something that many authors face and what was different back then in 2006 – well I published it beginning of 2008. The Kindle had launched in America but it hadn’t launched internationally. It was just cusp of ebooks starting to happen.

[0:12:49] Charlie Hoehn: How long did it take you to figure out how to make an ebook? I mean, I’d imagine you were having a higher people to code it up and all that fun stuff.

[0:13:01] Joanna Penn: Well, I mean, I was trying to remember now. I mean, I was one of the first people in Australia to get a Kindle and I learned from people like John Lock who you know, was right at the beginning there, Amanda Hawking, you know, Joe Conrath, the very early years of self-publishing ebooks. Actually, I mean, publishing an ebook is not that hard. I mean, at that time, smash words was around in a new mark Coca, one of the earliest. And you just stopped bloated a word document and you can still just upload the word documents to kindle. Back then, remember, this was a new thing and people were still at that point, while they still are now at publishing PDF’s on their website, right? Formatting was not such a big deal at that point.

[0:13:42] Charlie Hoehn: That’s right, I forgot that.

[0:13:44] Joanna Penn: Yeah, so just so people realize the mistakes I made then is I actually printed 2,000 copies of that book with you know, one of these, let’s say vanity birth, and then I have them in my house and then I realized, this was the point that I realized, “Oh dear, no one knows who I am.”

[0:14:02] Charlie Hoehn: Right.

[0:14:03] Joanna Penn: I didn’t have a website, I didn’t know anything, I did make it on to national TV and in the national newspapers but often that doesn’t actually sell any books and it didn’t sell any books for me.

[0:14:14] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, I’ve had to tell – I’ve had to tell my parents that numerous times because they’re like, you know, “If you just got on CBS news, your books would really sell.” I’m like, “It seems like it would work that way, it does not work that way.”

[0:14:29] Joanna Penn: Yeah, sadly, there’s even stories of people getting on Oprah and not selling any books.

[0:14:34] Charlie Hoehn: I know, yeah, I mean, especially now, back in the day, when she was in prime time, she could move 500,000 copies of a book. Now, she’s doing Facebook lives and own and she only moves like a thousand copies.

[0:14:50] Joanna Penn: Yeah, exactly. This is the thing. That’s when I kind of like, okay, well I’m serious about this and this is another really important point. You know, I think writing a book can be done, you know, certainly writing a nonfiction book can be done and it will be useful to some people and awesome. If you love it and you get the itch and you want to write more, like you want to be an author who does this. You know, there’s a big part of their life then they need to learn the book marketing. I started to learn publishing and that’s when I started my website, The Creative Pen which was basically trying to help people along the way by sharing my own journey. That’s probably a good marketing tip; sharing your own journey can be a very powerful tool.

[0:15:30] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah. How did you – when did you realize, “Wow, I now have people who know me and care about me and they are strangers connected to me on the internet.”

[0:15:46] Joanna Penn: Yeah, I still think this is also – like I say to people: If you can make $10 on the internet from people who don’t know who you are then that’s really exciting. You know, if you can make that first $10 and you know, I kind of still have my kindle sales from you know – I mean, the print on demand sales, they don’t really have anymore – I went with Lulu originally, you know, before that all kind of went bad. But my kindle sales, you know, month one, you know, was sort of $10 or something. You know, that was such a big deal for me to actually have people buy my book that I didn’t know and also, I was aiming for Americans. I knew that nobody would know who I was so if people don’t realize, I was living in Australia, there’s 20 million people in Australia. 380 million in America and America is the kind of – the first market for digital.

[0:16:38] Charlie Hoehn: In Australia, Amazon’s not as popular either, right?

[0:16:41] Joanna Penn: Well, Australia has a weird book market but at the moment, right now, as we talk in 2017, you know, Amazon’s in a fight to get in warehouses into the Australian market. I’m hoping that it will change, but you know, Sony was the first one with an E reader in the Australian market and iBooks is very strong in Australia but the point is that with 20 million people, why would you bother?

[0:17:03] Charlie Hoehn: Right, yeah.

[0:17:03] Joanna Penn: Sorry to any Australians listening. You know, I was in Brisbane trying to market to Americans and you know, Twitter appeared around then. So I got on Twitter, I started my podcast in 2009 so I was one of the early podcasters before it was even kind of cool podcasting.

[0:17:24] Charlie Hoehn: Do you want to give a shout out to that?

[0:17:25] Joanna Penn: Yes, The Creative Pen podcast. Now it’s sort of 330 episodes or something.

[0:17:30] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, check that out if you are a self-published author for sure.

[0:17:34] Joanna Penn: Yeah. Or any kind of author, we kind of do everything but yeah. I think what’s interesting about podcasting about books, about anything, you have to – there’s a couple of months unless you have an audience where you feel like you’re howling into the wind and you’re like, “Nobody’s listening, why am I even doing this?” In fact, my first podcast, you’ll laugh at this, I was on a speaker phone, you know, like a normal phone to put on speaker and I held an MP3 player in front of the speaker phone.

