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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 843 of the podcast and it is Monday 29th December 2025 as I record this but it is going out on New Year's Day, so happy New year. Welcome to 2026 and I hope it is the best year ever for all of us. In today's show I'm sharing my creative and business goals for 2026 and I'd love to hear from you. What are your goals for the year ahead? Please share your thoughts or link to your own articles in the comments as I love to hear what you're up to. Right, let's get into it. My Creative and business goals for 2026 so I love January and the opportunity to start afresh. I know it's arbitrary in so many ways, but I measure my life by what I create and I also measure it in years. At the beginning of each year I publish an article and a podcast episode like this which keeps me accountable. And of course, if you'd like to share your goals, please add them in the comments. So 2026 is a transitional year as I will finish my Master's degree and continue the slow pivot that I started in December 2023 after 15 years as an author entrepreneur and you can listen to that episode. It's called the 15 Year Author Business Pivot and I'll link to that in the show notes. Just to recap the highest level, it was from digitally focused to creating beautiful physical books, from high volume low cost to premium products with higher average order value from retailer Centric to Direct first, from distance to presence and from creating a loan to the AI assisted Artisan Authority. So I've definitely stepped partially into all of those and 2026 will continue in the same direction. But I also have an additional angle for Joanna Pen and the Creative Pen that I am excited about leaning in to the transformation economy. So over the last few years I've struggled with my identity as Joanna Pen and my Creative Pen brand. When I started the creative pen.com in 2008, the term indie author was new and self publishing was considered vanity press and a sure way to damage your author career rather than a conscious creative and business choice. It was the early days of the Kindle and iPhone Both launched in 2007, and podcasting and social media were also relatively new. While US authors could publish on KDP soon after, the only option for international authors was Smashwords and the market for ebooks was tiny. And those days we used to do downloadable PDFs. Print on demand and digital audio were also just emerging as viable options. While it was the early era of blogging, there were very few blogs and barely any podcasts talking about self publishing. So when I started the creative pen.com in late 2008 and the podcast in March 2009, it was a new area. For several years it was like howling into the wind. Barely any audience, barely any traffic, and certainly very little income. But I loved the freedom and the speed at which I could learn things and put them into practice and share them. Consume and produce. That has always been my focus. I also met great people on Twitter and interviewed them for this show, and over those early years I met many of the people I consider dear friends. Even now. Since self publishing was a relatively unexplored niche in those early years, I slowly found an audience and built up a reputation. I also started to make more money both as an author and as a creative entrepreneur. Over the years since, pretty much everything has changed for indie authors and we have had more and more opportunity every year. I've shared everything I've learned along the way and it's been a wonderful time. But as self publishing became more popular and more authors saw more success, which is fantastic, obviously completely positive, other voices have joined the chorus and now there are many, many thousands of authors of all different levels with all kinds of different experiences, sharing their tips through articles, books, podcasting and social media. And I started to wonder whether my perspective was even useful anymore. Then, on top of the human competition, in November 2022 ChatGPT launched and it became clear that prescriptive non fiction and how to information could be very easily delivered by the AI tools with the added benefit of personalization. You can ask ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini how you can self publish your particular book and they will help you step by step through the process of any site. You can share your screen, you can upload screenshots, images, it can help with what fields to fill in, which is very useful for translations as well as writing sales descriptions, researching keywords, offering marketing advice, writing a lot of the marketing copy targeted to your book and your niche and tailored to your voice. So once again I questioned what value I could offer the indie author community and I pulled back over the last few years as I've been noodling around this and obviously I've continued sharing and interviewing and the Patreon and everything, but I really have been struggling with where do I fit. But over the last few weeks a penny has dropped thankfully. Here's my thinking in case it also helps you I want to be useful to people I want to help. In my early years of speaking Professionally, from around 2005, I wanted to be the British introverted Tony Robbins. Someone who could inspire people to