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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 837 of the podcast and it is Saturday the 15th of November 2025. As I record this in today's show, I'm doing a solo episode about lessons learned at Author Nation 2025 with thoughts on sessions I attended, as well as how to evaluate vendors and businesses you might want to work with. As there are so many now the importance of money management, times of turbulence, and comments from others who were there and who are at different stages of the author journey. So that's coming up in the interview section. And as I focus a lot on author business, I have reduced my book you, Author Business plan. It is now only 99p on my store for the ebook audiobook and the PDF workbook. And the audiobook is narrated by Human Me and I've reduced that for the rest of the year. No special coupon needed. And it is also in print. It's also on all the usual stores or you can order at your favourite bookstore or library. But if you would like the reduced copy, go to thecreativepen.com Plan 26 Plan 26 the numbers 26 and that will or link in the show notes as ever, but I wanted to make that more easily available. Your Author Business Plan if you're putting a lot of these things into practice for next year in writing and publishing things. Well, first up, there are a ton of scams going around at the moment, particularly lots of scam emails, many of which are sent from Gmail accounts. Now one of these scams that many of you have now told me about is someone supposedly from my team asking you if you want to come on this podcast and pay for it. Now trust me, this is not how it works. First of all, I don't have a team reaching out to pitch people for the show. I get way too many pictures every day as it is. This is also not a paid for podcast and some podcasts do charge to go on a show, but not mine. I ask people on the show if I'm interested in a topic or if I think it will be useful for you as the audience. And if I do ever reach out to you, it is because we know each other in person or any email will come from joannathecreativepen.com so if you get a email and it may be lovely approaching you and asking you if you want to come on the podcast, then if it's from a Gmail account, I'm sorry, it's probably spam, so mark as spam and delete. But yes, watch out. At the moment there's lots of these going around and because they're using AI to find information from your book, they can be very personalized and very flattering. So they might be saying, do you want to be part of a book club? Do you want to be used in this movie? Do you want to work with this publisher? So yeah, just be careful with emails that come to you at the moment. Also, my dad is a visual artist and he's been getting them as well for other things. So if you're in any kind of job you will probably be getting some kind of spam emails, so hopefully these will be soon marked as spam. I think the difference is that old spam was the same email sent to loads of people, so it was much easier to pull out by the automated services. But now the emails are very individual, so I think it's much harder to know when things are spam, but I trust they will figure this out. But for now, please watch out for those. Also, Spotify have announced recaps. This is currently in beta, which means only a few people have it, but it is rolling out, presumably to everyone, eventually. These are short audio summaries tailored to your most recent listening point. They are designed to help listeners jump back into stories they've put down, whether it's after a busy week or a doze during a bedtime story, or simply needing a refresher before diving back in. Recaps only cover the portion of the book you have heard. So much like a previously on feature for tv, recaps help you easily re engage with a story without needing to re listen. This is designed to reduce friction and keep you immersed. Recaps are part of Spotify's ongoing effort to make audiobook listening more seamless, intuitive and listener friendly. One author J.H. marquett, author of Spider to the Fly, described recaps as an audio bookmark that speaks. Adding using it once blew my mind. As sophisticated as it is smart, this feature is a must for any audiobook lovers out there. When you return to a story, tap the recap button at the top of an audiobook's page to hear a tailored summ summary of what's happened so far. Your first recap will be available after you've listened to the first 15 to 20 minutes of a book, and they're regularly updated to match your progress, helping you rejoin a story without spoilers or full book summaries. So it sounds like it's a pretty interesting feature. Recaps use AI technology to help you catch up, but the work of authors and narrators stays protected. We are not using audiobook content for LLM training purposes or voice generation, and recaps do not replicate narration or replace the audiobook in any way. So I did ask them about non fiction because I pretty much never listened to non fiction in the same order, but they said it's not really designed for that. I think it's more of a fiction tool, so if you jump around or even like a short story anthology, I don't know how they'll manage that, but I think if you listen to fiction, particularly maybe long books or books in series, that might be really useful. So that is Spotify recaps. And I also wanted to mention I did have a meeting with the Spotify team at Author Nation and I asked them about the publishing with Inaudio because in the past you would publish on Findaway Voices and then it would distribute to Spotify. And so I thought, well, with Inaudio you can still do the same thing. Now you can, but it is better since they are actually not the same company anymore. Inaudio is a different company, so using both is the best way. So if you're wired with audio it's now a bit like ebooks. It used to be a lot simpler, but now you are loading your audiobooks to multiple channels as well. So how I do it is I put my audiobooks on ACX.com for Audible if they're human narrated and I click the button for non exclusive. Then I upload to Spotify for authors specifically, then specifically for Spotify, then in audio for wide stores like Barnes and Noble Audio, Apple Libraries and more. I also use Inaudio for Kobo, but you can load audiobooks direct into Hobo Writing Life. Then I also upload to Book Funnel for my audio that you buy direct through jfpenbooks.com and creativepennbooks.com and just remember, if you like listening to audio, you can get bundle deals more cheaply at my stores in audiobook format. And the Book Funnel audio app is just like Audible. I mean it has all the same functionality. So if you are a big audiobook listener and don't currently buy audio direct from authors, maybe give it a go. You're going to get some really good deals from buying direct from authors. There's I then also publish my audiobooks on YouTube, hecreative pen and fpenauthor, so my fiction is there too. I do this a bit later. Most of my audiobooks are up there now. I get ad revenue on the Creative Pen and I also consider my fiction channel more about marketing as it's not monetized at the moment. But also I want all my books in the AI systems. And Gemini, Google's model has access to YouTube, so it's another way I think we can be more discoverable in the AI systems if you choose to be discoverable as I do. And of course if you want more on self publishing audiobooks, successful self publishing the fourth edition, which is a free audiobook on creativepenbooks.com narrated by Human Me goes into that more and also I have a book audio for authors as well. So in other things, email marketing remains the stable base of author marketing. And BookBub has a new article on 22 Ways to Grow your author email list. It includes of course the Reader Magnet where you offer a book for free and then email readers with new releases and offers later. But they also have lots of other ideas including offering discounts on books just like I've just done, which you can only really do if you control your own store access to behind the scenes extras, quizzes, giveaways, special merch that only you audience can get, joint promotions with other authors like those run by Book Funnel, live events and virtual events with sign up. And then of course you can list your sign up in your back matter in your books and on your website, in your social media. There's certainly no excuse for not doing at least those last few things. For example, I know some traditionally published very very successful authors who were never able to put a link to an email sign up in the back of their books and then they sold a ton of books, had a massive supposedly a massive audience. But when things changed and their publisher moved on and the series stopped publishing, they could no longer reach that audience. So don't be the author who sells a ton of books and didn't collect any emails at all. Future proof your career by making sure you build your email list. It's not a sexy