[0:18:05] Charlie Hoehn: Do you still have that episode up?

[0:18:07] Joanna Penn: Yes I do.

[0:18:08] Charlie Hoehn: That’s funny.

[0:18:09] Joanna Penn: The sound quality is appalling. But this is the thing, start before you’re ready and just give it a go and in fact, you know, like the wave back machine, my website back then was just horrible and – but this is what we do, we learn along the way.

[0:18:24] Charlie Hoehn: That’s the hardest part for people who are on the outside looking in for the first time on your close to 10th year, I forget when you said, it was 2006?

[0:18:39] Joanna Penn: Yeah, 11 years.

[0:18:40] Charlie Hoehn: 11 years and by now, you have this complex machine that has been gradually built over the years and people looking at you are like, “How did she do all that?” Well, it was time and consistent effort.

[0:18:54] Joanna Penn: Exactly. I try to say to people to think more in Olympic years because you know, the quote is you overestimate what you can achieve in a year and you underestimate what you can achieve in kind of five to 10 years. So if you think Olympics, I think your book came out in 2013 right?

[0:19:13] Charlie Hoehn: Yes it did.

[0:19:14] Joanna Penn: Yeah, around then. 2012, you know, let’s think back to 2012 which was the London Olympics, right? Then 2016 Rio Olympics, if you think where you were in 2012. You know, it completely different life to how it would be in 2016 which is you know, only last year, we’re talking to the Rio Olympics and I think people often remember where they were during the Olympics summer. You know, when I think about that, I mean, I had my first novel, you know, I had two novels at that point. I was making not very much money like maybe 30 grand a year at that time from my writing. You know, wind forward to 2016 and I’m living on the other side of the world and making multi-six figures from my books and you know, just a completely different life and would be the same for you, you8 would have been writing in 2012 I guess. Now you’re doing all kinds of different things.

[0:20:09] Charlie Hoehn: I know. Yeah, this was actually, to this point, before my wife and I got married, we had a bunch of talks and I said, “You know, honestly, my biggest fear about marriage is I’m going to be a completely different person someday, that’s a fact. I don’t know what that person’s going to be but both of us are continuing to evolve.” “If we can grow and evolve alongside each other and support each other no matter where that goes then we can definitely make this work.”

[0:20:43] Joanna Penn: That’s lovely, we had that kind of sentiment in our wedding vows, actually me and my husband, “We had growing together but not in each of the shadow,” that’s quite similar to you.

[0:20:53] Charlie Hoehn: That’s beautiful.

[0:20:54] Joanna Penn: Should we get romantic.

[0:20:56] Charlie Hoehn: Not to the editor to add in soft piano playing right now. Awesome. Yeah, let’s talk about your books, I mean, is there anything else to your journey you want to lay out?

[0:21:12] Joanna Penn: Well, I think the important thing is, back in 2006, I started writing, 2008 I first published, 2011 was when I left my job. I think many people, if they want to make a living with their writing, you know, then the goal is to leave their job. Now, many people don’t want to leave their job. I know many of the Book In A Box clients are people with a business and that is their job and the book is kind of secondary. But if you don’t enjoy your job like I didn’t, you might want to become a fulltime writer or have writing at the basis of what you do. 2011, I mean, I pretty much, The Creative Pen was three years old, I had about six books at that point, I was speaking so this is really important. Speaking is a great cashflow revenue stream but it’s not scalable. Speaking is based on your time so while we’re speaking, but I still have this day job, I was still working in a mining company and I said to my husband. “Look, I want to give this a go.” Another tip for dealing with spouses, you know, be honest. I said “Look, I need to give this a go.” I saved up some money and I said, “Look, six months, if it doesn’t work at all, I will just go back to my job,” and most people can leave a job for six months and go back with enough expertise. You know, that you don’t miss too much in six months. He said, “Alright, let’s do it” and it was going well, so we ended up downsizing. This is another thing. In order to fund this new life, we sold our house, we moved back to Britain, you don’t have to do that but you know, I wanted to be somewhere that was creatively stimulating for me and my fiction is based around my traveling and Europe, particularly. I wanted to be back in Europe and we downsized our life completely. That can be useful if you want to downsize your income in order to change careers, then you might have to do something like move somewhere cheaper. You know, go to four days a week as I did before giving up your job, also saving money, reducing debt. All these practical things that sometimes people don’t talk about but I think are important. The reason you might want to do that is if you really want to do this and I think a lot of people say, “Yeah, I’d love to write a book or yeah, I’d love to be a writer,” but they don’t actually want to pay the price. I think it’s Tony Robbins who talks about this, you know, decide what you want and then decide what price you’re willing to pay.

[0:23:39] Charlie Hoehn: Or what pain.

[0:23:40] Joanna Penn: Willing to do that.

[0:23:40] Charlie Hoehn: What pain you're willing to go through.

[0:23:44] Joanna Penn: Yeah, in order to reach that life that you want. It isn’t overnight, it’s not, “Oh yay, I’m going to write a book and then make a million dollars and retire.” You need more than a million these days.