change, to achieve things they didn't think they could. Of course, writing a book is one of those things. Making a living from your writing is another. So I leaned into self help and how to but as I said, that is now clearly commoditized. It is almost worthless on the basic level since it's everywhere. But recently I realized my message has actually been one of transformation and in the following four areas. From someone who doesn't think they are creative but who desperately wants to write a book, to someone who holds their first book in their hand and proudly says I made this. That's the new author. From someone who has no confidence in their author voice, who wonders if they have anything to say, to someone who writes their story and transforms their own life as well as other people's. That's the confident author. From an author with one or a handful of books who doesn't know much about business, to a successful author with a growing business heading towards their first six figure year or even going further. That's the author entrepreneur. And finally from a tech phobic fearful author who worries that AI makes it pointless to create anything and will steal all the jobs. Don't. To a confident AI assisted creative who uses AI tools to enhance and amplify their message and their income. That's the AI assisted artisan author. These are four transformations I have been through myself. Absolutely all of those four things are transformations I have made in my life over the last 20 years, really starting around 2005 and with my work as Joanna Pen and the Creative Pen. I have, I hope, helped you through some of those transformations and continue to do that. And that is why in 2026 I'm repositioning myself as part of the transformation economy. And yes, this is a thing. So what does this actually mean? Now there is a book out in February 2026. It's called the Transformation Economy by B. Joseph Pyne II, who is also the author of the Experience Economy, which you probably will have heard of and it drove a lot of the last decade's shift in business models. Of course it's not out yet, I have the book on pre order, but in the meantime I am doing the following I will revamp the creativepen.com with transformation as the key frame and add pathways through my extensive material rather than categories of how to do things. So instead of know how to write a novel, which of course I'm not changing the titles of my books by the way, they all fit into these new categories, but I'm adding navigation pages for the new author, the Confident author, the author Entrepreneur, and the AI Assisted Artisan author. They're going to be my four main categories of transformation and I'll add to those navigation pages over time. My content is basically the same as I've always covered these topics, but the framing is different, the intent is different, and I'm going to start using this different kind of language. The Creative Pen Podcast will lean more heavily into transformation rather than just information, and will focus on the first three of the the more creative mindset, confidence, business things. My Patreon will cover some of those things, but that is also where I do most of my AI specific content. So if you're interested in the AI a assisted artisan author transformation, come on over to patreon.com thecreativepen I know that's not for everyone. I have more non fiction books for authors coming and lots more ideas. Now I am leaning into this angle. I actually feel like this has really freed me up to think in a different way and also understand where I fit because these four transformations are what I have been through and continue, I guess continue to become always learning new things. But certainly transformation is the point. I will continue to do webinars on specific topics in 2026 and also add speaking back more in 2027. It's harder to think about transformation when it comes to fiction, but it's also really important since fiction books in particular are highly commodified and will become even more so with the high production speeds. Yes, Empowered by AI now of course all readers have a few favourite authors, but most high volume fiction readers, often called whales whale readers, will read a ton of books without knowing or caring who the author is and potentially are not looking for a transformation with every book. But yes, fiction can be transformational. Readers aren't actually buying a book most of the time. They're buying a way to escape, to feel deeply, to experience things they never could in real life. A book can transform a day from meh into fantastic. And over the holiday period, I'm sure, like you, I spent quite a bit of time reading and one of my favourite days, I think it was Christmas Eve actually. I literally just lay on the couch and read a whole novel and that was wonderful. It's like introvert heaven. Cashew was lying on top of me and I just read a book and it was lovely. So yes, can be transformative now. My jfpen fiction is mostly inspired by places, so my stories transport you into an adventure somewhere Wonderful. And they all offer offer a deeper side of contemplation of Memento Mori if you choose to read them in that way. They also have elements of gothic and death culture that I'm going to lean into with some merch in 2026 that's coming up soon, so more of an identity thing than just book sales. I