marketing topic, but it is still the basis, certainly the basis of my business. Along with this podcast. Of course if you sell direct you get all the emails if people opt in when they they buy. So that is another way they didn't really cover. So definitely check out the article as it will give you lots of ideas. And that's the BookBub blog at insights.bookbub.com link in the show notes and also I wanted to add another resource to my main section on Author Nation coming up soon as Jamie Albright and Sarah Rosette have an episode on the Wish I'd Known Then podcast about Author Nation, which I think dropped after I'd already recorded the other part of the show. So they talk about how Author Nation went for them and they also have some guests on the show, including Damon Courtney from Book Funnel, who talks about the launch of signed ebooks, which I also mention in the main section, which is very exciting. They talk to Alex from Book Vault about bespoke printed editions and of course Book Vault are my printer for my Kickstarter campaigns and my Shopify. They also talk to other authors, vendors and an audiobook narrator. So definitely a great episode to get other perspectives. That's the Wish I'd Known then podcast in personal news, I have been catching up with lots of admin after Author Nation and also my coursework on my master's degree. I am full time on it and I got behind so I really intended to do a bit of work every day while I was in Las Vegas, but it just didn't happen. So if you do go to these author conferences, make sure just to clear the deck. I've actually written a ton this week. I've written probably about 10,000 words, which for some people isn't a ton, but for me it's quite a lot. And I've written the post coming up, which I'm obviously talking through, and then worked on a couple of my essays for college stuff. So yeah, I'm just playing catch up and then because I have had jet lag and I've been tired and I've been trying to do too much. I annoyingly I broke my little toe at the gym yesterday, so it's not even a cool injury. I mean it's one of those just being tired. I was walking between the toilet and my stuff and I stubbed my toe on a very hard object. And yeah, so I was getting changed. It wasn't even like an active injury, but it is a good job. I didn't like drop a weight on it or anything but I I thought I would share that because if you are coming back from a conference, you're going to be really t tired. I think some people think especially if you've been away from your family and people think, oh, but you've been away, you know, thinking that you've had a holiday. But I just want to remind you that going to author conferences is not a holiday. It's very, very stimulating in so many ways for your brain, for your body. Also traveling to a different country, across different time zones, in a different environment. So like the dryness of Las Vegas affects many of us quite hard compared to so I just, I wanted to share that and I'm fine. It's just bruised and there's nothing you can actually do for a broken little toe except not keep using it and rest and everything. So it's just a reminder to be a little kind to yourself if you have got back from something big. And yeah, you may not have had a holiday, you may actually need a holiday. Ah yes. And also in this run up to the holiday season, I know Americans have Thanksgiving and then of course we all have Christmas and New Year. And on the one hand it's like, oh, there's so much to do before the end of the year. And on the other hand I certainly, and maybe many of you feel like perhaps you need to start doing less. I try not to do too much in December every year because I know I'm going to be really tired and January is a much better time for me to do stuff. So anyway, I wanted to share that with you and a reminder to just don't rush, take some time and be kind to yourself. So thanks for your emails and comments and photos. There are so many comments I can't read them all. So thank you. I love getting them all and always lovely to hear from you. Ashley Westcott said about Wendy's interview on memoir. I absolutely loved this interview. So much of it rang true. I had to laugh. A decade ago I had written a hundred thousand plus word memoir style novel and my readers asked why nothing ever happened. Naturally I had no sense of plot, just characters meandering around. Now I write auto bil biographical fiction. I think that's also called just auto fiction where most key plot points are made up. But a lot of the scenarios the characters encounter come straight from my life. So that's awesome. Ashley. I'm also still getting lots of comments and emails about Don's interview on caring, which touched so many people. Trista said, Listening to your recent episode on Creating While Caring with Don King While a four month year old sleeps on my lap at our home in British Columbia, Canada, up prior to the birth of our son, I'd begun to devote more time to writing with an eye to developing an author career outside my 9 to 5 now with the little one. It feels impossible to make time for anything outside of the endless feeding, sleeping, diaper changing, Groundhog Day routine, which of course is its own sort of joy. It's inspiring to hear how others find the space to share emotionally and creatively when they're already giving so much. So thank you Trista. And yes, and remember, I think everyone also remember that things change and if you don't have time now because of family or care or health or whatever, there will be other times later. And Mag said on Becca's interview I love Becca Syme. I have heard her on lots of podcasts. Her voice and her words are soothing and inspiring. I've listened to this three times now and there will definitely be a fourth and a fifth. I never usually listen to podcasts more than once. I'm off to sign up for her Kickstarter. Fantastic. Thanks Mags. And finally, thanks to Kay who sent me a photo of a death mask I came across at Haddon hall in Derbyshire. It is Lady Grace Manners and the grave of Robert Charles John Manners. Lord Haddon looking very relaxed on his tomb. Yes, memento mori indeed. Okay, please leave a comment on the podcast Show Notes at the creative pen.com or on the YouTube channel at the Creative Pen. Or you can email me, send me pictures of where you're listening joannathecreativepenn.com or if you get a scam email and you want to check whether it's from me, JoannaTheCreativePen.com I love to hear from you. It makes this more of a conversation. So today's episode is sponsored by Book Funnel, who get a lot of love in the main section of the show today as well. One of the fastest ways to find new readers is partnering with other authors in cross promotions and book swaps. The challenge coordinating with multiple authors and delivering books to thousands of readers usually turns into a logistical nightmare. Bookfunnel makes group promos simple. Upload once, deliver everywhere, and watch your email list grow without broken links, frustrated readers, or late night tech support. Smart authors know collaboration beats competition. Book Funnel makes sure your promotions actually work instead of falling apart at the delivery stage. Ready to grow your audience faster? Start@BookFunnel.com TheCreativePen that's BookFunnel.com TheCreativeOpen so this type of corporate sponsorship pays for the hosting, transcription and editing, but my time in creating the show is sponsored by my community@patreon.com TheCreativePen thanks to the 10 new patrons who've joined this week and thanks to everyone who's been supporting for months and years. If you join the community, you get access to everything all my backlist videos, audio articles on writing, craft and author business and tutorials, tools and what I think is coming next. Plus you get to ask questions for the audio or the live office hours on Zoom. This week I shared 22 things you can use AI for, including lots of extra resources that have nothing to do with actual the actual writing. So hopefully that is useful. 