[0:23:58] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah.

[0:24:00] Joanna Penn: You know, essentially, 2011, I left my job, took a massive pay cut in terms of the amount I was earning and then 2015, I hired my husband out of his day job to join the business because we were making multi-six figures. It basically took that nine years to go from writing that first book, to being able to live the life I wanted to.

[0:24:26] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, how many years of that were you 100% full steam ahead, totally focused on building momentum in writing and publishing your own books?

[0:24:38] Joanna Penn: It really was pretty much from 2008 onwards. When I published that first book, I got the bug and I went, “This is what I want to do.” I want to write books, I love holding that book in my hand and saying, “I made this.” It’s a very Seth Godden thing as well, “I made this.” I’m addicted to that. At that point, when I held that first book in my hand and there’s a really funny picture that I have of me standing in front of 2,000 books, you know, boxes and my face – I don’t know what I’m doing but my face is so happy, it’s that, you know, unconscious incompetence or whatever that first thing of the cycle is. But you can see, I’ve got the bug and so I committed that day and that’s the thing, you know, if you want this, it is the best time in history to be a writer.

[0:25:26] Charlie Hoehn: I know.

[0:25:26] Joanna Penn: And sell internationally, it’s amazing.

[0:25:28] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, I know. I want to talk about this stuff that drives us crazy, that we hear from authors because we hear total delusions and we also hear real fears from authors that are often very unfounded. For instance, I remember a few years ago, speaking to a gal, she was in her early 20’s and she was asking me questions about how to – I don’t know, learn how to be an entrepreneur, learn how to – or not an entrepreneur, how to succeed at a startup in Silicon Valley. The way she was asking these questions was very flat and I kind of just got the sense that she didn’t really want to do it, it was just something that she thought she needed to do that that was a path to success and I started asking her. “What kind of stuff she did on the side, what did she do when she was bored and she confessed that she wrote novels.” I thought, “Wow, that’s really cool.” She confessed that she wrote eight to 10,000 words a day which is crazy.

[0:26:39] Joanna Penn: Wow.

[0:26:41] Charlie Hoehn: I was like, “You are a writer first of all” and she said that she’d written close to two dozen novels that she’d never published, that she’d never done anything with. Because she thought she had to go the traditional route, she’d always been told. It was not really possible to make a living as a fiction writer. It’s simultaneously like broke my heart and made me fuming-angry and like super excited all at the same time and I just insisted, exactly what you said, there has never been a better point in history to make a living if you are a writer, if you are a content creator, if that is who you are and you love doing it. All you need to do is the work, publish, and time. You just need to keep doing it.

[0:27:42] Joanna Penn: Yeah, I think there’s a couple of things, first of all, is the definition of success and this is whenever anyone asks me about book marketing or publishing or anything, well what is your definition of success? Because if you want to have someone pat you on the back and say, you are a good writer, which many novelists in particular want to do. That need for validation, external validation, is the thing that may be keeping you back from different forms of success. When I speak about these things too, right? As my audience and normally writers and I say okay, what do you want? Do you want to win the Pulitzer prize or do you want EL James’, you know, who wrote Fifty Shades Of Grey, 120 million dollars, what do you want? Do you want the prize and the critics saying that you’re brilliant because – or you know, say The Man booker prize which has been announced. You know, you get 50 grand for winning The Man booker price which you and I know, this is not very much money when you’ve spent like 10 years writing books which those people do. It’s like no, I’m sorry, that’s terrible. Most prize nominated books only sell around 5,000 copies. It’s just like “Okay, do you want that or do you want 115 million dollars” and if you compare the reviews on Amazon for 50 shades of Grey, to the last Pulitzer prize winning book, readers love Fifty Shades Of Grey but most authors, particularly fiction authors, will say that they would rather have a literary prize and a critic tell them they are good. Than to make a living. You know, I think that lady –

[0:29:15] Charlie Hoehn: Such nonsense. I hate it, I call it the American Idol effect. It’s like, you have a camera in your hand, make YouTube videos of you singing and post them. This is a sore subject for me because my ex-girlfriend from years ago, lovely gal but she was a fiction writer and she had that exact thing going on and it was like one of the few things that we would get in heated debates about because you know. I take the Thomas Edison approach, Thomas Edison said, “I only invent things that will sell because sales is proof of utility and utility is success.” My stance was like, focus on the market, focus on the people who are going to be your fans, not some literary authority or some magazine, who cares? No one’s reading those. So many writers have that chip on their shoulder, where they want that validation. I’m not entirely sure where it comes from to be honest that I don’t want to judge these people and say, “Well, have you thought about your childhood but like, seriously, why do you care if you have fans?” Fans.

[0:30:40] Joanna Penn: I think you’re being a bit hard Charlie. I want to call you off on it as an artist as someone who is, I write fiction as well. See, I’m one of those people. I write fiction for the love of writing fiction and some of my books really sell very few copies, this is the truth of being a novelist, you know?