don't really know what this means as yet, obviously, but it will emerge, I am confident. Trust emergence indeed. I'm also going to try and shape jfpennbooks.com into more transformative paths, rather genre lists. Again, I don't really know what that means, but I'll figure it out. My memoir Pilgrimage always reflected transformation. My own midlife shift. But I've also heard from many who it has inspired to walk alone solo for the first time, or to travel on pilgrimage themselves. And experiencing a transformation. Now, of course, it's not just for our readers or the people we serve as part of our businesses. Transformation is also for us. One of the reasons why we are writers is because this is how we think. This is how we figure out our lives. This is how we get our stories and ideas out of our heads and into the world. Writing and creating are primarily transformative for us. That is part of the point and a great element of why we even do this and why we love this, why we are writers, why we are authors. Which is why I don't really understand the attraction of purely AI generated books. There's no fun in that for me. And there's no transformation either, because of course, doing the work is what transforms us. Now. Of course I love using ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini thinking models as my brainstorming partners, my research buddies, my marketing assistants, and as daily tools to keep me sparkly. And I smiled as I wrote that. And yes, I human wrote this and am human narrating it, just in case you had any doubts, because sparkly is how I feel when I work with these tools. Programmers use the term vibe coding, which is going back and forth and collaborating together sparking off each other. Perhaps what I am doing is vibe creation. I feel it almost as an effervescence, a fun experience that has me laughing out loud sometimes. I am more creative, I am more in flow, I am more on fire. I am more me. Now I can create and think at a speed way faster than ever before. My mind has always worked at speed and my fingers are fast on the keys, but working in this way makes me feel like I create in a high performance zone far more often. I intend to lean more into that in 2026 as part of my own continuing transformation. And of course I share my experiences mainly in the community@patreon.com. when it comes to AI at least. And just as a note, I pay for access to all the models and currently use ChatGPT 5.2, thinking Claude Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3 Pro models. So that is the big shift this year and the idea of the transformation economy will underpin everything else in terms of my content. And no doubt you will be hearing about this from other sources since I think that book is going to make quite a difference. The Creative Pen Podcast and My Patreon Community so the Creative Pen podcast continues in 2026, although I am intending to reduce my interviews to once every two weeks with my intro and other content in between. We'll see how that goes as I'm already finding lots of fascinating people to talk to. Thank you for your comments, your pictures, and also for sharing the episodes that resonate with you with the wider community. Your reviews are also super useful wherever you're listening to this, so please leave a review as it helps with discovery. Thanks also to everyone in my Patreon community, which I really enjoy, especially as we've now doubled down on being human through more live office hours, on video, on Zoom, and I'm doing more of these in 2026 and the first one of the year will be early UK time so Aussies and Kiwis can come and then I'll be back to the normal time slot when most amaz Americans come along. I also share new content almost every week, either an article, a video or an audio episode around writing, craft or the business, and lots on different use cases for AI tools. If you join the Patreon start on the Collections tab where you will find all the backlist content to explore. It's less than the price of a black coffee a month, 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 My books and travel podcast is on hiatus for interviews since the Masters is taking up the time I would have had for that. However, I plan to post some solo episodes and I also post travel articles there like my visits to Gothic cathedrals, city breaks and things like that. Check it out at booksandtravel Page blog or you can find the books and travel podcast at wherever you're listening to this and all those episodes are evergreen. It is not a time specific show so you can always have a look listen so you can always have a listen to over 100 backlist episodes if you want to escape virtually this year Webinars and Live Events along with my Patreon office hours, I'm enjoying the immediacy and energy of live webinars and they work with my focus on transformation as well as, yes, doubling down on being human in an age of AI. So I will be doing more this year. The first is on Business for Authors coming up on the 10th and 24th of January, aimed at helping you transform your author business in 2026, or even transform into someone who has a clue about business in general if you're just getting started. Details@thecreativepenn.com live and patrons get 25% off. In terms of in person events, it looks like I will be speaking at the alliance of Independent Authors event at the