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 my roundup of Author Nation Lessons Learned From Author Nation 2025 in early November 2025 I attended Author Nation in Las Vegas along with around 1500 other authors and lots of vendors. There were about 80 different sessions over four days and then a separate Reader Nation signing and book sales event. The sessions were on different tracks so you could go to basic craft and self publishing things or more advanced sessions around CRAF publishing or for business and mindset. I spoke several times, once as part of a panel on long term career strategies, once in my own solo session on collaboration with AI, all the things you can use AI for that are not writing, and once in a private meetup for my patrons. Congratulations to the Author Nation team for delivering such a fantastic conference. I know how hard everyone worked and it went super well from what I could see. If you are interested in learning more, check out AuthorNation Live for future conferences depending on when you are listening to this Authornation Live. So here are some of my thoughts from the 2025 conference. But of course, remember I am a writing conference veteran at this point and have been an author entrepreneur for a long time, so my takeaways will be different to someone who is at a different place in their career. One Double down on being human. Of course I'll always say that and the importance of connection in person if possible. To be clear, I know this isn't possible for everyone due to time or money or health reasons or caring responsibilities as Don's recent interview illustrated. But if you can, it's always worth going to conferences in person. If you do attend, organise well in advance. Schedule meetings early but also leave room for Serendipity make the most of meeting people at your level. Build your network There were people I haven't seen for years at Author Nation. So much elbow bumping, lots of connection, lots of coffee. While I did attend a few sessions, most of my time was back to back meetings and chats with other authors and vendors. And we had a great Patreon meetup with over a hundred people people. Thanks for coming. If you're a patron, author conferences are a great way to build relationships. And if you start with people at your level now, then over time you will grow and change. And some people will become successful in different ways. Some people will disappear altogether. But the longer you are in this business and the more you join in and help others, the more people you get to know. Social karma kicks in. Some of these relationships naturally turn into business opportunities and other author friends will be your support crew over the inevitable challenging years ahead. So if you don't feel like you have any author friends, or if you don't know enough people at your level, consider booking an in person conference for 2026. It could be a genre conference or a broader author conference like Author Nation, but get away from your screen and do some peopling. As hard as it is it worth it? Number two Constraints breed creativity. So Drew Davis did the opening keynote, and if you want to be a keynote speaker and get paid the big bucks, then it was a masterclass in professional speaking. I've done a lot of professional speaker training over the years, and it was inspiring to watch Drew's presentation and consider how he used multimedia, how he engaged with different mediums, how he made people laugh and brought emotion in as well as deliver a message. If you're ever in sessions or at events and you want to learn on a different level, consider the person and their skill, or lack of it, instead of the content. You can learn a lot from watching or listening to the person delivering and how they speak or teach or react to the people in the room. Drew's content was great as well, and he spoke on the Cube of construction, which can be the catalyst for supercharging your creativity. He had an actual cube too, on the stage, or a lot of them, which he then built into a sculpture later, part of his sort of multifaceted teaching style. In a world of unlimited possibilities, it's difficult to stick to one choice, especially if you listen to author podcasts like this one, or go to conferences where you ingest a ton of sessions like Author Nation. You will have hundreds of ideas and you can have popcorn Brain with things firing off everywhere. But if you don't settle into one thing or a limited number of things and focus, you might not achieve much. So Drew recommended deliberately constraining your work in four ways. 1. Eliminate the unnecessary. What can you stop doing in order to pursue the new thing? If you start something new, kill two things. Kill the easy one, then kill the hard one. And that was a really good tip. I like that because some things are really easy to give up and other things are really hard. So I was thinking back to when I was trying to write my first book. Plus build an author platform as it's always, I guess, been known, plus move out of my consulting business into being an author entrepreneur. So I was trying to do a lot, I was trying to learn a lot, I was trying to build things, I was trying to write. And so I gave up tv. Now I think this would actually have been easier back between 2005 to sort of 2008, 9, 10 was when I was doing that. TV was worse back then, I think. Plus this was really the very early days of smartphones, the early days of social media. So that wasn't much of a distraction. But giving up TV in the evenings, I mean I still did it maybe once a week or something, but I pretty much gave that up in the evenings, which gave me extra time. I needed to build a new direction. So you have to make the time somehow and give something up, give up the easy one. So as Drew said, kill the easy one, then kill the hard one. 2. Define the outcome. What single result defines success? For example, back in that sort of early book days, with my first novel, Pentecost, which became Stone of Fire, I had a goal to publish it on Amazon by my birthday. So that was the outcome book on Amazon by my birthday and I fell short by about a month. But I always find a birthday related goal is actually a good one as it's so memorable and clear. Like you generally know you have a feeling when your birthday is within the year. So it kind of helps you plan. And this relates to three Limit your options. What unreasonable limitations can you apply to your project? Give it a time limit like your birthday and a creative limit. That creative limit is also a good one. For example, some authors, especially with early books, get out of control. So if you constrain the genre and also limit the number of point of view characters, if you're writing fiction, that will make it easier to achieve your goal. So one of the big mistakes of new authors is trying to write like George R.R. martin. And in fact, even George R.R. martin has trouble with his point of view characters because he has so many. And the more point of view characters you have have, the more your book will expand. So if you limit the number of characters, point of view characters, the person whose head you're in for the chapter, and also constrain the genre, you are going to make it easier to achieve your goal of, for example, writing a book. And then 4. Raise the stakes what specifically will happen if you fail? This is a tough one as it's so personal and different people respond to different stakes. For me, I like achieving goals, like achieving goals is enough of a motivation for me. And so if I fail to meet a goal and doesn't happen very often, failing a goal is enough of a stake basically for me. Now some people talk about signing a check to a charity they hate or something like that, and sending it off if they fail. But that like literally doesn't motivate me. So whatever floats your boat. You have to decide what the stakes are, what will happen if you fail. I mean, it might just be another year has gone by, another year of my life and I still don't have that book out. And I've met a lot of authors for who that is enough of the stakes to get them moving. And as we know from writing fiction particularly, stakes are important to keep things moving and to keep people motivated and caring. So Drew also talked about turning constraints you already have, like time or budget or health or energy into positive positives. And this kind of reframing can help you embrace your situation. For example, if you only have 30 minutes while commuting every weekday to write well, so be it. Try dictating if you're alone or typing on your phone. I know several authors who've written books during a work commute and have started very successful careers. Like one author I was thinking about, Michael Laurent. I think he basically wrote his books with one thumb on his phone and he's written a lot of books. Or, you know, a busy mum who dictates while doing chores. Or again, coming back to Don's interview. If you're a carer, then raging against that may not help as much as adapting and changing your creative goals and being more relaxed about your time. And again. Go back and listen to that recent episode with Don on creating while caring, if that is your area. I've had so many emails about it and it really touched people. People. Anyway, I am embracing my constraints as I'm doing this master's degree right now in death, religion and culture, which I have told you about. This is full time. So I'm doing generally at least 20 hours a week of study and online lectures and reading really interesting topics. And then I'm writing essays. So I am writing, I'm writing a lot, but I don't have the time or the headspace to write books as well as essays. It's a very different kind of writing, a very different kind of study. And I'm currently working on three essays, and I thought you'd like to hear what they are. It will make some of you laugh and some of you just think I'm even weirder. So one is on natural burial. And if you know academic writing, it's critically approaching