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The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers
Review Of My 2024 Creative And Business Goals With Joanna Penn
00:25:07
Another year ends, and once more, it's time to reflect on our creative goals. I hope you can take the time to review your goals and you're welcome to leave a comment below about how the year went. Did you achieve everything you wanted to?
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- [00:01]
Joanna Penn
Welcome to the Creative Penn 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.
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I'm Joanna Penn and this is episode number 787 of the podcast and it is Saturday 28th December 2024 as I record this, the final episode of the year. In today's show, I'm doing a solo episode reviewing my goals for 2024, what I achieved and what I failed at, and why I failed. And this is something I do every year to keep myself accountable, both to myself and also to you. I hope you have time for reflection over this holiday period and I'd love to know what you achieved and any lessons learned. So please leave a comment on the show notes or the YouTube channel or email me joannathecreativepenn.com I'll also be sharing my 2025 goals in the next few days and then we'll be back to the usual show next week. Right? Let's review 2024 review of my 2024 Creative and Business goals with me, Joanna Penn. So first of all, I have two brands, Joanna Penn and JF Penn. So first of all, JF Penn. I was writing Spear of Destiny, the Gothic Cathedral project, and short stories. So I researched, wrote and then did a Kickstarter for Spear of Destiny, my arcane thriller number 13, before publishing it wide a few months later. In January, I was in Vienna, Nuremberg and Cologne, which was a chilly trip but inspired much of the story. The Kickstarter ran in June 2024 and raised £12,536. That's, I guess around 14 15,000 US dollars from 313 backers. I made a limited edition hardback with silver foil and a ribbon and a specific cover for the campaign, which I love, which I made with Midjourney. You can buy Spear of Destiny in all formats on my store jfpenbooks.com but it's also available everywhere else now. The hardback was also available in bundle deals with the rest of the series. I also bit the bullet over the audio and had the first three books in the series re narrated by Veronica Giguet. So back in 2022 I rewrote the first three novels and at the time I withdrew the audiobooks of those first three novels. So I had those first three done as well. As Spir of Destiny. So that was a an investment in my human narrator. And all of those audiobooks are available now. So the bundles, the 13 books plus the short story bundles really help the Kickstarter fund at a higher level. And they're really only possible if you sell direct, so you can still make a profit even with discounts. So I was happy with that. I also had a goal in 2024 to produce a non fiction photo book with essays about English Gothic cathedrals. And I did lots of research trips, took lots of photos, read books on stone masonry, which was great fun. But then I discovered the pain of photography permissions. Now obviously I knew that you needed permissions and licensing for photographs when they were not your own, but I had thought that photographs that are your own you can use in different ways, but if you take photos on private property, you cannot use those photos in commercial projects without photography permissions. And that can take time and energy as well as potential payment for every one, plus the text that goes with the photo and potentially even the layout of the material. Now this put a bit of a break on that project. I hate the idea of asking permission in general. It's something I really dislike. Part of the reason I'm an indie author, it just goes against my independent spirit. And when I researched permissions in more detail, I hated how long it would take, how much toing and froing there would probably be. And yeah, I'm just the kind of creative who enjoys wrangling chaos and I like being a whirlwind of creative energy and this just doesn't fit well with the structured permissions process. When I interviewed Leon McInally about his dark Tourism book, which was heavy on photos and permissions, I realized I just couldn't do that kind of project. I did consider hiring someone to do to work with, but it just doesn't fit with me at the moment and it really changed the energy around the whole thing. And I am quite an intuitive creative, so that was definitely not happening. But I still have lots of research around Gothic cathedrals ideas for what that could turn into. More thoughts that in 2025. I also had a goal to write at least one or two short stories and I did manage to de Extinction of the Nephilim, which which I really enjoyed, and Sea Henge. In fact, I enjoyed that too. I really enjoy short stories I narrated both in audio