[0:31:00] Charlie Hoehn: But you’re the fan of the book you’re creating. You care –

[0:31:03] Joanna Penn: That’s true.

[0:31:05] Charlie Hoehn: You write to amuse yourself and that’s what JK Rowling says, she says, “I just write what amuses me, it’s totally for myself.” It wasn’t about the fans, it was about her. I think those are two very valid things.

[0:31:20] Joanna Penn: Yeah, you have to do some things for yourself but also, that’s why your definition of success is so important and if – I don’t think the audience listening want literary prizes, that’s not them, that’s different. But the other thing, just coming back to that lady you talked about. Having a whole load of drafts and this might be the same for people listening if they have a whole load of blog post or unfinished videos or, I think a lot about different energy, different cycles of energy that come with a project. And someone who cannot publish or cannot put things live, is someone who is lacking finishing energy. A lot of people have the starting energy like, “This is a great idea, I’m going to start this” and then right, I know, from writing novels, the saggy middle is really hard. It’s like yeah, writing is not some glorious thing that makes it easy although of course, if you use Book In A Box then it’s easier. You know, finishing energy is all that you know, you’ve written a number of books, you have to go through the process, the editing process, all the little things that are like okay, I just have to do this in order to finish.

[0:32:27] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, that’s a really good point when you’re writing a book, you think you see the light at the end of the tunnel, you get through the process, you’ve written a book, editing is writing two more books often times. It’s just as long, if not longer, and it deserves to be, that’s the polishing part and yeah, that energy drops as soon as you realize the amount of work you have ahead of you.

[0:32:57] Joanna Penn: That’s kind of partly what makes it worthwhile and those business owners listening, you’ve built a business form nothing. The process is kind of the same, the building an audience, the things that you do sometimes and you’re like, “Do I really have to do this?” That’s part of running a business and I think to be a successful author and to make money with your books and I’ve just finished the draft of my 25th book. You know, you do have to – there is a process that’s repeated but there is the excitement and things you have to get that for every project. You also have to treat this as a business. I’m always saying, you know, you have to wear two hats, you have to wear the artist’s hat especially if you’re writing fiction and you have to wear the business hat and both of those have a place in a creative business, like being a writer.

[0:33:50] Charlie Hoehn: Author Hour is sponsored by Book in a Box. For anyone who has a great idea for a book but doesn’t have the time or patience to sit down and type it out, Book in a Box has created a new way to help you painlessly publish your book. Instead of sitting at a computer and typing for a year, hoping everything works out, Book in a Box takes you through a structured interview process that gets your ideas out of your head and into a book in just a few months. To learn more, head over to Bookinabox.com and fill out the form at the bottom of the page. Don’t let another year go by where you put off writing your book. I’m curious, which of your books has the biggest place in your heart at this point in time?

[0:34:38] Joanna Penn: It’s funny, because the book that immediately came to my mind, it’s a crime thriller, supernatural crime thriller called Desecration. It was my fifth novel and it was the book when I let go of self-censorship. Now, not completely but it was the first book where – because you know, you’re talking to Joanna Penn and Joanna Penn is upbeat and wears read and she’s like you know, can do speaking and she can talk and go to parties and things. JF Penn, my fiction author self, likes to be on her own, she wears blue, you know, she has a dark heart, she loves Stephen King. You know, JF Penn, when I write my fiction and it’s great having two author names if you want to do this kind of different stuff, Desecration, I wanted to write about the meaning of the physical body after death. You know, the idea came from a medical specimen museum where you go in and there’s body parts in jars and I was like. “My goodness, what if these people were like alive when they went in the jars” and all these stuff, you know, really dark ideas so I had a murder in a medical specimen museum and then a sort of the history of anatomy told in a murder mystery with a bit of a supernatural element. That book, I think – this comes to the heart of finding your voice which is something that people don’t really get until it happens. Which is by book five, I knew what I was doing, I knew how to write a novel but I still hadn’t just let my inner self go. Write things where people would say, “Oh she might be a bit weird you know? That’s a bit dark.” It’s has not got swearing, it’s not got sex but it’s got themes that are pretty dark and if people are into Stephen King, you know, writing about death, writing about grief, these things are interesting but quite dark. I was like “Okay, that book means a lot to me because I let go of – I guess that need for validation, that need for someone to tell me I’m a good girl and that I’ve done a good job and I’ve pleased people.” And in fact, my mom stopped reading my books after that.

[0:36:43] Charlie Hoehn: No.

[0:36:45] Joanna Penn: I gave her nightmares and she actually said, “Couldn’t you write something more like Hilary Mantel,” the Booker Prize-winning historical literary novelist. I want to encourage people – the other thing I started saying around that time was I like graveyards. I want to say that on the show because I think it’s important and this comes to marketing too. I go to graveyards for fun, you know, and take pictures. I love – in Europe, we have a lot of lovely grave stones and graveyards and churches and architecture. I share pictures of grave stains and graveyards and death culture on Twitter and Pinterest and all those. The people who enjoy that too, the people who are not afraid to think about death, they are my audience for JF Penn. Now, they’re probably not the audience listening but some people listening will go, “I like graveyards too but I never tell people that because it’s something that people judge me for.” My challenge for listeners is, what do you think people are going to judge you for? Then, think about doubling down on that and bringing that out in your work or your business because that will be the thing that makes you stand out because your audience is not everyone. It’s the people who love the things that you do.