these areas. One is on natural burial, one on the ethics of using dead bodies to inspire commercial fiction. So how ethical is it for us to make money if we've been inspired to write by somebody else dying? You know, we get inspiration from everywhere. But are there ethics around where we get inspiration? That is the question. It's an interesting topic. And one on the depiction of hell in an area of art history. So these are three very different topics, three very different ways of approaching things. And my constraints around my author career are that I literally don't have the time or the headspace to do what makes me money, which is writing books. So I'm clearly collecting a lot of ideas for when I'm ready to write fiction again. Again. But I am also just basically doing the bare minimum I need to do to keep money coming in and my author business running. Now I have a massive backlist and I have ads running and stuff like that. So I sell books every single day by not really doing much. And the money comes in on the back list. But I am also and also from patrons and from affiliate and all the other things. But I am cutting things down. So Books and Travel is going back on hiatus. I'm doing fewer interviews here in 2026, and obvious I'm not likely to publish a book. I mean, I've got books I've already written publishing. So the Buried and the Drowned is coming out and Blood Vintage is now out, which I wrote last year. So I have those things and backlist marketing going on. But I certainly have constraints. So this question for you is what constraints do you have? And do you need to reframe them as positive constraints? Or how can you add constraints if you don't have enough? Don't give yourself unlimited possibilities. Add constraints. The four that we mentioned here. One, eliminate the unnecessary. Two, to find the outcome. Three, limit your options and four raise the stakes. Three. What do you need for a long term sustainable career? Becca Syme did a talk on sustainability for a long term career which tied into the theme of Author nation which was build your best life through rather writing. And of course Beckett was on the show recently and is always worth listening to. She started with a need for basic self knowledge. Do you know yourself well enough to understand what works for you and what you're capable of doing? Do you know what to say yes to and what to say no to? How are you learning more about yourself and your personality now? There's always a lot of talk about the CliftonStrengths assessment as that's what Becca specialises in and I've certainly found that very use myself. I also love Myers Briggs, I'm infj, which is uncommon in the wider population but very common in the author community. And when I discovered really, I mean very late, it was after Susan Cain's book Quiet came out I really learned that I'm an introvert. Like I didn't know that I was an introvert until I guess my about the age of about 30 I think. And so I had always thought I was wrong in some way and then I learned that I was an introvert and what that meant and that just helped me so much. It changed so much in my life and I was able to adjust things based on what actually worked for my personality made a huge difference also to my physical pain. I used to get migraines all the time and I just couldn't get rid of the pain. I used to take painkillers all the time and to try and get through the day. And then I eventually worked out. I was working in a open plan office. You know, back in the early 2000s you weren't allowed, it wasn't a thing where you could wear noise canceling headphones. And I was in like open plan offices of hundreds of people and for introverts and highly sensitive people that kind of stimulation was just too much. And as soon as I moved into working on my own in the quiet I just stopped getting headaches. So there's a practical way which that helped me. But learning about your personality, about yourself is just so important. Some of the other things Becca talked about included understanding the limits of your energy so you don't burn out out, making sure you reflect on and audit tasks so you know what to do more of and what to get rid of. For example, it's common to find authors not doing social media at all or like me I do not do TikTok or short form video or all of that. And to know when it feeds you and but of course other authors love it as the basis of their business and they enjoy doing it. And that's why I podcast. So for me, podcasting does feed me and I enjoy it and it also underpins my business. This whereas for others it might be social media, it might be email, it might be live events. Like there's so many options, but your personality is so important to that. Becca also talks about the need for a personal growth stimulator, a way to make sure you're always learning and growing and finding community. For me, that's mostly listening to podcasts, reading books and meeting people one on one. And at the moment my master's course, which is a lot of reading and thinking and writing essays and yeah, so much fun, fun. Becca also said you need to do a business edit or a Persona edit every now and then as you are likely over committed either personally or in business. And I know some of you hate to hear that, but are you over committed personally or in business? You need to take things off your plate, not keep adding more. And I talked to one particular author friend and she was saying all this stuff and I was like, hold up, hold up. This. You just need to stop, you need to stop doing some of these things. And many of those things were personal, they weren't business. And I was like, maybe you need to let go of some of the business stuff to make room for personal things that are not changeable. And of course we all have these different times in our life when there is no choice. Personal things happen with family or again, caregiving life stages where you don't have any choice, these things will happen. So having a reflection now and then of, hey, maybe I just need to stop doing some stuff. There are some of you listening with young kids as well, multiple young kids, like just stop doing some of the other stuff. Time will come when you have more time, basically. Also one very key point that Becca said, and I wrote it it down. If you can't tell whether something is working or not, it is not working. I actually love that. I can't tell you how much. I mean, I wrote down lots, but I put this in quotations. If you can't tell whether something is working or not, it's not working. And so often people are looking for, you know, am I selling lots of books or not? Like seriously, people who are selling lots of of books, they can tell that they're selling lots of books and I had some funny times in Vegas with a friend of mine who I was like, seriously, how are you getting those results without doing the things that most people are doing? And the fact is it was just working for her in these moments. And some things work for some people and it is bloomin obvious when it works, right? So I just wanted to remind you of that. And if you're like, oh well, I don't know whether it's working well, probably not working now. That doesn't mean it won't work eventually, but only you can decide whether or not it's worth spending time on. And my take on this is about understanding ease. The word ease is very difficult for workaholics like myself and I'm sure many of you listening. But what is easy for you? What is easy for you that other people think is hard? And so for example, example I always come back to TikTok. But it is easy for some people and then they're just selling books left, right and center because it's easy and they're good at it because it's easy and it works for some and not for others for sure. So what is easy now some people say to me like, how do I find time like me, how do I find time to learn so much about what's going on and listen to all these things so that I can share with you every week, every Monday I'm sharing things that you may not have heard about because I spend the week listening and inputting and and that's partly to do. My top five Clifton strengths are learner, intellection, strategic input and futuristic. By my very nature, I am constantly inputting, learning things, thinking about it, considering how they impact the future. And it is easy and fun for me as I live in the stream of input. I really do. I input so much every single day and I love it. However, the strengths at the bottom, you could say they are weaknesses mean that hard things for me are peopling and crowds, social energy in person or online. Which is why I think video really in any form, definitely short form, video is just not my thing. Also I can't do things. Well, I can, but it's very hard for me doing things off the cuff. I need to plan. I'm a planner. I like to think, I like to have everything done. I think very hard about how to do things. I spend a lot of time planning. Obviously with this today you can tell I've spent a lot of time on this and thinking