London Book Fair in March and I'll attend the Self Publishing show live in June. Although I won't be speaking, there might be other things that emerge, but in general I'm not doing much speaking in 2026 because I need to Next topic, finish my Masters in Death, Religion and Culture. This is a lot of work as I'm doing the course full time and it finishes in September, so the bulk of the year and much of the middle of the year will be dissertation and all the other papers that I'm doing. I am planning on doing something around AI and death, AI, Religion and Death actually in my dissertation, so no doubt that will lead into some fiction at a later stage. And talking of fiction, Bones of the Deep by J.F. penn. That will be my first book this year. The Masters is pretty serious, which you might expect from that kind of topic, and academic research and academic writing is also very serious, and I found myself desperate to write a rollicking fun story over the holiday break between terms. I've talked about this tall ship idea for a while and now I'm committing to it. Back in 1999 I sailed on the tall ship Sorin Larsen from Fiji to Vanuatu in the South Pacific, one of the three trips that shaped my life and I have a books and travel episode on that. If you want to listen, I'll link to that in the show notes or just search books and travel podcast and it's one of the first episodes. It was the first time I'd been to the South Pacific islands, the first time I sailed blue water with no land in sight, and I kept a journal and drew maps of the trip. It also helped me make a decision to leave the UK and I headed for Australia nine months later in early 2000 and ended up being away 11 years in Australia and New Zealand. I came home to visit of course, but only moved back to the UK in 2011. So that trip in 1999 was memorable and pivotal in many ways and has stuck in my mind. And I've never sailed on a tall ship since, or maybe never again, but it was pretty memorable. So the main story of Bones of the Deep is based on that crossing, but of course, as J.F. penn my imagination turns it into essentially like a locked room. There is no escape out there, especially if the danger comes from the sea. Another strand of the story comes from a recent academic essay I wrote for my Masters when I talked about the changes in museum ethics around human remains and medical specimens. I. E. All those body parts in jars, and how some remains have been reproduced repatriated to the indigenous peoples they were taken from. I've also talked before about how I love merfolk horror like into the Drowning Deep by Mirra Grant, all the murmuring bones by A.G. slatter and merfolk by Jeremy Bates. These are no smiling fantasy mermaids and mermen. These are predators. And what might happen if the remains of a mer saint was stolen from the deep? And what might happen to the ship that the remains are transported on and the people on board. Oh yes, so much fun. I'm about a third in. I'm loving it. It is actually a thriller with a supernatural edge. I mean, obviously merfolk, well, who knows. But generally merfolk are not considered real, so I guess you could say supernatural. But it is more thriller than horror. It is called Bones of the Deep and will be out on Kickstarter in April and then everywhere by the summer. You can check out the Kickstart pre launch page with photos from my 1999 trip, already there, the COVID for the book and the sales description and you can sign up for pre launch if you're interested. JFPen.com forward/bones. I am also planning to add merch to creativepenbooks.com and jfpenbooks.com so I've dipped my toe into merch I. E. Physical products a number of times and then removed them. But now I feel clearer on this message of transformation. I want to revisit it. My books remain core for both sites, but for Creative pen books I also want to add other products with what are essentially affirmations that I used in my early years of moving into that new author. If you are a patron and you met me in person in Vegas over the last couple of years I've done little badges with creative on and stickers with creative on so I will have creative branded stuff. Also, I am creative. I am an author which was my affirmation for a couple of years. I couldn't even say that out loud for probably two years I carried it around in my wallet and until I could actually say it out loud let alone think that it might be true. And then I have a poster on my wall which I've had for years. Measure your life by what you create. So I'm going to do variants of that for JF Pen books. The items will be gothic, memento mori, skull related things like that. I haven't really figured it out yet but I am working with my designer Jane and everything will be print on demand. I will not be shipping anything but we need to work on designs then we need to try out some printing and order test samples and then get them added to the store. So this is probably mid year at the rate that will take. But I'm excited about it actually. I feel like I want to do some things with some nice creative branding and some skull related branding. The visual design is something that I really enjoy. So yeah, working with Jane on that then how to write, publish and market Short stories and Short Story collections by Joanna Penn I have a draft of this book already which I expanded from a transcript of the webinar I did on this as part of the Buried in the Drowned campaign. Turns out I've learned a lot about this topic over the last few and also on how to make a collection. So I will get that out at some point. It won't be a kickstarter but I will do direct sales, I will do a special edition, a workbook, I'll do bundles and I will human narrate that audiobook and then of course it will go wide everywhere other possible books. So I am an intuitive creative and I'm a discovery writer so I don't plan out what I will write in a year. I know I will write a couple of books, but I don't necessarily know what they will be. They tend to emerge and I pick the one that feels the most important. So after the ones I've already talked about, there are a few candidates. Crown of Thorns arcane thriller. 