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The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers
Don’t Call It Art: Rediscovering Creative Joy With Austin Kleon
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Welcome to the Creative Pen Podcast. I'm Joanna Penn, thriller author and creative entrepreneur, bringing you interviews, inspiration and information on writing, craft and creative business. You can find the episode show notes, your free author blueprint and lots more@thecreativepenn.com and that's Pen with a double N. And here's the show hello creatives, I'm Johanna Penn and this is episode number 867 of the podcast and it is Saturday 6th June 2026. As I record this in today's show, I'm talking to Austin Kleon about his new book Don't Call It Art. We talk about how you can regain the sense of joy in your creative work even after many years of working as a creative, productive procrastination, silly rituals so you don't take everything so seriously and how Austin's newsletter went from a marketing cost to a day job income on top of his book sales. So that's coming up in the interview section. In Writing and Publishing and Book Marketing Things. Orna Ross on the Self Publishing with Ally podcast has an episode on does social media still sell books? Which is a great question, as of course it does for some people with some types of books who use some different social media in the right way so that it does sell books. And of course that doesn't stay the same forever. Which is kind of the point, as Orna suggests that it might be time for an audit on how you are using which platforms. Orna says if social media doesn't appeal to you or you don't feel you have the skills, you have two leave or develop those skills. The key is aligning the values of your social media presence with the values inherent in your books. And that takes time. As ever in publishing, there's rarely a quick win. Also, I do think that sort of short and quick content often doesn't work for many of us. We want to sink deeply into our work and I'm pretty much one of those. Orna says if it drains the interiority that your books depend on, it's obvious this won't suit you. And obviously I do mostly long form content. So I like podcasting and this podcast. But then I was reflecting on it thinking, oh well, I don't want to spend my time doing short form content. But this podcast takes a lot longer to prepare than probably a week's worth of short form content. So when I speak to people who do say multiple TikTok videos in a day, I will probably spend more in a week curating this introduction doing the interviews, checking over. I mean, I do have a AI help now with various bits of the process, but it's obviously still me preparing this intro, doing the interviews and checking over what goes out. And yes, so I think that the amount of time it takes is probably comparable or I'm doing spending longer on it, but it's more about what suits you. So doing one bigger thing rather than lots of shorter things. For example, other trends Orna talks about in the post, the old single town square mod, or for example, everyone is talking about the same thing on Twitter or everyone's talking about the same thing on Facebook or Instagram or whatever is over. The platforms have fragmented, each serving different age groups and social groups. And video has also become a genuine sales engine like nothing else for certain books in certain genres. So in the background to all of this, there's also a growth in different ways of reaching a community of readers, a growth in subscriptions, reader communities and director reader platforms like Patreon, which I obviously use, Substack, which Orna uses, Kickstarter, which many of us use, and direct sales through WooCommerce or Shopify stores. Orna says writers are getting comfortable with the idea of selling direct and building up readers on their own websites and using social media to drive people toward these owned platforms is where things work really well. Social media and direct sales go hand in hand. And this is sometimes called social selling. And I think in the old days, in the olden days, like when I got on Twitter, what was it, 2006? I want to say it was 2006, 2007, those first few years, it was all about. The idea was sort of 80% of the time you were not posting your content and you were spending your time having conversations and all this. And then 20% of the time you could do something about what you were selling. And in fact, Gary Vaynerchuk did a book on this called Jab, jab, jab, right hook. Kind of a violent metaphor really. But the idea being that you would do more of the giving value side and then you would ask for the sale. But what we See now on TikTok is it's essentially a shopping channel. It's social selling. It's all about the sale and the content is all about driving things towards that. So it's a really different world. And of course that's not true everywhere. But I think it's really interesting how things have changed. I mean that that's happened to a lot of, a lot of things over time. It kind of moves from conversational and gentle to more of a hard sell over time. But going back to the article, Orna talks about doing this Aud so first of all, list every platform you're on and what you do with it. Are you active or dormant? And if you're active on a platform in what way then think about what it does for you. Does it actually achieve anything? And consider the true cost in energy, time and money. Does it drain you? Does it energize you? Does it feed you in some way? And of course it doesn't have to be financially, it doesn't have to be book sales. It could be connecting with other authors for example, or a learning opportunity. So does it feed you in some way or just take from you? What is the point? This is such a big deal in all we do then make some active choices. For example, I really like Instagram, but I mainly post on Instagram @jfpenauthor with photos. And I don't use Instagram in any particularly targeted way. It's a lot about being proof of being human. I do link back to my content pages. It helps me curate, I guess, my photo. I take so many photos and then let's say I visit a Gothic cathedral, for example, and I. I might take, I don't know, four photos in one day or maybe more than that. Like I take so many photos and then I go on Instagram and I can post up to 10 and I will often post 10 and I have to choose the top 10. That's actually really good for me because then when I do my email list, I don't go to my photos on my Apple account, I go to my Instagram account and I pick those photos. It means I don't have to do that curation more than once. So that's really useful. And then I often auto post to my Facebook page and I do run ads. So I keep my Facebook pages going mainly for running ads from. I don't often go in there anymore, but I think I will keep those. Like I like posting on Instagram, I like looking at photos on Instagram and then I keep Facebook for advertising. So those are some good reasons. I'm still on X at the Creative Pen, but I mainly look and I do still post, but not in the way I used to. So back in the day, in early days of Twitter, for maybe five to seven years, I was sharing links that were interesting for authors. That's kind of how I started building up my authority, I guess. And my platform on Twitter was sharing useful content and then obviously posting My own as well and. But I don't really do that much anymore. But it is where I get my AI news. Twitter or X. X is the biggest platform for people who are sort of using AI. So I get all of my AI tips from there, which helps me help you through Patreon, like the webinars I did recently. Now, of course, some authors who left X after Elon Musk took over have