all out and I could not do this off the cuff. Some people are brilliant off the cuff, but that's not me. So we have to know our strengths and the weaknesses. So if you do the Clifton strengths assessment or work with Becca in any way or do any of the personality tests, it might help you figure things out. But you can also just pay more attention to what is easy for you, what brings you joy and energy and fun versus what drains you and makes you unhappy. Now, we all have to push our comfort zone a bit for sure, but you need to be able to discern when to. I think discernment's probably the right word. Discern when you are pushing your comfort zone and trying something new and it's difficult versus something that is. Is just. Oh my. Oh, I really just. I hate this, I hate this and I don't want to do that, so I'm not going to do that. So you have to discern the difference as to what is worth persisting with and what is not. Becca also talked about the need to set boundaries, understand what to say yes to, when to say no. You need a community for support, you need to care for your physical body. And she mentioned you need a source of hope for the future. And that made me smile because I hope I can be part of that for you. I remain hopeful and excited about so many things. Change will continue as ever, but there are more opportunities ahead. So coming back to that, the question is what do you need to have in place if you want a long term sustainable career? You can find many more of Becca's wise words in her books and also on her quit cast and on her Patreon Patreon 4. How do you want your author business to run? Katie Cross did a Great session on SOPs. Standard operating procedures. Super sexy topic from Katie, but so important. Basically, SOPs are really just documents or spreadsheets with step by step instructions on specific tasks. But the most important thing is sections on why things are done and why they are important to your business. And that's what many people miss out on, preferring to focus on the how to rather than the why, which is more critical. And I get questions every single day saying how do I sell direct, for example, or how do I market my books? Wanting how and they want a sort of step by step tactical thing. But the bigger question is, well, why do you want to do whatever it is you're trying to do and are there other ways to do that or you know, all these things I'm talking about and I think it's perhaps a more advanced level question. And in fact most of the People who attended Katie's session, there weren't very many people there, but they were mostly people on the more advanced track of the conference. So the why is really critical. For example, selling Direct and TikTok are probably the most trendy topics in the indie author community. And there were lots of sessions on various aspects of those at Author Nation. Some of the numbers thrown around by authors doing these things are incredible, but also need to be questioned for your own business, since it's not for everyone at every stage. And it's quite funny because if you go back to the sort of, if you wind back to the earlier conference conferences, it used to be 20 books Vegas. Like, I mean, I want to say it's like a decade ago really when all that started and the big numbers thrown around were Amazon KDP in KU and then with Facebook ads. And I mean, there's always big numbers thrown around under whatever is the thing of the day. But of course, the thing of the day changes over the years. So let's talk about selling direct for a moment. I love selling direct through Kickstarter and Shopify in my very limited way. And in fact, I'm going to have a discussion coming up before Christmas with my friend Sasha Black, and it will be something like two different ways to sell direct, because we both do it very differently. I definitely do not want a warehouse like Sasha Black or Adam Beswick or David Veer Goots who does the letters. And I also don't recommend selling direct if you don't have an audience or a budget budget or a marketing funnel or time to set it up or at least test the technical side of it. And I, as much as I think it's awesome for some people, it is not a silver bullet to becoming a successful indie author in the same way that Amazon KU plus ads was not a silver bullet for some people either. And there will always be things that work for some authors, some genres, some books, and that don't work for others, other people. So coming back to selling direct, you need a good reason. So coming back to Katie's thing, what why are you doing it? Why is it important to your business, not just how to set up Shopify or how to set up TikTok integration or whatever. You need a good reason to commit to anything for the long term. And so you need a considered author business plan and where the money's going to come from and how you're going to do the marketing. Because at the end of the day, day, it doesn't matter what platform you use, you won't sell anything if you're not marketing. And that is often the side of the business that's missing. And I know some people are saying, well, I've set up my Shopify store and I'm not selling any books. And well, there you go. It's the same as if you put your book on Amazon and you probably won't sell any books. You have to do marketing. Anyway, back to Katie's talk. I went along because I'm interested in how we will work with AI agency agents in the coming years and I want to have SOPs so I can give them to my AI partners rather than human assistants. Now Katie didn't even mention AI. She is a superstar at working with other humans. That is her strength. But the processes can be used for either or both. You can have some humans, some AI, etc. She also mentioned that some SOPs are just for me, which is a really good point. You need to question why you are doing some things rather than just writing an SOP when you're outsourcing things. So consider your own processes and those that go on. Why am I doing this? I mean, just come if you're still writing your first book, it's still worth writing down. Why am I doing this? Then that will help you through the tough times. Why is this task important to my author business? And if you can't answer that question, maybe you need to eliminate the task altogether together 5. What are your contingency plans for when things don't go to plan? The team at Author Nation had to deal with lots of challenges. It's extremely hard to run any conference, let alone a massive conference with so many people. So congratulations to Jo and Suze and Shell, Jamie Isabella, all the volunteers, the whole team for pulling it off and doing an amazing job. It went incredibly well from what I could see. It was seamless, incredibly well run conference. It is an excellent conference that I highly recommend for authors, but what happened on the last few days was also a good lesson for all of us in business. So James Patterson was meant to be the closing keynote speaker and do a VIP evening thing and then sign at Reader Nation the next day. And his attendance in person was a draw card for many. I was personally excited about it, but he got sick and pulled out on the day of his appearance, only appearing on Zoom for a short time instead. On top of that, the government shutdown impacted flights, so many people changed their flights to leave earlier rather than get caught up in the expected delays. But Author Nation and the team there did a great Job of the show must go on. They didn't moan about it. They just got on with bringing in James Patterson by zoom and then interviewing other successful authors on stage. And they pivoted in a short time, which was super impressive. But it also made me want to reflect on the bigger lesson here. Things will not always go to plan. People will disappoint you. Publishers will disappoint you. Your own marketing attempts will disappoint you. Readers will leave you one star reviews. People will say things about you that are not true. Believe me, I've had it a lot. People will judge you. That has always been my biggest fear. And yet it happens every day and you can't do anything about it. If you are out in the public in any way, you will get criticism and rejection. And yes, there will likely be haters. The bigger you get, the more haters you get. That's just the reality. But on the other hand, if you hide, hide, if you try not to attract any attention at all, no one will find your books and you won't sell anything and you'll moan about that instead. This is the reality of the author life and you can't let these things stop you. The writing life show must go on. And then of course, even if you have everything sorted, something may happen that is outside your control. Like James Patterson cancelling and flights being disrupted and a political situation that makes people not want to travel anyway. Also like the pandemic, like the global financial crisis, like the dot com crash, all of these have happened in my working adult life as many of you listening will have also experienced. And these will