14. So regular readers and listeners know how much I love religious relics and it's about time for a big one. I mean, Spear of Destiny was the last one, and that was a pretty big one. But I have a trip to Paris planned and the Crown of Thorns is at Notre Dame, which has also been restored after the terrible fire five or so years back. And I want to go see it and I want to also visit some other locations. So my arcane thrillers always come from in person travel, so I'm looking forward to that. Could happen in 2026, the latter half, probably the last quarter, if it happens at all. Maybe 2027. Also AI religion, techno thriller, short stories. I have some ideas sketched out for this already and my master's dissertation will be something around AI religion and death. So I expect something will come from all that study and not sure what, but it will be interesting, that's for sure. I am. It's so funny because I do so much in this AI space, but it doesn't feel sci fi to me. I. I have written a bit of techno thriller. De Extinction of the Nephilim, you could say, is sci fi techno thriller, because obviously, I mean there has been de extinction already of some of these extinct species or a variant on that, but it's kind of on the edge of sci fi. So I feel like techno thriller really is on the cusp of that. But with the AI stuff, I really am gonna push that into the future. So I guess maybe techno thriller, sci fi. We will see also the Gothic Cathedral book. I have tens of thousands of words written on this. Lots of research, lots, many, many photos. Like thousands of photos too. But it's still in creative chaos. Now. I love creative chaos, really love that stage, but it's not emerged into anything coherent. Perhaps it will in 2026 and the plan is to refocus on that at some point after the Masters is finished. I do feel like the academic research process has helped me and will make this a better book. But I'm holding my plans for it lightly as it feels like a big book for me. Like my shadow book, which became Writing the Shadow, which took more than a decade to write. So yeah, who knows? Still on the list and also how to be creative. I've written bits and bobs on this over many years because when I was an IT consultant, I didn't feel like like I was creative. As I said, I had to do affirmations and things for years before I started to figure out what being creative was. And a few people have asked me about this lately. And as part of this transformation theme, I feel like that book has to go back on the list. But again, who knows whether it will be 2026. We shall see. And then some final other things. I intend to experiment more with AI translation. So AI Assisted Translation has been around for years now in various forms, and I have tried different services over the years, as well as working with human narrators and editors and proofreaders in different languages, as well as licensing books in translation to traditional publishers. So I've kind of tried everything here. But when Amazon launched kindle translate in November 2025, it's basically convinced me that AI assisted translation will become a lot more popular in 2026. A lot of people are doing it already, but Amazon taking this step is frankly quite significant. Now. In 2025, AI audiobook narration became good enough for many and it really started to take off. And I feel like 2026 may be the year for AI translation to really start moving in the same direction. Now, of course, human translation is the gold standard, as is human audiobook narration. That would be the primary choice for all of us for every book if it was affordable. But frankly, it is not affordable for most indie authors and indeed many small publishers. Most books don't get translated into every language. There would rarely be a book that is translated into lots and lots of languages. I mean, obviously the very biggest. But lots of books don't get translated at all. Many books don't get an audiobook edition, and many books in translation don't get an audio edition. But if you look at what AI will do for this kind of accessibility and reach, it's going to be massive and obviously it's going to have lots of impact on rights licensing as well. But it costs thousands per book for a human translation, and it is a premium option. Of course, if that's what you want to do, you should definitely do that. But personally, I have only ever made a small profit on the books that I have paid for with human translation, and it took years. And while I have had a few nice translation deals on some books, I'm not