come back. Stephen King is probably the most famous one of them. So there's, there's plenty of conversation amongst authors, but it's not a place to sell books in my opinion. It's more a conversational hub. I have a profile on LinkedIn, but it's super old. Don't really use it as you know, I'm not on TikTok. Basically I do not use social media to actively try and sell books. I use it, as I said, more like this sort of visual diary, a way to find content. But I have this long form podcast and Patreon which is where I interact with a number of you and then I have my email marketing side, sort of my email lists and so take someone like me and do not model me when it comes to social media, I am just not the right person. And compare this to my friend Sasha Black, who as Ruby Rowe uses TikTok and Instagram to very, very effectively drive traffic to her Shopify store, Kickstarters. Social media absolutely sells books for Ruby Row and is designed to do so. Is a deliberately designed social selling in action. And I think this is the difference. Like you have to decide what you want to do, you have to do some kind of marketing. I'm sorry, but you know this is true by now. And so what do you want to do? You learn the skills and you change your attitude. If I wanted to become better at social media, you know, maybe I will decide. Never say never, right? Is it too late to go on TikTok, I wonder? But yes, I do think that you have to decide how you're going to use these platforms and do the things that feed you in whatever way that is. And also find an author who's actually doing what you want to do and model them. Don't randomly just throw things up and hope for the best. So in the same way I spend time every week curating this introduction, doing interviews for the podcast. You know, I spend time and energy on what is a marketing activity, but also does make me money in other ways. I mean that might be another angle for me is does podcasting sell books? Hell yes, it absolutely does. But again, if you do it in a certain way, so whatever you do, I guess this is the question, is it serving you? Is it serving what you want to achieve and then find someone who's doing it in that way and model them? And I think we can also start to question what purpose AI can serve in this, because obviously you can very easily now just use AI to spin up lots of content and automatically schedule it and put it all out there. But what's the point? So if you are going to do that, and obviously I'm pro AI and I have now the meta mcp. So I had Claude setting up Facebook ads for me this week and if you missed my advanced advanced AI webinar, MCP is basically a way for agentic AI tools to connect to different services without having to build any custom automation. And they can create ads and monitor things and run analytics and all of that. So I am definitely open to new ways of using these tools, but I still think we have to question why are we doing it? And then is it working? So let's say you are using these AI tools to spin up content and push it out there. Does it actually convert? Is it converting? So whatever we do, we're not just doing it unquestioningly, we are examining what we do. And then of course you can just go, okay, do you know what, I'm just off social media, I'm going to do something else. I'm going to do local library events with no recording at all, or local in person school events, no recording, just connection with other humans. So you are an independent author, you get to choose your own direction. The most important thing is not doing things unthinkingly, so making active choices and deciding your own direction. So sticking with some AI things. There was an article in the bookseller here in the UK called Trial by Algorithm last week with a lot of hand wringing over the use of AI for literary prizes. And you might have seen the controversy over over as ever. The most sensible comment comes from the aforementioned Orna Ross, who as well as being the founder and director of the alliance of Independent Authors, is also an actual active author writing and publishing her books and poetry. And yes, Orna's a friend of mine and we do the self publishing with Ally podcasts together sometimes. But it always annoys me that so many of the commentators in this space work in publishing but are not actual authors. So I always think it's really important for us to. Obviously people in publishing have completely valid opinions, but. But if you want opinions from actual working authors Then make sure you check what people do. So in the article, Orna says that what's eroding trust isn't AI use, it's the panic around detection. With Olga Tokarshuk's I think that's how you say it recent statement that she used AI to conduct research as part of her writing process, showing that even a Nobel doesn't insulate an author from accusations. Orner says the real reason is why in an industry that is quietly threading AI through every process and cutting content deals with AI tech companies are writers. The only people being interrogated, cancelled, harangued, doxxed, review bombed, and worse for AI use. Authors, like everyone else in publishing, are increasingly using AI in their creative publishing and business processes. At Ally, the Alliance of Independent Authors, authors identify as one of three archetyp AI Minimal, AI Assisted and AI Integrated. And I like that because you even if you say, oh I don't use AI, you are AI minimal if you essentially use Amazon or Google or pretty much anything online now, which all have AI at least wrapped in it somehow. But yes, three archetypes AI Minimal, AI Assisted and AI Integrated. We encourage our members towards respect for each other's choices. We also encourage them toward transparency about use and will keep doing so. But in this climate where AI is being wielded as a weapon against authors while everyone else keeps their tools in their pocket, we understand why honest disclosure may be impossible for many. Orna said that Ally's position is simple. Judge the work, treat authors as capable adults, and if you're going to interrogate provenance, interrogate the whole chain or stop pretending it's about integrity. Trial by algorithm serves no one. I love that. Judge the work and treat authors as capable adults. I think we should all be doing that. Stop feeding the trolls and just get on with your creative work, however you choose to do that. And there's also a blistering attack. It's an excellent article, an attack on the hypocrisy of the publishing industry around its attitude to AI by Mark Williams of the New Publishing Standard. Now Mark works in the Gambia, in Africa, and is just even more independent than the rest of us because he lives outside of the bubble of Western publishing, really. And his articles are international in focus and insightful. He's one of the only sort of publishing blogs that talks about the African publishing industry, in the Middle Eastern publishing industry, the Asian. You know, he really is over a lot more international work than certainly I am or anyone who's working within the Western market. So it is a great article. Please go read it as it is. Long and considered view on all the publishing industry's hypocrisy over who gets to use AI tools, who doesn't, and who we should care about and who we shouldn't. So a little excerpt from it. He says publishers have constructed with meticulous care a moral circle around creative labor. Inside the circle, authors, illustrators, narrators, translators, the human artist whose displacement by AI is framed as an existential crisis, a theft, an assault on imagination itself. Outside the circle, engineers, warehouse operatives, phone operators, metadata specialists, marketing copywriters, junior editorial