[0:38:01] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, I definitely learned that lesson as well. So I wrote a book years ago and had to edit out an enormous chunk of that book. I decided I’ll just take the best part of that chunk and put it in the blog and then proceed with editing this book even though it’s going to be a nightmare because I’m going to rewrite most of the thing and that blog post blew up and it went viral. It was on WordPress.com featured on the homepage. It was nuts and that article was called, How I Cured My Anxiety and it was a deeply personal thing that I was worried about in the book that I thought I was going to get judge. I cut it out not because I was afraid of the concept but a friend of mine said it didn’t fit with the rest of the book very well and it ended up being the thing that helped a lot more people. So many people resonated with and now I mean for the last four years if you Googled “Cure anxiety” it showed up as the top result. And I think it’s because there just aren’t a lot or at least there weren’t at the time a lot of people talking about that publicly in a way that was very helpful. So I think you’re totally on point which is not just what are people going to judge me for but what is it that maybe no one’s really saying right now, at least in the non-fiction world. One of the books that I’ve found really fascinating that is sold over a million copies over the last six months is Mark Manson’s –

[0:39:49] Joanna Penn: How To Not Give An F…

[0:39:50] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, what is it? I forgot the exact – The Subtle Art of not Giving A F. I thought it was brilliant because everybody else is writing books on how to be successful and how to care more, basically. Anyway, he’s a great writer and everything but that really stood up to me as the thing that no one wants to be known as somebody who doesn’t care at all and so I like that idea Joanna.

[0:40:26] Joanna Penn: I think it’s quite revolutionary in your own life as well and certainly with my fiction, I now write at author’s note at the end like some authors do and I bare my soul a little and after that book Desecration and I talked to a lot about, like I said the physical body. The book after that, Delirium, was a lot about suicide and mental health. I wrote in my author’s note about some of my own mental health experiences, or mental illness experiences, over the time. And by sharing some of those things again, I think the more personally we share our journey as you said about your anxiety, people resonate with that and many people feel the same way. It was funny earlier this year and this is coming back to the writing and the validation, I was a finalist in actually, a literary award and the International Thriller Writer’s Best Ebook Original and for my book Destroyer of Worlds and I wrote a big blog post about it because when I got nominated when I was a finalist only five people in award ceremony. Big names like Clive Cussler and Lee Child, people there like huge, big names in the industry and it meant so much to me and it surprised me because I thought I had gotten rid of that need for validation and I did a podcast like when I talked about and I didn’t win. So I was sitting there and I didn’t win and I talked about what it meant to me to be nominated, what it meant not to win like you know? How annoying that was but that podcast and sharing. This kind of the double standards that we have in our self like, “Yehey I am independent” and then, “Please pick me, pick me” you know we have to hold these tensions in our lives and we have to on the one hand be like, “Yeah I’m going to make loads of money with my business” and then the other hand we’re like, “But yes, I just want to stay home and be quiet” or whatever. You know I want to speak, I want to be quite and so this is the thing. We have to hold these dichotomy in our life and I don’t believe in balance. I don’t think there is any balance if you love what you are doing but this seesaw is something that we’re constantly dealing with, this kind of roller coaster of balancing and I often talk about Plato’s chariots. I don’t know if you know the metaphor of the chariots and there’s a dark horse and a white horse and to me, the dark horse is that shadow’s side. The darker side, the quieter side, the Saturn and the winter and the white is maybe the business side, for me it’s Joanna Penn versus JF Penn and if they don’t run together, if you can’t manage the dichotomy of your deeper side with your more outer side, you won’t feel whole. You won’t feel real in your life and that might be one of my next books I think.

[0:43:12] Charlie Hoehn: I love that. Have you read the book, what is it called – Remember Be Here Now by Baba Ram Das?

[0:43:18] Joanna Penn: No, I’ll put that on my list.

[0:43:20] Charlie Hoehn: It’s an amazing book. I personally loved it, Steve Jobs actually attributed it to the reason he ended up taking a journey to India, a spiritual quest to India. But in the book, it’s got a crazy back story that I will spare you for you to check it out. But they talk about in there that this applies to not just the individual but humanity and that they say police create hippies and hippies create police and that the problem comes when you don’t see yourself in the other. And that you need that person to be who you are and it’s the same with republicans and democrats and everything that has a balance, they’re the same thing. It’s just that one is the other shadow self.