planning on waiting any longer. I'm going to experiment more with AI translation in 2026 more languages, more markets, more opportunities to reach readers. I'll talk about this in the next episode when I'm covering trends for 2026 because because it's certainly not just me. And then onto book marketing. My goal here is to ideally outsource more marketing to AI, but do more marketing in general anyway. So you have to reach readers somehow. You have to pay for book marketing either with your time and or your money. Those authors killing it on TikTok pay with time and those authors leaning heavily on ads are paying with their money. Most of us do a bit of both. There is no passive income from books and even a backlist has to be marketed if you want to see any return. But I, like most authors, am not excited about book marketing. I would much rather be working on new ideas and writing new books and thinking forward and also considering the changes ahead and writing and talking about that in the Patreon or here on the podcast. So yeah, if when it comes to oh what shall I do today, book marketing is is usually very far down the list and often doesn't get done. Also my book sales income, although it remains about the same. I have more books and although I don't do rapid release, never have and I produce I guess a book or two a year and some short stories. Then I need to do more book marketing in 2026. But of course I said that last year and I didn't do much more than I did in 2024. So here I am again promising to do a better job job and I hope that encourages you. Every year I think about I must do better at book marketing and I bet you that is 90% of you listening now. Every year I hope to have my AI book marketing assistant up and running. Maybe 2026 will be the year it happens. What I want to do is upload a book and specify a budget and say go market this. The AI will action the marketing without me having to cobble together workflows between systems. Now of course it will present plans to me to appro move, but it will do the work itself on the various platforms and monitor and optimise things for me. Now we have something like that already with Amazon auto ads, but it's specific to Amazon advertising and only works with certain books in certain genres. So I have auto ads running successfully for a couple of non fiction books, but they've never really worked for fiction. Of course that might change as all of these algorithms get better. I'd also like to have more sales on my direct stores jfpenbooks.com and creativepenbooks.com which mean a different kind of marketing. And I kind of just stopped doing all of that because oh for many reasons. But I do need to get back to that now. Perhaps this will happen through ChatGPT shopping or other AI assisted e commerce which will be increasing in 2026. More on that in my Trends episode to come and then finally of course doubling down on being human Health and travel. I have a lot of plans for travel, both for book research and also holidays with Jonathan, but he has to finish his MBA and then we will have some family things that take priority so we haven't booked anything. But it is going to happen. Paris will definitely happen as part of the research for Crown of Thorns, hopefully in the spring. Of course I've been to Paris many times, it's just across the channel and we can go by train but it's always wonderful to visit again. And as I said, Notre Dame for the Crown of Thorns is the plan. Health wise. I will still be powerlifting, weight training twice a week as well as walking every day, which is my happy place. And of course always the biggest goal is happily married with Jonathan and wonderful time with my lovely cats Cashew and Noisette. So what about you? If you'd like to share your goals for 2026, please add them in the comments. And remember, of course I'm a full time author entrepreneur so my goals are substant. Yours might be as simple as finish the first draft of my book and that is fantastic. That is part of the transformation into a new author. That still takes a lot of work and commitment. So whatever your goals are, I'd love to hear from you. All the best for 2026. Let's get started. So I hope you found my goals interesting and I would love to know about yours. Please leave a comment on the podcast show notes@thecreativepenn.com or on the YouTube Chann the Creative Pen. Or email me joannathecreativepen.com you could also share a link if you've written a similar type of article or done a podcast episode. Also, please send me pictures of where you're listening or your favourite cemetery or churchyard. Back to the usual schedule next Monday with a prediction show for what might be ahead in 2026 for indie authors and the book publishing industry. And remember, if you want to transform your Author Business in 2026, join me for my January webinar on Business for Authors. That's coming up on the 10th and 24th January. So you can join me for either one of those details@thecreativepenn.com live or if you're a patron, use the special link as you get 25% discount and that is in the Patreon. In the meantime, Happy New Year, 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@thecreativepen.com Blueprint. If you'd like to connect, you can find me on Facebook and x hecreative pen or on Instagram and Facebook and JF Pen Author Happy writing and I'll see you next time.