assistants, the human workers whose displacement by the same AI is framed as efficiency, innovation or simply not mentioned at all. He outlines the publishers and he does name a lot of them, goes into all the details who condemn AI usage on one hand, while in the same breath talk about how they are using it themselves for cost reduction and automation. And says the industry's AI ethics do not apply uniformly to AI companies either. They apply in precise correlation with commercial dependency, so any company they need is not attacked. And the biggest of course, being Amazon, which owns the world's dominant book retail platform, the world's largest audiobook service, the world's largest self publishing infrastructure, and through aws, provides the cloud backbone for much of the AI industry itself is conspicuously absent from publishing moral campaign. And he mentions Amazon's Audible launching virtual voice offering AI generated audiobook narration at minimal cost, threatening the professional translators. But he says publishers are businesses and they will follow the money. The money trail leads inexorably to embracing AI, whether authors and other creatives like it or not. As he says, publishing is not anti AI, it is pro revenue, as all industries are. And AI is currently both a threat to some revenue streams and an opportunity for others. The threat gets the moral language, the opportunity gets the press release. I love that. That's such a great quote there. The threat gets the moral language, the opportunity gets the press release. Like we're doing these amazing things with this one tool and then other sort of articles moralising over the whole thing. And it's fascinating, I think, in terms of all the ways that publish companies are using AI and automation. But we need to think this way too and consider that if AI is a threat to some revenue streams and an opportunity for others, what does that mean for us? And I've been talking for years and saying that digital revenue will just inevitably go to zero as abundance continues to a point of content generated for an individual on demand. And that is certainly already on the horizon. But We've seen the indie author community already begin and begin to adapt to this the rise of the gorgeous limited edition signed hardbacks. Thanks to everyone who backed my Kickstarter book boxes in person, sales events, private communities like my Patreon that double down on being human approach all things that AI cannot replicate and that we can be paid for. But at the same time, look at what publishers are actually doing with AI in their businesses, not what the vocal minority of moral crusaders are focusing on. I don't want indie authors to fall behind because we are too afraid to pivot and use the technology to drive us forward. It very much annoys me because we adopted ebooks and digital audio first. This is how we surfed the first wave of transformation between 20062007 to, let's say, 2020. We were ahead. We adopted all of this first. We adopted digital marketing first and then traditional publishing copied us and in a lot of cases has taken the lion's share because they have bigger budgets. But now they are ahead of us in adoption, in AI in business, faster than the author community because they're not paralyzed by fear of judgment. So yes, rant over for today, but I hope that has given you something to think about. And the alliance of Independent Authors has a short AI survey if you would like to help shape advice for authors by sharing how you use tools and also what you need in terms of help. The survey is at selfpublishingadvice.org aisurvey2026 self publishing advice.org AI survey2026 I will put the link in the show notes and if you'd like to hear conversations with authors who are unapologetically using AI in all kinds of interesting ways. Have a listen to the Brave new Bookshelf podcast which has some fascinating episodes. And of course I talk about about use cases in my own Patreon community as well. And in personal news. And this circles back to the very personal side of what we do. I went up to the Book Vault printing factory this week. It is a big day out. Leaving on a 6am train from Bath. I go into London, then across London, then another train north, then a taxi to the factory, getting there about 11am and then signing and then doing it in reverse. It's it's Definitely, definitely a 12 hour day, door to door with most of it in various forms of vehicle. But boy is it worth it. So I am so grateful that I get to do this. And I did put some pictures on Instagram Fpenauthor so you can see and as I said it's my sort of where I put my proof of being human. And there is me human me signing books. I'm so grateful for Book Vault and the quality of the books they produce. The gorgeous foiled hardbacks with my custom end papers which I am thrilled on of I made with midjourney and I love turning what's in my head into images and my human photos are in it too of the Soren Larsen the ship I sailed on back in 1999 that sparked that story. So the physical products are gorgeous, I signed them and those signed copies are in the post. So if you backed the Kickstarter, Bones of the Deep will be with you soon depending on where you are in the world. If you ordered the paperback and the large print paperback they went before so you might have got those already. And the hardbacks probably this week for the UK and maybe Europe, next week for the US and maybe the week after for Australia and Canada depending on the shipping. If you don't have what you ordered by the end of June, please let me know. Joannathecreativepen.com and you should of course have the ebook, the audiobook and the digital bundles already if you've already finished it. I've heard from some of you I'd love some reviews on Goodreads and Bones of the Deep will be out in by August I guess in the usual places. Also I will be at SPS Live in London later this week. The biggest self publishing conference in Europe I think. I am not speaking, I am just hanging out which I am really happy about. So come and say hi if you see me. I will be around having various meetings and but I will be around in the breaks and stuff. So yeah, come come over and say hi. As ever, selfies are fine but no handshakes so I will elbow bump people. That is my plan so I am not a disease vector. I will also be on the party on the boat so I might have a dance with anyone game for it. It should be a fun time and thanks to James Blatch and the team over at SPS for doing that conference. It is obviously a huge pile of work to do a conference, not something I intend to ever do on that kind of scale. So I'm again I'm really grateful for the opportunity to go to these things and be part of the community and anyone who takes that kind of organization on should absolutely be praised. And in fact Joe Solari will be there from Author Nation as well. I won't be at Author Nation this year. But again excellent conference. So yeah, and I think the sort of double down on being human, going to physical conferences in person, meeting people obviously learning things. There's loads of interesting sessions but many times it is the people we meet at these things that can be the support for us and the opportunities for business in the future. So yeah, enjoy those live events and thanks for all your emails and comments and photos this week. So many comments on Jamie's interview about writing her story after the death of her sister. I'll just read a few Nina said, what a wonderful, heart wrenching interview. I send all good wishes to Jamie who wrote Weeping in Starbucks and retained humour and grace. Thank you for interviewing her so beautifully and sensibly. I appreciate that it's hard to talk about these topics so thank you for