not be the only large scale disruptions in our lifetime. So those three, the dot com crash, the GFC and the pandemic, they were all in I guess let's say 20 year period. So let's assume the next 20 years are to going going to have three more disruptions. These are just things that happen. There will be more. There will be large scale disruptions. For example, a political shift that does not go in your favor. This also happens. This has happened several times here in the uk. I didn't even mention those things. And there are of course personal disruptions that will blindside you too. Things that happen to your health, things that happen in your family. This is just life. So what do we do? Of course we keep creating. But I also wanted to mention, and I talked on the long term success panel about the biggest, one of the biggest mistakes I've seen authors make and that is bad financial management. It's the thing that destroys businesses. Regardless of what kind of business you run or what job you have, I've seen many authors hit it big and then spend it all without saving for the inevitable downtime time, or those who take on too much debt or overexpose themselves to risk, or those who have one stream of income instead of many, and when that one stream dries up, they have to start again. That's what happened to me in the global financial crisis. I had one stream of income, my job. Then we all got laid off in one day and none of us had any work. And there were hundreds of us all in the same city who were looking for work in that one area. And back in 2008, that's when I said I would build multiple streams of Inc. Income and not allow a single company to take away all my income in one fell swoop. Which is why I've never been dependent on Amazon either. And I now have so many streams of income. I need a pretty developed accounting system to keep track of them all, for which I am very grateful. Some of them are very, very small, like literally $5 a month or something, but some of them are significant. And if I lost some of them, then yeah, for sure that would be difficult. But I have a lot of diverse things and so I've really developed that in response to how I felt in the global financial crisis, which was I will not allow that to happen again. I will have things in different pots, in different countries in different situations so that that doesn't happen. But of course hard times will come. They inevitably do. So we need a buffer to weather the storm. Now just to be clear, this is not about the conference business of Author Nation. As Joe and Sue Solari are very experienced business people, they know about managing risk and cash flow and all that. Jo even has a consulting business helping authors in that specific way. But many authors are not experienced at business or money management. So if you don't feel confident in this area, check out my list of reasons resources@thecreativepenn.com Moneybooks TheCreativePenn.com Moneybooks this is an area of education you must have. And the only way to do it is to learn about it and to get over the mindset issues around money, to learn about investing, to learn about cash flow, to learn about all these things. That is an area for that you need to be successful in this business business. So first of all, are you confident in this area? If not, get educated. And then how exposed is your author business or just your life or your job in general to disruption. If something happens out of your control, what is the worst that can happen if there is something like this, can you weather the storm? Can you make contingency plans? Can you build multiple streams of income and how long will that take? What can you do to deep risk within reason of course. I'm not saying that you should have no risk at all. So for example, I left my very high paying consulting job to become an author entrepreneur. People thought that was pretty stupid and it took me goodness how long did it take me? It took me years to get back to my income. So I left my job in 2011 and it took till 2015 to make make the same amount of money as I had left. So yeah, you need to take some risks, but what can you do to de risk and have plans for when things go right, but also for when things go wrong? 6 How do you know when to work with a company as part of your author business? We use the term self publishing alongside being an in indie author, but of course we are not truly independent and you can't be a successful author on your own. We need service providers and software vendors and publishing partners and there are many of them trying to catch your attention now. It is always lovely to talk to the various vendors I've been working with for years, many of whom the people there I consider friends now. And at Author Nation I spoke to people From Drafter, Digital, BookFunnel, Kickstarter, ProWritingAid, Reedsy and Book Vault, as well as my editor Kristen Tate and others. There were many, many, many vendors at Author Nation. One of the good things they do, in fact is Vendor Day when you can meet lots of these vendors. Some are well established as some of the ones I mentioned. There were many brand new businesses and I hadn't heard of a lot of them. And I wanted to give you some advice about deciding which companies to work with, including the ones I've mentioned, including ones I use use. You shouldn't necessarily use them depending on where you are in your author journey. And there are so many pitching online and at conferences, many with budgets that are targeting authors and they're running businesses so you know they need customers. So I thought it might be useful to give you a framework because many of these companies are wonderful, but not all are worth working with for your situation. It it totally depends on your situation and where you you are in your author journey. For example, it makes sense for an author working on their first book to spend money on editing, but avoid vendors who want to help you sell directs as it is way too early for that if you haven't even finished your book. So here are some questions I consider when weighing up new vendors or services and then also reconsidering them over time because the industry changes changes, my needs change too. And I've changed vendors in lots of things over the years. For example, I used to use Grammarly and then I moved to ProWritingAid a few years back because I like the software better. I think they're more focused on authors. I got to know the team. Another thing I've done recently is I've moved back to Zoom from Riverside. I used to use Riverside for this. I've dropped that off. I've moved email services over the years. I've moved web apps, web hosts. Oh I've moved selling direct platforms. As things have changed, you have to reassess the vendors that you use over time. So anyway, I'm going to give you some questions and there are three things to consider. Well, three main areas to consider, lots of questions, and you could paste these into Chat, GPT or Claude or Gemini and ask it to help you evaluate a service. If you don't want to talk to the vendor directly or you can't find the answers to these questions on their website, which should raise red flags. Anyway, so a what purpose does this serve in helping me write, publish or market my books? Or as part of running my author business? For example, my accounting software Xerox doesn't help me write or publish or market my books, but it is very necessary in running my business. So it hasn't purpose. So yeah, what is the purpose of this vendor or service or tool? What is the cost versus the return on investment? How do I make money with this? How quickly might I get my money back if that is a consideration? For example, something like paying for audio narration or paying for translation, those kind of services, you really be thinking how do I make money from this or how do I get money my money back if I'm paying upfront? Also, are they asking for a one off payment and how long is that for? So it might be like a lifetime thing or is it a monthly subscription? Now if you sign up for a subscription, I recommend paying monthly, even if that is more expensive, which it usually is per month. But I find that reconsidering your costs every month and having the ability to dramatically reduce your costs is so important. And you might also change your mind. If you pay monthly, then you're not locked in. That's my general advice. However, I do pay annually for things I Definitely know I will use things like prowritingaid, things like Book Funnel would be some examples again for my business, not necessarily yours. B How how does the company make money? So how does the vendor or the service, how are they making money? Because remember, if it is free, you are the product in some way that might be through advertising. I don't, I mean there's lots of ways. But a company that lasts needs a sustainable revenue stream and they might run out of funding at some point if they have an initial investment or the investor wants their money back and they may need to