[0:44:18] Joanna Penn: And that need to write the other, to understand the other I think is partly why I write fiction and what other people do and why we read fiction because the only way we get into someone else’s head is by reading about the experience about their life. Now you can get part of that from an autobiography or a non-fiction book like yours but what the power of a story in fiction, is that there’s no lecturing, there’s no “This is the point” there’s no this is how you get over your anxiety. It’s actually the character in the story gets over there their anxiety by doing this adventure and facing their fears and all of that type of thing. I think like what you were saying that the other, this is so powerful and I think you know this is not a political show but we would understand more about the political other if we wrote characters that were those people and tried to get into those heads and imagine what life is like when you were on that other side. So yeah, I think that’s very powerful and it’s something that is so important to think about and just back on India, my fiction genesis you know, all came from a trip to India as well being in Varanasi and the burning gaps where they burn bodies. That was the idea, the opening scene for my first novel came from that. So I love India it’s an amazing place.

[0:45:36] Charlie Hoehn: Wow, have you read Shantaram?

[0:45:38] Joanna Penn: Yes, absolutely. Yes.

[0:45:40] Charlie Hoehn: How did you feel about that book?

[0:45:41] Joanna Penn: Yeah, I like it but I struggle with the massive epics except for James Mitch. Now I would definitely recommend James Mitch novel.

[0:45:49] Charlie Hoehn: What did he write?

[0:45:50] Joanna Penn: Oh he’s written tons of books. The book I’d recommend from Mitch is there is The Source which is again, sort of big multigenerational story about Israel. Israel is another country that have been through a lot and appears in a lot of my books. So you know these sort of deep places that resonate with humanity, you know Jerusalem, Varanasi, I guess New York in America resonate deeply. New Orleans, these stories that come from places that have been emotional over generations, I think can be very powerful. So that’s how I weave travel into my story telling now.

[0:46:27] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, I’d imagine – the reason I brought up Shantaram, I actually was triggered in thinking about it when you mentioned the book market in Australia and I was just trying to remember what are the bestsellers that have been in Australia? Definitely Shantaram has been on the list for a long time. But who do you think is doing the best fiction writing now and maybe on top of that, who do you think is under rated? Who do you think is flying under the radar right now?

[0:46:56] Joanna Penn: I really don’t think I can answer that question because everyone reads different things so what I would say is –

[0:47:02] Charlie Hoehn: Well your favorite.

[0:47:03] Joanna Penn: Oh well my favorite, I mean I probably read five books a week. So it’s very hard for me to recommend a book. I do have on my site JF Penn, books that I love and my number one book that I wish I’d written although inspires me the most is The Stand by Stephen King. That book is my archetype of what I want to write. It’s about as thick as Shantaram but it’s post-apocalyptic sort of super natural thriller. So that book means a lot to me. But in terms of what – in terms of the best writing right now were a really interesting point in writing history where TV writing in particular, is incredible. So there is a lot of discussion amongst those of us who write fiction about TV writing. So I’ve got the book I mentioned Desecration and I am currently working with a screen writer on an adaptation because what we want is the Game of Thrones effect. You know we want if you see – If you look at the Amazon charts, ignore the New York Times bestseller which we know is fixed but if you look at something like the Amazon charts the books that are bought the most, it’s entirely resonant with what’s on TV on Netflix and all of that. So when The Handmaid’s Tales was on a month or so ago, The Handmaid’s Tale was number one on Amazon. Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin has been writing for 40 years and only now is he getting what he’s getting. Because they’ve taken a story and turned it into this world that people love and it’s amazing escapism. So for me, my non-fiction is about helping people with practical information. My fiction is about escapism from a life that you need escape from. So I hate watching the news, politics makes me miserable. I need to escape into a novel or I hate my job and I need to escape. That’s why I write and I think in terms of there is so many good writers right now it is just a fantastic time in history. But yeah, I think and actually just coming back on the – sort of circling back to where we were in the beginning about prizes and what you should read, this is what you love to read and that’s touching base with who you really are and Fifty Shades of Grey, the fact is actually most people want to read a good story not a well written language book. So that’s what I want everyone to come back to.

[0:49:23] Charlie Hoehn: A 100%, it’s same thing with movies versus documentaries. There is a reason why movies succeed and documentaries really don’t is because of that.

[0:49:34] Joanna Penn: Yeah, I guess I want to nudge people because some people listening will have always wanted to write a novel. They might be non-fiction authors or writing a non-fiction book because they should and maybe they are reading non-fiction because they should. I meet so many people especially in their 40’s that are like, “Oh but I should read that book because it will help me with something” and I’m like, “Yeah but what are you doing for fun?” Why don’t you just read a book for fun? Just read a novel. So I think that’s important too. Just be honest, just go and find a book that might be considered crap by the literary critics and give it a go. I mean Fifty Shades of Grey it’s a good story. Forget the sex, it’s a good story that’s why it’s sold too many copies.