that. Julie said, this conversation with Jamie resonated with me in so many ways, especially around allowing yourself to change what you want to write without shame or judgment. And Thorne said, another great conversation. I so appreciate Jamie's perspective and her humour. Her new book is the first of hers I've read. It's got her voice is full of heart and I'm sure it will find the readers who love it. Absolutely. And then thanks to Zoe who sent pictures from Thawa in Australian Capital Territory Act A burial above a stony ground with view of Mount Tennant beside the Murrumbidgee gorgeous Australian blue sky and I I still remember landing in Australia in 2000 when we still used film rolls. I'm sure many of you remember that the ISO levels and here in the UK our light is very different so you need I can't remember if it's a higher or lower ISO but when I landed I actually had to get rid of those film rolls and buy new ones because the light in and that was Western Australia where I landed back in 2000. I flew into Perth and went north and then down through Northern Territory and all that and just the quality of light and Zoe captured that light in the photos she sent. Wonderful, wonderful place indeed. And Jen sent a picture from Rockaway in West coast Oregon with her cute little dog Blitz who loves the beach and sent a picture of St. Mary's by the Sea Church just steps from the BE. So that is wonderful. So you can leave a comment on the podcast Show Notes atthecreative pen.com or on the YouTube channel. You can email me, send me pictures of where you're listening or your favourite cemetery or churchyard. Joannathecreativepen.com I love to hear from you. It makes this more of a conversation. Today's show is sponsored by prowritingaid because however you choose to publish, whether you go indie or you want a traditional decent deal, you need to make your book the best it can be. ProWritingAid remains one of my absolute must use tools in my writing process. I use it to go through my first draft before printing and hand editing and then again after I put the edits into Scrivener since I always make more mistakes and I still write in Scrivener. So I do that before sending to Kristen my human editor. ProWritingAid knows all the rules of editing and helps you apply them. And of course you can choose not to make the changes as you you like. It helps with making your writing more active. Finding repeated words finding words and sentences you could improve, adding sensory detail, grammar, punctuation issues, typos, spacing, sentence structure, and more. Now of course I don't accept all the changes, but it helps find lots of problems. And ProWritingAid also has a set of useful reports now, including story strengths and weaknesses, areas for improvement, and other announcements. Analysis Using AI to help you improve so why use software to help? Why don't you just learn all the grammar and writing rules and apply them yourself? Well, we all use tools to improve our process and we are also often blind to our writing issues. It helps to have another pair of eyes, even if the eyes are software. So won't a human editor do all this? Well, they can, but I'd rather pay my editors to fix the things the software can't and comment on things that human readers will notice. Notice like potential things with character or inconsistencies or plot holes or structure. So I use prowritingaid as my essential editing tool before sending to my human editor. Check out the free edition or get 15% off the premium edition by using my link prowritingaid.com Joanna J-O-A-N-N-A that's prowritingaid.com Joanna this type of corporate sponsorship pays for the hosting, transcription and editing, but my time in creating the show is sponsored by sponsored by my community@patreon.com TheCreativePen thanks to the 8 new patrons who've joined over the last week, and thanks to everyone who's been supporting for months and years. If you join the community, you get access to all my backlist videos and audio covering topics on writing, craft, author business and AI tutorials. We had office hours last week with lots of AI use cases for author business so you get the replay if you do join and you can Come next time. The Patreon is a monthly subscription, the equivalent of buying me a black coffee a month or a couple of coffees if you're feeling generous. So if you get value from the show and you want more, come on over and join us at patreon.com P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com TheCreativePen Right, let's get into the interview. Austin Kleon is the New York Times and international best selling author of non fiction books include Steal like an Artist, show youw Work and Keep Going, as well as an artist, professional speaker and poet. His latest book is don't call it 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again. So welcome back to the show, Austin.
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Thank you for having me back. It's nice to talk to you again.
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A
Yes, I know. So you were on the show in March 2020 and at the time your book was Keep Going. And it was prescient considering the pandemic and politics. And so I wondered like, why this, this book, don't call it art now, was this something you see in the creative community or your life that made you want to write this book now?
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So I think 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. Like Keep Going is a book about like the world is kind of bottoming out and you're worried that your own creative work is how do you keep pushing through and keep making stuff. And I think this book to me is about what happens when you bottom out inside. When you've kind of lost that love and feeling for that 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. And 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 kind taught me how to tap into that because my kids were kind of these natural, you know, they didn't have I would spend all day talking to people who had creative hang ups and I'd get back in the house and I'd just be around these beings that didn't have any of them. It was really instructive. And I felt like if I could bottle the energy of my kids when they were about 4 years old and try to put it in a book book, I think it could really help a lot of the people that I run into and the people with the kind of problems that, you know, I hear from.
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A
So you mentioned that when you bottom out, when you feel this way, how do people know when they have hit that?
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Oh, I think it's like you just don't want to do it anymore, you know, like you're just kind of like, this just isn't, this isn't giving me back what it used to. I think when we first start, like when we start with our creative work, that's kind of this thing that, where it juices us, you know, we come away from it feeling full up, you know. And I think that 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, or maybe it's all the stuff around it, which is more often the case. So for example, if you're a mid career writer like me, who's been publishing books for 16 years now, now I still really like writing, I still really like drawing, I still really like cutting and pasting and putting things together and all that, the admin around the work, as I call it, 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. And so it's really important for me to make sure that I'm having some playtime, so to speak, some R and D, some research and development time to make sure that it's not just all business. Because I think 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.