change the time terms in order to make money. And we've seen this with some of the services online that kind of come and go based on how much funding they got versus how much cash flow they're making. And does the business have a sustainable business model and do they understand their competitors in the market and how do they compare? As I was walking around the vendor hall at Orthonation and I'm a tough customer, I know that. And I was actually with a friend of mine, Mel Amade, who is also tough in business and the pair of us were sort of questioning all these different things, which is really fun for us. It's fun for us to analyze businesses. But as I was walking around, I asked a couple of new vendors I'd never met before. I was like, so who are your competitors? And in my mind I know the competitors because I know the market. And so the answer I'm explaining expecting is often not the one I'm getting, which I just found interesting. So does this company understand the competitors and how do they compare? Like why would you go with one company over a different company? And then C, who are the team behind the company? How long have they been in business? Do I trust that they will be around for the long term? Because especially if this is something you're going to base a longer term decision on something like web hosting, for example. I have only ever got gone with big businesses for web hosting because it's such a pain. So I won't do small companies for web hosting. Then things like why do they care about authors? And is it important that they do? And then if you are in doubt, are they a partner member of the alliance of Independent Authors now? The alliance of Independent Authors. Fantastic organization, professional organization for indie authors. And of course Orna and Ross and the team were at Author Nation and they vet terms and conditions and contracts so we know that companies can be trusted. So I think that's always something I ask, you know, are you a partner, member of Ally and the alliance of Independent Authors. Now, none of this is necessarily to be judgmental about a company. It's just that the reality is if a company has, I don't know, has one author, as that's their entire business, then how sustainable is that? Or do they have a bigger team around them? How does the money come in? How are they going to sustain this with their life? It's just asking a lot of questions to kind of see how is this going to work? And also what part does this vendor or service play in my company? Is this something that if this disappeared, would this have a really big impact? Once you have all this information, you can make a more informed decision about whether to sign up up with them. Now, I say all this because I just heard authors getting excited and making emotional choices without considering their own author business plan for the years ahead or signing up for so many new services and tools that they're then overwhelmed. Because of course signing up for something is just the first step. You then need to incorporate it into your author business. So as an example, going to take Book Funnel and as full disclosure, Book Funnel was a primary sponsor of Author Nation. They also sponsor this podcast and I am an affiliate because I am a happy user of the service, have been since the beginning. It is a great company, a useful product for many authors, but not all as I will go into. So I've used Book Funnel for years to give away my free books, primarily a way of marketing to bring people into my ecosystem so they go on my email list so they would buy other books. And now I also use them for direct sales of ebooks and audiobooks through my stores jfpenbooks.com and creativepenbooks.com I would struggle to make money selling direct without Book Funnel. So yes, they make me money. They are worth the very reasonable cost, but the cost is reasonable to me because I make money. If you are just writing your first book, you don't need Book Funnel, so don't sign up in terms of their income. I pay an annual subscription to use Book Funnel, as do many thousands of other authors worldwide. So they have consistent cash flow. Damon Courtney, who is a wonderful coder and also fantasy author, founded Book Funnel a decade ago when he recognized the need in the author community for an easy way to deliver ebooks directly without all the technical pain we used to have to go through. Every year since, Damon has expanded offerings, expanded his team. They have a great service team and I know he cares about authors because he is an author. And if you meet Damon, at any event, you will understand how deeply he feels his responsibility to the community. But more than that, there are lots of lovely people in the author community, but the businesses don't necessarily last. Damon's business, Book Funnel, has already lasted more than eight years. I think since really they made good revenue. Considering most businesses fail within five years, any company that has been around for longer is doing well. I have also asked Damon specifically what happens if you die, because that's something, you know, I'm always thinking about death. That is just me. But they do have a succession plan and it's a question that he has considered, which is a responsible question when you have a lot of of authors depending on you. Another reason I wanted to mention Book Funnel is they launched personalized signed ebooks at Author Nation, which is a fantastic feature where you can. And obviously I haven't got it yet, but it's coming where you can sign a copy of an ebook for a fan or personalize it with a message. And of course I asked about personalized audiobooks, which I would like to do, which will hopefully come in 2026. I definitely want to do both of those, probably just for Kickstarters, because I imagine like physically signing digitally signing still takes time, so you need to restrict the numbers. And again, this is something for authors with an existing fan base, not for brand new authors with no readers. So I wanted to talk about this kind of financial and market analysis of vendors, since a mistake of many authors is getting ahead of themselves. For example, at a conference like Author Nation, going to sessions on advertising or Kickstarter when they haven't even finished a first draft of their first book, or like I said, signing up with a vendor or a service too early, spending money too soon. The industry changes fast, so finish that book first. Also, it's not just new authors who make mistakes. The biggest mistake of authors at my level is thinking things will stay the same. That the way of making money that works so well five years or 10 years or even 20 years ago will still work today. It won't. The industry changes fast, so you need to keep adapting, keep letting go of things that don't work anymore. And of course they might not work anymore because they don't work for everyone. Like the industry's change, the market has changed, or they don't work for you personally because your life has changed. I certainly have different goals at 50 than I did at 30. And back then I hustled so much more than I am willing to do now. I'm in a different life stage. And my author business is mature and stable, so I can do things differently than I did when I was starting out. Just for context, if you don't know my story, I started writing seriously for publication in 2005, so 20 years ago, back when traditional publishing was still really the only way to go. I was 30, I was living in New Zealand and then Australia, and I had just met Jonathan, my now husband. There was no iPhone, no kindle, no Amazon KDP, no TikTok, no mobile commerce. It was the very early days of Facebook, very, very early days of Twitter. There was still MySpace. Ebooks were downloadable PDFs. I kid you not. Audiobooks was mostly still on tape or CD. Or they were downloadable MP3s that you then had to use like a tape adapter in your car. Remember those where you put the tape in your tape deck and it had a little cord that went to your MP3.3 player. There was no real infrastructure for an indie author business. The term indie author, in fact, was only starting to be used as a term to be proud of. It was a different world and there was a lot of discussion of stigma. We don't really do that anymore. Oh, the stigma of self publishing. And now we're like proud indie authors. It really is a different world and we're so lucky now to have a fantastic ecosystem, to have so many companies and vendors here who help us with our writing craft, our publishing, our author business, our marketing, and also community friends along the way. And so I am not trying to put you off using vendors. I'm just giving you a framework for assessing what you need. And author conferences are a great way to find and meet vendors. So a big thank you again to Jo and Sue Solari, the Author Nation team, and all the vendors who supported the show. Because without vendors the these shows could not happen. Conferences are underpinned by vendor sponsorship. So brilliant. And in fact this podcast is underpinned by my patrons and my vendor sponsors. I just couldn't afford to do this every week without my vendors, without my patrons. So thank you so much. And yeah, and all the authors who attended bought tickets and all of the above. So I hope that helps you with assessing whether a company is worth you working for at whatever stage you're at in your career and also maybe help you assess what companies you're working for right now and whether there's anything you need to change. 