[0:50:19] Charlie Hoehn: You know this is an interesting point, right? So forget the sex, even forget the writing, I think a little differently about why Fifty Shades of Grey took off. I think that there is a massive market of women who identify with that on, either a subconscious level or on a conscious level. I don’t know many women my age, I’m 31, who have read it or who were able to get through it. I know a lot of people in their 40’s, 50’s the boomer generation who secretly loved that book. So I feel like there was a bit of a – like a that guy set the time and I know her approach was posting in Twilight Fan Fiction forums and people were saying, “Oh yeah more, more, more” and then she stripped it out of that, put it on her own site, made it her own thing which is a really brilliant approach. But yeah, would you agree or disagree?

[0:51:31] Joanna Penn: Yeah, I think you’re right on that and I’m 11 years older than you. So my demographic would be right and in fact E.L. James would be a few years older than me and I think women in their early 30’s are definitely a different market, to women in their 40’s and 50’s. So in terms of the sexual empowerment I guess might be something. But you know regardless of what made that standout in a very crowded romance erotica niche, I mean it’s like there were a ton of books that are like that book and that one broke out. You know in the same that J.K. Rowling, there were plenty of fantasy books and hers popped up, we can’t do that but I guess coming back to it that book is written in first person. So it’s very close, it’s “I did this, I did that” it’s very close to being in someone’s heads and many people in their 40’s and 50’s might not be in a happy relationship. Might not be sexually fulfilled or other things like that. So that’s coming back to generally the books we write as storytellers, is giving people a vicarious experience. Now I don’t write sex in my books. I write thrillers, I write supernatural stuff, I write murder-mystery, I write a lot of death. There’s a huge body count in my book. I write terrorism, I write mass slaughter of lots of people and that might be kind of crazy but that’s what you do in thrillers and that’s escapism for me. My favorite film is Conair. I mean again, you’re too young for that but I mean that’s an iconic explosion movie. So that’s the sort of escape I like and that’s the important thing to come back with. You know I just admitted that on a podcast, you know?

[0:53:17] Charlie Hoehn: That you love Nicholas Cage, yeah.

[0:53:19] Joanna Penn: Yeah that I love Nicholas Cage and Face Off, awesome and just being honest with what you like and writing what you like and being more honest with ourselves I think is so important because your book will be boring if it’s like, “I should do this” and “I must do that” whereas if you tap into who you really are underneath. If you could get back to that because sometimes we buried it then what you write would be so much more important.

[0:53:48] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah so I’m really interested in your perspective on this, what makes a great story? As you said, E.L James, J.K. Rowling there were other books on the market that were similar thematically, probably very similar structure. What was so different about theirs that warranted outselling the Bible? I mean I still think to this day that some of J.K. Rowling’s books sell a quarter of a million dollars’ worth individual books, per month. So a full decade after Harry Potter, what makes her story so great?

[0:54:34] Joanna Penn: It’s actually 20, yeah.

[0:54:35] Charlie Hoehn: 20 years, yeah two decades. So what makes a great story?

[0:54:39] Joanna Penn: Yeah, I mean it’s got to be about character, although that book particularly was a crossover book. So my mum loves that book and my mum is 70. I don’t particularly but I really love other writing as well but I’ll brief but in terms of a good story, it’s got to be character. It’s this, I can’t remember the book’s name but thinking about the bestseller novels and escapism is a really big part. So you’ll find that the biggest films, the biggest TV shows, the biggest books are all about escapism. So even something like Titanic is a different time or it’s a different place, it’s a different world. So if you want to – even some of the non-fiction like Shell’s Trade, With Wild or Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, these take people to a different place where they are not. So that escapism I think is super important and also they need to be in the character. They need to care about the character and you need a really good thing that’s stopping them to get what they want. And I mean J.K. Rowling obviously did that very well but you know, I know you’ve had obviously, Tucker Max on the show talking about timing as well and about how sometimes it’s just timing as someone who has written a number of novels none of which have broken out. But I have my own small happy audience who love my novels, separate to my non-fiction audience. I don’t think you can think that as a novelist. If you are writing a novel you can’t engineer it. And if you try and engineer a bestselling novel, it’s not going to work. You have to go with what you are doing and see what happens. I mean it’s like you mentioned the Silicon Valley girl a while back, if you try and engineer this best app, the next Uber of this, if you are reading Angel by Jason Calacanis at the moment about investing and founders, investing in a founder is like reading a character in a book. If you want to go deep with this character, you’re going to read the book. If you want to go deep with this business, it would be because of people. So I think that and again, like you know inviting a good non-fiction book. You have to have stories about people or about you at the heart of it because that’s how we learn as humans. So those would be some tips both for fiction and non-fiction. It’s got to be about character and some form of escapism.

[0:57:07] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah and we even talked about this before the podcast, which is the one thing that I’ve learned about great storytelling, is it has to have a really relatable character. They have to do something that’s identifiable and Pixar, their creative storytelling process, they’ve got a great course online that’s free on Con Academy but they talk about this as well is you have to start from that place of identifiability. The temptation when you get into writing stories, is exactly the type of awesome stuff that you’re talking about, high body count, explosions and that stuff but you can’t start there. You have to begin with something identifiable, which is why they always say start with something that actually happened to you and one of my favorite examples of this, Kenny Powers and East Bound and Down, so are you familiar with the show?