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Yeah, and I'm at 20 years, so I know exactly what you're saying. And a lot of listeners also, same thing, have been, you know, we love writing books, but as you say, it's all, all the stuff that goes around it. So for those of us who do this for money as well as passion, what are some more practical ways, I guess, to have more fun with our creativity?
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Well, 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, on I start another little project and that's my little naughty fun time. So one of the things I do, like when I'm working on a book or when I really, when I'M doing anything is 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. And that could be making one of my blackout poems. That could be making a collage in my notebook. Notebook that could also be sitting here. I have a bass in the studio now, so I can practice my bass guitar. And 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? And then I think the juice that you get from that little naughty, I'm gonna do what I'm not supposed to be doing right now thing. I think that kind of carries into the rest of the day. It's like a nice start to things. Things.
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A
So do you think that that play should be ocean? Should is a bad word, but could be something that's different to what we make our money with. So for me, writing novels and stories is both 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. Lego or something.
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B
Right. And so the trick is, how can you make making your stories, like playing with Legos. That's kind of been my whole career is trying to figure out, like, I hate staring at Microsoft Word, you know, and that blinking cursor, you know, like, it's just taunting you. Like, come on, what do you got? You know? So a lot of my creative life has been about trying to make it more playful, like, trying to make it feel more like a game. And that's like, when I came up with my blackout poems. There are these things that I do where 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. But that was one little exercise. And then that, weirdly, that side, that thing I thought was just play, just fun. That kind of turned into my first book. So that's okay. Well, what else can I mess around with and play with, you know? So I do a lot of collage work in the studio, and I rarely actually use that. That for any of the books or anything. Sometimes I use it for my newsletter to illustrate the newsletter, but it's always trying to, like, the other thing is just trying to figure out, okay, how can I make writing a game? Or how can I make it more playful? You know, and there's different things that I do to kind of make it feel more playful. One of them is really stupid. I really believe in silly rituals. Rituals, because I think silliness is really powerful. People talk about their daily rituals. You know, Mason Curry has that great book. So when I was reading that book, I realized it was really the silly stuff that I really liked. Like, 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 I have these cigarette pencils. They're pencils that look like cigarettes in the studio. Studio. So I put one in my mouth before I start writing, and I pretend to be some old 40s writer on a typewriter, you know, so it's just getting in that I like. I like doing goofy stuff in the studio because I think when you do goofy stuff and stuff that you'd be embarrassed if anyone else saw it. It kind of gets you in that playful state.
- [37:42]
A
Yeah, it's interesting. And I mean, I felt that sometimes when I do this, but I very much. In your book, you have a section that says, don't take things too serious. And I feel like many. For many of us, we write memoir, for example. Some of us do, and that is very close to us. It's like the deepest expression of what we want to say in the world. It. It feels very serious. And so how can we hold things more lightly and not take things so seriously?
- [38:13]
B
Well, I think that for me, comedy is actually a philosophical position. And what I mean by that is that I think a lot of people set out with actually a tragic model of creative work in terms that I think a lot of people think, oh, I have this special gift, or I'm this. I have this thing that I really need to do, and I need to put it out into the world, and I need to see it. I need to make the world look more like I want it to look. You know, they kind of have this idea that I'm like, 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. And I think that there's another way of working where it's kind of more like, you know, I'm just a normal person trying to play with my environment and take my experiences and put them into something interesting, you know, so I'm gonna play and use my Wits, and we're gonna see what we come up with, you know, And I think they really are kind of two modes of life. And the pandemic taught me that. It was really when we were keeping our sense of humor. Humor, and when we're kind of having a laugh and kind of 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, like, well, we're in this tough situation. We got to make it into what we want it to be. You know, it's kind of like that. That felt really bad. But when we cruised along and we were just improvisational and we just went at things with kind of a lightness, I think that lightness is really. There's a great Elo Calvino essay about lightness in Six Memos, his book for the new millennium, I think it's called. But I think lightness is really underrated. Even when we're going about heavy work, having a sense of lightness and play with it, I think just makes the work better. But that's. It's a philosophical position of mine, is that I aspire to comedy. I aspire to a comic outlook on life, that I'm just a creature with a body who's going to die, and I'm fundamentally ridiculous, you know, and that life is pretty absurd, and you just make the best of it.
- [40:30]
A
Oh, no. Well, yeah, that's. There's certainly some truth there. But then I guess, kind of staying on the similar thing, you have a chapter in the book on permission to be bad.
- [40:40]
B
But.
- [40:41]
A
But I also, as many of the listeners also have your book, show your work, and it shaped many of us into sharing our work in progress. And it feels quite dangerous now in a world where judgment is, I don't know, much louder than it maybe was when you wrote show your work. So tell us a bit about the permission to be bad versus should we keep some of this private?
- [41:06]
B
Well, I think the permission to be bad is about the making part of things. Things. It's the private part. It's permission to be bad. When you're in private, when you're in that kind of. Like, 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. You know, it's not like, hey, let me let people into. Let me. But it wasn't ever like, let me put up a webcam and run a 24, 7 feed. You know, 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 work itself? So the way I see permission to be bad is you just 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. And it doesn't necessarily mean quality wise. I mean, I think it also means let yourself write stuff that you would never say on social media, you know, let yourself read stuff that you wouldn't admit that you were reading on social media media. Let yourself listen to stuff, you know, let yourself really be that kind of unfiltered, unhinged, private person that you want to be. And then when it comes to sharing, you put some time in between that input time and that making time in between the sharing time and then you share what you think is going to be useful or helpful or interesting to other people. People.
- [42:37]
A
And yeah, I think you wrote that book before TikTok and the, the, yeah. Really, how fast people are moving? Do you think people need to slow down a bit in what they share? Maybe, I don't know.