7 thoughts from other people My perspective is only one view and I attended Author Nation primarily as a speaker and also as a Patreon host. And of course. As a podcaster, author of several decades and a veteran of many, many, many author conferences all over the world over the years, I didn't go to many sessions or take many photos. I didn't keep a daily log. I didn't journal. Most of my interactions were private one on one meetings. So I wanted to share a couple of other other perspectives and these people might also be listening. So hello to Amber Field who did a post on five overarching themes of Author Nation. She said, my hope was to meet other authors like me and to get inspired to do more book promotion, a task I hate and procrastinate on badly. I thought that would resonate with many of you. I've been a published author since 2023, but this was my first writing conference, so it's great to hear from someone who's going to their first conference. It really paid off for me. Amber says, I met amazing authors, got tips for every part of my author business, and just plain had a lot of fun. The themes she identified included AI is changing how we work, but not necessarily how we write. And that is great and you can use it for so many things without ever using it for writing. Amber shared how she got ideas about using AI AI for marketing from my session and others. And thanks for sharing the lovely picture of us. Amber Some of her other themes when it comes to marketing, you don't have to do everything. Indeed, pick something and do it well as well as be yourself. She noted none of the most successful authors at the conference followed in another author's footprints. Exactly 100% of them followed a path that can only be described described as doing what they liked, which often included hopping genres and doing side projects they found fulfilling. This is so true. And of course this year in 2025, my short story collection the Buried and the Drowned and My Masters in Death are evidence of me doing that. And I think it's good because it keeps everything fresh, it brings in new ideas, it means you're creatively fulfilled. It's not not just all about making money, it's also about creating creativity. So lots more detail and photos at Amber's Medium site and I will link to that in the show notes. Thank you Amber Field. And another hello to Pamela Hynes who posted on Substack every day and she then has a roundup piece with links to all the daily posts which I'll link to in the show notes. But this is excellent and so detailed and she says in her opening I went to Author and Nation as an editor and coach but also as a writer in need of reconnection. I wanted to learn, recharge, and see where this rapidly evolving publishing world is headed. I came home with a clearer vision for my work and a renewed faith in what happens when we gather. She also noted the first day of any conference begins long before the first keynote. It starts with a decision to show up. It's the power of presence, of choosing to step back into community even when it feels easier to stay home. For many writers, the hardest part isn't pitching or networking, it's walking into the room in the first place. Las Vegas may not sound like a literary destination, but Author Nation. Following the tradition of 20 books, Vegas transforms it into one. Between the home, hotels, neon and laughter, I found my people, fellow professionals determined to grow, learn and connect. The first handshake, the first panel, the first oh you too moment reminded me that creativity expands in the presence of others. This really is a fantastic representation of the conference. I highly recommend you go check out these posts at the end of the week. Panel Pamela says this conference has reminded me never to forget that the thing I work on alone in my writing space is part of a larger whole. That whole includes small entrepreneurs, big corporations, innovative idealists, editors, consultants, and most importantly, readers. We write to share something meaningful. All of it exists to serve a single simple act, someone reading a story and being changed by it. This conference allowed me to connect directly with that meaning and those individuals. As an editor, book coach, and writer, I'm leaving with sharper tools and deeper clarity. But more than that, I'm leaving with gratitude for the people who read, who believe in story, and who remind me that art isn't finished until it's received. Wonderful post, Pamela. I know how much work you put into all of that, so thank you for sharing. And you can check out Pamela's substack at Evolved Perspectives or just go to PD Hinds H I N E S P D h dot com and I'll also put the link in the show notes to the roundup posts but there are posts from every day and there are also photos and if you if you were at Author Nation, it's worth reading because Pamela's insights are really interesting. But if you weren't at Author Nation and you're thinking of it for next week, next year, it is a really good post. Posts because you can see pictures, you can get an appreciation of what it's like. And also I wanted to mention that I found both of these posts so Amber's and Pamela's because I just asked ChatGPT. So I said to chatgpt, can you find me some posts About Author Nation 2025? Now you if you're listening and you're like why didn't she find me? Well, I wanted to mention it because Pamela and Amber's posts showed up. So congratulations, you are discoverable. And in fact it was Pamela's Website, Author Website PDHines.com that it came up with. And I also did this on the morning of the 13th of November. So if you're writing after that, I may not have found it anyway, but I thought that was quite interesting, right? So my conclusion Author Nation is a fantastic conference and I highly recommend the show whether you're just starting out or whether you are a more experienced author. There are sessions for any level and there are people you can meet at any level and lots to make the most of. However, I won't be attending in 2026. I need a year off Las Vegas. I've done three years in a row now and I want to make room for other travel and other possibilities possibilities. I'm also doing this full time Masters now. I didn't know I was going to start this last year and I booked my ticket at the end of the last or Nation. If I had known I was doing this I don't know whether I would have gone. But I'm really glad I went. But I know that next year I won't be going to Vegas. I don't know what conferences I will do in 2026. My masters goes through until like October and I think what will happen then is I'll just want to write a ton of books and looks. I can feel that building up already. But I wanted to say that I highly recommend Author Nation as you have heard today and you never know, I might be back in 2027 so I hope you found this useful. Let me know. Put a comment in the show notes on the creative pen.com or on the YouTube channel or you can email me joannathecreativepen.com so I hope you found my roundup useful, although of course it was probably a bit different to some of the other round ups you've heard. My experience of conferences is a little different at this point. I hope it was still useful. And if you want to organise your Author business in 2026 I have reduced my book your author business plan to 99p on my store. The ebook and the AudioBook narrated by HumanMe and PDF workbook reduced for the rest of the year. It's also in print. It's also on the usual stores. You can also get it at your favourite bookstore or library, but if you want the reduced version go to thecreativepen.com Plan 26 Plan 26 and it will take you to the right page on my store. Or just go to creativepenbooks.com and you can search for it there. So please leave a comment on the podcast. Show notes on anything you found interesting@thecreativepen.com or on the YouTube channel. Or email me joannathecreativepen.com and again, remember, this is my email and so if you get one of those scams and it's not from thecreativepenn.com as a domain name, you know it's not me. Also, please send me pictures of where you're listening or your favourite cemetery or churchyard next Monday. I'm talking about writing the future and being more human in an age of AI with Jamie Metzl. In the meantime, happy writing and I'll see you next time. Thanks for listening today. I hope you found it helpful. You can find the backlist, episode episodes and show notes@thecreativepenn.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.