[0:58:12] Joanna Penn: No.

[0:58:13] Charlie Hoehn: Oh it’s an HBO comedy about a former major league baseball pitcher who was on top of the world then he just drops out of the leagues because I forgot, his arm’s hurt or something and he ends up becoming as substitute teacher at a middle school or high school. While he’s there on the first day of class he is telling the students how he’s going to get himself back to the majors. The entire show is just about a guy who is no longer a pro wanting to get back to his glory days. And he’s telling these kids like how great he used to be, how he’s going to get there, kids don’t know him. Kids don’t care and Danny McBride actually based that on something that actually happened where he wrote a Hollywood script for a movie that got rejected and he ended up having to take a part time job where he’s telling these students that this is only a part time thing, “My real job is I’m a fancy Hollywood screenwriter,” and as he’s saying it, he was so embarrassed for himself. That he was saying it realizing “These kids don’t care, what am I doing bragging to them? Why am I saying this right now?” And so he just blew that moment up in his life. He made it larger than life. That’s what made the show so great, I think.

[0:59:46] Joanna Penn: Yeah well and then I guess it all comes back to yeah, share authentically and real stories resonate with people.

[0:59:53] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah so let’s transition into your non-fiction books. You have written a lot of – did you say you’ve written a total of 25 books or a total of 25 non-fiction?

[1:00:07] Joanna Penn: No 25 total books that’s not including box set of short stories or any of that.

[1:00:14] Charlie Hoehn: Okay, cool. So, a lot of the authors that we work with that have come on the show, one of their big goals is to do public speaking, like you’ve done and you wrote a book “Public Speaking For Authors And Creatives And Other Introverts” so what’s the one thing that you wish that you could tell them, the people who think, “If I just get into speaking this is where my career is going to go. Now that I have my book it’s a passport to being a paid public speaker.” What would you tell them?

[1:00:52] Joanna Penn: Well I think from that perspective, it definitely can be. Many non-fiction authors make far more money from speaking and their book is like a business card but what’s interesting is if people aren’t speaking at the moment and they don’t know how that goes then I thought I wanted to be a speaker, I actually saw myself more like Tony Robins. I was like, “I am going to be the British Tony Robins. I’m going to run self-help things and I’m going to write non-fiction and that’s going to be my future.” But the reality of speaking for me and that’s why I wrote this Speaking For Introverts, is that introverts get energy from being alone and they are very tired when interacting with people and many authors are introverts because if you do this a lot, you spend a lot of time on your own, in your own head and physically alone and if you don’t enjoy that then again, why are you bothering? But public speaking as an introvert is very, very tiring and I actually used to think I was abnormal. So if people listening, if you haven’t read Quiet by Susan Cain that is definitely a book I recommend to people. If you feel and you resonate with what I’m saying, read anyway because chances are if you’re an extrovert, people you know like one of your parents or your siblings or your child or your spouse will be an introvert. It’s like 50% of the population. So for me, speaking at the beginning I was like, “Yeah I’m doing lots of speaking” and I was so tired and I just couldn’t work it out. I was like, “What is going on with me? Am I ill?” I didn’t use the word introvert at the time until Susan Cain did Quiet and then I realize that actually maybe that wasn’t the reality of the life I wanted. So this is really important again it’s like, “Okay, I think this is what I wanted to do. I’m going to do it” and then if it doesn’t suit you then you need to pivot. So now, I only speak a couple of times a year at where I wanted to network with people or I want to travel. But I try and not speak and again, coming right back to the business of this, speaking is also non scalable. So unless you are going to film your event and then sell an online course that relates to that material, you’ll do that talk, you’ll pay for that talk and you’ll never get that time back and you never get that money again. Your time is gone and that’s the other lifestyle design thing, for me like the book is the ultimate scalable product. A novel particularly is scalable because you never have to update it unlike non-fiction which most people have to rewrite non-fiction because it gets dated overtime, even if it’s you who’s dated. You’re like, “I am not that person anymore.” So for me speaking was a kind of almost a transition from the day job because it’s good cash flow even if you have a small audience. Even if you run your own events in a local venue you can make a thousand, $2,000 in a day just by charging a $100 a ticket for example. Which is kind of what I did and that’s a good return if you need some cash but then as I said, if it’s exhausting you and you’re kind of broken then maybe that is not for you. So those are some tips but yeah, if you wanted to be a speaker once you have a book all I think you need to do is put it on your business card to say author-speaker-entrepreneur. Put it on your website, so have a speaking page that’s front and center, like you do on your Charlie Hoen site you have “Speaker.” And then people know that they can actually book you and then also as I said running your own events is really good too. If you have expertise that other people want, that could be a good way to start.

[1:04:25] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, so let’s say you’re maybe not particularly – you don’t have a personal brand online but you do have a book and you’re like, “I want to do a few speaking gigs at these bigger companies,”how would you approach that? What do you do with your book? Do you send it to the people and cross your fingers hope for the best?