- [42:48]
B
I mean, I think that social media, I think I had a lot more, I mean I obviously had a lot more faith in social media back then. I think it's turned now to all like I use all the principles from show your work in my newsletter letter, which I think like newsletters are very much the new kind of great. They're doing a lot of the work that like social media used to do and that you're still able to kind of have this direct connection with the people that you're trying to reach. The big problem with social media now is that it's just all algorithmically tuned where you, 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. And so that's like a whole different thing. But as far as the show your work principle, which is share your process as much as your product. That carries over to any, I think it carries over to any platform. And so in my newsletter every week I share, every Friday I share a list of 10 things that were going on behind the scenes here. It might have been like what I was watching on tv, it might have been what I listened to, it might have been a new pen. I was trying out or something like that. But the Friday newsletter is almost always like, process stuff. And I. When I talk about process, my definition of process is actually very broad. I think for a lot of people it's like drafting, editing, like, whatever. For me, the process is the whole life, you know, like, to me, the process is almost like everything except the finished thing, you know, because a writer's life is. It's 24 7. I mean, my friends, you know, my friends who have real jobs, haha. You know, I think they really are like, what do you do all day? And I'm like, well, what do you mean? You know, like, well, I see you out on your bike ride, and I'm like, yeah, when you see me on a bike ride, I'm thinking through something half the time. Or I'm whatever. If I'm watching tv, I'm thinking, hey, would this go good in the news newsletter? You know, it's like, I'm never off. My whole life, everything is copy, as Nora Ephron said, you know, and that's part of the job, is that it's very hard to turn off. So to me, I see the whole life as process. And so 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? And so, like, 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've put out a book.
- [45:31]
A
So. And it's funny you saying that. I actually, I was at the dentist yesterday, and my dentist literally asked me, so where do you get all your ideas? And, you know, this is a common question for all of us, right? And. And then. And it just becomes so hard to explain that to people who don't walk around in the world just constantly getting ideas.
- [45:49]
B
I mean, it was funny one time I was like, I, this is. I can't believe I'm gonna tell the story. I was getting my vasectomy after my second kid, and I was. I was talking to this doctor and we were just about to do 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. I said, that's everything that you want your doctor to say, you know, cut into to you. And he said, oh, no, no. What I mean is, I know what I'm gonna do every day for the next 10 years. You know, he. He knew exactly what his day was going to look like. But he was like, you, you have to use your brain. You got to figure out new stuff and whatever. And I was like, oh, that's really interesting. That was a funny. But that was another funny moment. And that's the trade off, right? He's like, he's got the, he's got job security, you know, he knows he's going to too. But yeah, it was a really funny moment. That was one of my favorite because I think every writer has a moment where they have to talk to a normal person, which is most of the
- [46:57]
A
day, actually, I was gonna say I'm married to one.
- [46:59]
B
Right. About what you do, you know. Now, my wife, on the other hand, grew up the daughter of a writer, so she knows exactly what it's like. You know, she. Nothing ever phases her, her. So she's totally used to it. She's used to, you know, me like, 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. You know, she's used to the whole, like, rigamarole. So it's very handy. I've been very lucky in that sense.
- [47:29]
A
So coming back to the book, you talk about your use of bibliomancy for inspiration, since we're talking about that. So tell us about that. I think all the book people listening will be. Be happy.
- [47:40]
B
Well, yeah. So 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, big book. And when I really don't have any ideas, I will turn at random to the dictionary and I'll kind of close my eyes and I'll stick a. My finger down the page and I'll open them and I'll just see what I come up, up with. And sometimes just that act will give me an idea. But I also do that with books. Like I'll go around the studio, I'll just pick up a book and flip to a random page and just see what it says there. Or read an old piece of like, marginalia that I've left in a book. I just, I believe that. I believe deeply in the power of bibliomancy and I think it's a case for paper books. I mean, I'm one of those people that still really. I believe deeply in reference books. I've started collecting more and more of them. So I have like a. I have an old big dictionary that's always open on my desk, and I look up words I Learned from John McPhee, actually, the writer, that you should look up words that you think you know. That's the first time I ever heard anyone say that, believe it or not. Is that so I look up words that I think I know, and 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 for the first time, a thesaurus. And I don't think most people know what an actual thesaurus is like. I think most people think of a thesaurus as a synonym finder. And that's not actually what a thesaurus is at all. A thesaurus is like a weirdly. Like, it's like an encyclopedia weirdly. It's like knowledge. That's. It's a very strange thing. Thing. It's. You look up things based on big concepts, and then it gives you a bunch of words to look up later. It's. It's a very strange thing. It's not what most people think it is. So I have a couple of editions of Roget in here. I like the really old ro from like the 1900s, because they actually have opposing ideas facing each other on the page. Do you have an old school Roget? Have you ever.
- [49:57]
A
Yeah, I mean, I was just thinking, I don't have one now, but I certainly grew up with them. And I was literally just thinking, I wonder if there are ones for Americans and ones for British people. Because so often we do say different things, like we mean different things. I always hear Americans say, oh, that's a doozy or something. And it means a completely the opposite thing here.
- [50:19]
B
Say fanny pack over there. That means something very different than it means here, right? Or chips or fries. That kind of.
- [50:26]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I wonder if there are different ones for different cultural references.