and they're available on my store jfpenbooks.com and all the usual places. I also did the art for all my fiction covers this year primarily with midjourney, but also dall E through ChatGPT. My cover designer Jane at JD Smith Design used the images I made to put the finished book covers together. I also used Runway ML to turn the midjourney images into a book trader for Blood Vintage, which I'll talk about in a minute. So I've used lots of AI images this year. I also had a goal to get everything into audio, but I'm still deciding what to do with catacombs so that is outstanding. I did change the COVID on it though and made a gorgeous sprayed edge hardback which I am using in my pitching for film and TV and all that kind of thing. You can also buy it. It's really nice. Also for JF Penn this was not a goal, but I'm very happy to have achieved it. J.F. penn, award winning memoir author at London Book Fair 2024 so that was in March 2024. Lessons Learned from Solo Three Ancient Ways won Best Non Fiction at the Selfies Awards and that was definitely a highlight. So then also for JF Penn, Blood Vintage, a Folk Horror novel. So once I dropped the Gothic Cathedral project early in the summer I had space for the Vineyard book, an idea that's been noodling around for some time based on biodynamic vineyards. So I visited Limeburn Hill, which happens to be near me within an hour's drive, and one of the few biodynamic vineyards in the uk. A beautiful place. It was beautiful in the summer, I'm sure it'd be beautiful in the winter. But I took some great photos and I love folk horror. It is a genre I read and so I really enjoyed writing that book and designing the special edition cover With Midjourney. The process also led to a connection with a US literary agent who suggested we take it out for submission. So I went ahead with the Kickstarter only for the limited edition hardback and have retained the other editions for licensing. So the Kickstarter was in October 2024 and I love having at least the gorgeous limited edition hardback. It is very limited edition. There were only 200 hardback copies printed and it is not for sale right now. I didn't sell it in any other formats and there are no more being printed at the moment. My US agent took it out on submission in September and we're still waiting for the final batch of responses. Apparently Frankfurt book fair, the US election, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year, etc. All tend to get in the way of business, so I'm finally experiencing what I'VE heard about for many years in terms of the slow pace of traditional publishing, but I'm committed to the process now. We will see what 2025 brings for that the Creative Pen Podcast and Patreon community. So another year of podcasting completed and we hit 10 million downloads and I did a special episode on that a month or so ago. Kind of incredible that it's still going after all these years. I changed the podcast logo. This is probably the fifth logo I've had now. When I first started the show back in 2009 I didn't have my face on it and then we put my face on it. I think it had three iterations of having my face and then this year we went back to just a logo. So very happy with that. And also the theme tune changed due to various reasons that I talked about at the time. Thanks to corporate sponsors Kobo Writing Life Draft, Digital ProWritingAid, Findaway Voices by Spotify publisher Rocket and Atticus Ingramspark and written Word Media, all companies I continue to use and recommend who have sponsored the show this year. And also thank you to all my pates patrons@patreon.com thecreativepen and one of the biggest changes this year was how much more I'm doing inside of that community. So in previous years that has been more of a support the podcast type of thing, but now I've been doing tutorials on aspects of AI tools and various other things around author business. So for example I did a thing on my bank account structure which was useful for those people who are doing multi currency stuff. I'm also doing them still doing the monthly Q and A audio and also now sort of bi monthly every second month doing live office hours where I'm also demoing stuff and we have a bit of a laugh. So thanks to all the patrons who support the show. We now have over 1200 in the community which is brilliant. And of course you can join for around the price of a coffee a month at patreon.com P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com forward/thecreativepenn so Joanna Pen Joanna Pen had a goal to streamline the Creative Pen website and redo the author blue blueprint. So what was interesting is although I ended last year by saying I want to do this 15 year pivot, I needed to clean house so I needed to do a bit of a cleanup in order to move forward. I thought I could get it done quicker but it's actually taken quite a lot of work this year I started out the year by entirely rewriting my Author Blueprint that is a free