- [50:31]
B
But I think that as people, I'm someone who, you know, with chat GPT and like all these LLMs and stuff. People are like, why would you ever pick up a reference like 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, and I like having to scan a page for the word I'm looking for. Because this marvelous thing happens when you're looking for the word where you bump into all these other Words. And then if you're a word nerd, you get to start thinking about, like, the root of the word and, oh, why is this word next to this word? Well, it's because they share the same root. And then you're going down all these fun rabbit holes. And my 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 for. So 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. Like, 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, whatever it is, then it can spit that picture out for you, right? 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 I'm making something, I'm actually trying to. 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. And that's the real magic for me. Sometimes you write to, like, I have an idea and I want to articulate it for people. People. But more than often than not, there's something that bothers me or something I want to talk about, and I sit down and I write and I figure out what it is that I actually have to say and what I actually think. Right. I think every writer really knows this. And that's why the. The dictionary, stuff like that. Those are ways of training you to get in that discovery mode of. Well, let me. Oh, I bumped into. I went looking for this one thing. Thing, and then I ran into this other thing. That's why I love the library. I don't know what system you all use over there, but it's like 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. And then you end up with three other books other than the one that you were looking for. You know, that's kind of the magic to me. That's the magic of creative work, is 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. Which is very rare in the population. It's about 2 to 3% of people. And there's probably some people listening to this right now who are like, what is this? Tell me.
- [53:26]
A
Like, it's actually more common in the creative industries.
- [53:30]
B
It's interesting. So what it is, is that you don't see. When I say, close your eyes and picture an app 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, like, some people, like me, I can close my eyes, I can tell you what the apple looks like, I can tell you what color it is, I can tell you where the shading is and that kind of thing. Someone like my wife doesn't see the apple. She could tell you, like, what an apple is. And it's really interesting because she has a degree in architecture, which is known as this very visual field 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 Aphantasiacs. And the reason is, is that they learned that they had to draw in order to see things, right? Like, and what happens is when you don't have a picture in your head head of what you want something to look like, then when you start drawing, you're not disappointed. Things appear in the drawing and you find things that you weren't, you know, you did. You couldn't even picture. And a lot of writers actually are Aphantasiacs, Like John Green discovered recently that he has Aphantasia. But it turns out that it's a superpower for writers because if you don't have a picture in your head head, then you don't have to translate that picture into words, Right? A lot of writers, they talk about thinking in radio. Like, they have a constant. Like, my wife has a. She's probably gonna kill me for talking about her this much. But my wife, when she describes it to me, she's like, oh, it's like a radio in my head. It's like I'm constantly hearing a voice and it's a narrator. And I was like, holy, that would be really helpful to me. I don't have anything like that in my. My head. And in fact, I read Mrs. Dalloway for the first time. And I gave it to her and I said, you got to read this book. I was like, because I think this is. This must be what it's like in your head. She said, oh, my God, it is. You know, but it was like this thing where. So part of the thing that I took away from that experience, though this is a long winded way of getting here, is that I take a lot of inspiration from. From people with this condition. Because 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 and they get really like, 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. Appears. That's more of that comic mode I was talking about earlier. I was trying to articulate is what would happen if we just sat down with our materials and we started playing and we saw what appeared on the page. So what if we started typing and we saw what appeared and then we played with that? You know, that's. That's the kind of joy that's more like how kids operate, you know, and kids are better at that. They're better at reacting to what's actually in front of them. Them instead of having these grandiose visions about what they're trying to achieve.
- [56:50]
A
Yeah. Just coming back on the longevity of a creative career as well. Your books are very distinctive. You have a very distinctive visual style and your handwriting and the way the books are done. And I wondered if another part of the kind of 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 do things that we have a voice and we're happy in that voice, but maybe sometimes we want to do something completely different. So for authors, we have different names, so I write under two different names and that helps. But equally it's like, how do you, I guess, define author voice? And do you ever feel like doing something completely different to your normal style?
- [57:41]
B
Style? Yeah, I mean, like, I think that style in a lot of the ways is self plagiarism. You know, I mean, style is kind of the repeated things that we notice in people's work. I mean, Hitchcock talked about this in films. Wes Anderson is someone like that. Wes Anderson has a style. You know, we would say there's a Wes Anderson style. And I'm sure. That he gets really sick of it, too, sometimes. But I also think it's. Its style is something that you also can't help. Help in some ways. It's like style I thought a lot about, because people worry about style so much. And I think that style, a lot of the time, what we call style is what Adrian Tomin one time said. Style is just the. The distance between what's in my head and what comes out of my hand, which. I really like that definition. I think it's interesting. I've been playing around with this book. It was really. I was trying to think, okay, if I do another book in that I use that word. If I do another book in this series, how can I, like, 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. Do you have.
- [58:55]
A
No.
- [58:55]
B
All right, so Taco Bell, for people who don't know, is this American Mexican chain, and they have tacos and burritos and stuff like that. And they're well known for. For making these really insane. Like, this is so. It's so American, this company. They'll do, like, they make a taco with Doritos as a shell. Like, Doritos is this chip. It's not. It's crisps, I guess.
- [59:22]
A
Yeah, we have Doritos.
- [59:24]
B
Yeah, you have Doritos. Okay. So, like, I spent time in England. I just don't remember if I ate Doritos when I was in England. But anyway, so I was reading this article about Taco Bell. It was really funny. This. They have a. They have a innovation kitchen at Taco Bell, and they have a rule about new products. The rule is. It's called the distinctiveness rule. And the rule is you could change the flavor, or you could change the taste, or you could change the form, but you can't change both at the same time.
- [59:57]
A
Okay.
- [59:59]
B
And 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. Success. And you have. And you're known for something, this presents an interesting thing. Like, you could do a complete break and do something completely new, or you could try the distinctiveness rule. It's like, 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 like, what if I do another one of these books? But the taste is. It's more like if my kids made it like, it had the texture of like kids art and it had like lots of scribbles in it and it was loose and messy and stuff like that. So it was kind of the idea. Now I think the actual book ended up being more of like the other books. It ended up looking like an Austin Kleon book because I just kind of can't help that. But the thing you said about having multiple names that you write under, I think that's kind of what I do with. I think of the newsletter as very different from the books. The newsletter is this kind of twice weekly thing where I can be a little bit more of myself. I think in the books I'm like this very helpful, happy version of myself. And then I think that the. So it's a. It's me, but it's like me on my best day. Yeah, really helpful and interesting for you. And then the newsletter is a little bit more of. It's still a highlight reel in a sense, but it's a little bit more of my weird. Everything I'm into, it's kind of the. More of the unclipped version of me. So the newsletter becomes a place where. Where I can do a lot of the weird stuff that's much different from the books. So 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. And as someone who's interested in a lot of different forms and a lot of different genres and just different modes of output, I think having something like a newsletter has been really creatively fruitful for. For me, it's kept me from getting too bottomed out with the books because I know I. The books do a certain thing for the reader. And as much as I'd love to do a book that was like radically different, I also think I've been given a real gift with the form of my books and that I kind of own the way that they feel and look and stuff. You know, 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 will be hard to get rid of it now. I think the pseudonym for me is kind of like the. The newsletter in a sense. I mean, the newsletter is a little bit more of where I get to be kind of wild and wacky and then books are a little bit more of a chiseled thing.
- [63:05]
A
No. And the book. I mean, the books are perfect. They're perfect examples of the form, as you say. But it's interesting, the newsletter, because you mentioned at the beginning that again, we can be drained by the admin around the work. And for many people listening, the newsletter becomes admin. So how does the newsletter fit into your business? Obviously, the books are traditionally published. They are very professional. They're all that kind of thing. How do you have your independent side? And how does all of that work together in your business?
- [63:33]
B
Yeah, that's a great qu. Thank you for asking that question. Because I run the whole show at the newsletter. The newsletter is just me, and then my wife. 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 do. I pick who gets in there. I pick everything. And I love that. I love having that. I've always wanted to be. I grew up watching David Letterman over here, and Letterman had a nightly show show, and I always thought that was killer. I thought, man, what a fun job. Like, 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, you know? And 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, and it was always. It quickly became a list of 10 things I thought were worth sharing. And I had a friend who was like, hey, I have a newsletter. It's bigger than any conference you've ever gone to. Like, he was talking about south by Southwest here in Austin. He's like, I have a newsletter now. It's bigger than south by Southwest. And he was like, his name is Hugh McLeod. And he was like, I remember him. Yeah. So, yeah, he would say, every time we have a print, I have this newsletter, and I put it out. And every time we have a new print, you just put the print in there and there's button and then they buy, you know, he was just like. He was like, you got to get it. He's. This newsletter thing is killer. And this was in 2011 or something.
- [65:10]
A
So, yeah, I have. I still have his books. Blogging your underwear or something.
- [65:14]
B
Yeah. Yeah, totally. So he was like. He was a whole different story. But I was just like, oh, I should really get a newsletter. And I love. Like, I mentioned Letterman. Letterman always had a top 10 list on his show. And so I just always thought a 10 list was just really fun. And of course, the books are lists of 10 too. So it just worked to have a weekly list of 10. It just felt good. And it felt like an infinitely repeatable format. Like, what I'm looking for as a creative person is I'm really looking for 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, like, people know the form goes back to the Taco Bell thing, right? They know like the form, but they're not sure what's going to go inside. They know it's going to be a burrito. Burrito, but they don't know what's going to be in the burrito. And that's the exciting part, right? So the newsletter, business wise, was always a marketing cost. For about the first, let's see, eight years of its existence, I paid Mailchimp to send it out. And then in about 2021, when I was. I hadn't done a book for a while, my agent said, you know, you should. And this is to his credit because he doesn't make anything off the newsletter. He said, you should really think about doing a paid tier of your newsletter. And there's this thing called Substack now that makes that really easy. And 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. And then that grew enough that it's a significant. It's gone. So the newsletter has gone from a marketing cost to something. Something that's almost. It's not quite as much as I make on my books, but it's close. And to be candid, like, my books sell pretty well. So, yeah, so suddenly the newsletter has become this really healthy income stream. And so the newsletter to me is actually the day job now. So the newsletter is actually what keeps. I think that that really keeps the lights on. But it's also. It's the perfect mix of it's the day job. It's the thing that keeps INC coming in on a regular basis. But it's also the thing I like to do the most because I'm not like a traditional writer who likes to just get lost in their book and take years and years and years and go away. And I'm someone who loves to just be doing a lot of different things. And so the newsletter is just like a perfect format for me. I'm talking myself into not quitting, actually, but it's gone from this thing that was a marketing cost to now it's like a significant part of our income. And so it's been very very interesting. That journey. That's such a bad word journey that trip from that is very interesting and it's been really cool. But I'm also just the lucky just been like really lucky and I think that part of my I'm always just trying not to squander my love luck.
- [68:28]
A
Well the book is fantastic and I know people are going to love it as and the newsletter of course. So tell us where can people find you and your books and newsletter online?
- [68:38]
B
So the easiest thing to do is to just go to austincleon.com and that has links to everything, the books, the newsletter and 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. So I'm hedging my bets because I think in the end everything will come back along to a self hosted website. Think in the end everyone's going to just go back to their little websites or at least I hope so in the little corner.
- [69:07]
A
Well that was great Austin. Thanks so much.
- [69:10]
B
Oh thank you.
- [69:16]
A
So I hope you found the interview with Austin interesting. Please let me know what resonated from the interview or indeed the interest. Introduction Please leave a comment on the podcast Show Notes at the creative pen.com or on the YouTube channel, or email me joannathecreativepenn.com and please send me pictures of where you're listening or your favourite cemetery or churchyard. Next Monday I'm talking to PD Aliva about writing cross genre, selling direct and serializing fiction on substack. So happy writing and I'll see you next time. Thanks for listening today. I hope you found it helpful. You can find the backlist episodes and show notes@thecreativepen.com podcast and you can get your free author blueprint@thecreativepenn.com blueprint. If you'd like to connect, you can find me on Facebook and X at the Creative Pen or on Instagram and Facebook fpenauthor Happy writing and I'll see you next time.