ebook. If you sign up for my email list@thecreativepen.com blueprint, you can also get the paperback on my store creativepenbooks.com and when I did that I also kind of withdrew successful self publishing from most of the sites. It's still available on my store, but usually I put a lot of it into the blueprint. So that was actually like a whole book. It's a short book, but it is a whole book and it's full of hopefully everything you need to know. I also did a lot of cleanup on the creative pen.com I archived a lot of posts and pages and did a bulk cleanup of categories and tags. And when you have a website as old as mine, which I started in 2008 and of course so much has changed, there's always backlist content to update or archive. I removed a lot of guest posts, redirected those, changed a lot of backlinks. It was not a fun job, but it was necessary and it is something you kind of have to do every couple of years. But I really wanted to do a big cleanup and I did do that also Joanna Penn how to Write Non Fiction the Second Edition so I also had a goal to update my backlist books for Joanna Pen and How to Write Non Fiction was the one that needed doing the the first edition was from 2018 and since then my writing craft has improved a great deal. I also wanted to include aspects of memoir. Of course I've written a memoir pilgrimage since then, as well as updating a lot of the business stuff, some of the marketing stuff, update affiliate links. Plus I wanted to narrate the audiobook. Yes, I did not do that original edition and so I want to have all my non fictional audiobooks as me. Which means I'll have to do some more over the next few years. But for now how to Write Non Fiction is now done. So it's it's finished. It's on pre order as this goes out. Well, depends when you're listening if you get if you listen to this immediately. If you're listening after the 1st of January 2025 you can get it on creativepenbooks.com it's in ebook, audiobook, paperback and hardback and large print and bundle deals. It will be out on all the usual stores on 31st of January 2025 and possibly earlier on the audiobook platforms. Also travel, speaking and in person events. So one of my goals when I became an Author entrepreneur was to travel more and so I like to review my travel and while it's not been a bumper year since Jonathan, my husband, is busy with an mba, I've still managed some trips for speaking and book research. So Vienna, Austria and then Nuremberg and Cologne in Germany. That was the book research trip for Spear of Destiny. I spoke in Sevilla In Spain for 20 books Spain, the last 20 books conference that I spoke in London for book fair panels. But I'm going to London. I go to London quite often so I guess that's not really travel. That's speaking. We went to Corfu in the Greek islands for a beach holiday. Then I've done lots of Gothic cathedral trips around the uk. Salisbury, Winchester, Wells, Ely. I did a stone carving weekend in Somerset near me in the show notes. I've got all the links. So all of my Gothic cathedral trips, or almost all of them, I I do a post on my booksandtravel page website. I haven't written that down but I keep that going for my book research. And actually there's also a post there for Death Valley, California, which is where I went for a day trip for book research before Author Nation in Las Vegas which was as I've talked about, a fantastic conference and an inspiring end to the year. And I will be actually submitting my pitches for next year sometime in the next week. Right. What about some other goals? I had a goal to learn how to make beautiful books. I'm taking that as a win because the special editions of Spear of Destiny and Blood Vintage, especially Blood Vintage because we can now do sprayed edges with Book Vault. I also made custom end papers so we can do all that we can do premium products far more easily. Now some indies with bigger audiences are doing print runs with all kinds of special add ons. So it really possible to do anything now if you have the time and the budget. And this I think is one of the overarching things to remember with everything we talk about, with anything anyone talks about is is this your business model? It might be someone else's business model, but is it yours? Always question is this something I want to include in my business? So I'm very happy with what I've been doing. I have no plans to expand that. But yes, beautiful books this year for sure. I also had a goal to optimize my Shopify stores and Meta ads. I'm taking this as a fail. So my Shopify stores, creativepenbooks.com and jfpenbooks.com continue to tick along just fine. I sell books direct in different formats every day, but I have not done a great job. Well, I haven't touched them at all actually haven't done any optimization. I did outsource my meta ads for the first few months months of 2024, but once that ended it was an experiment really. I never picked it up again. I much prefer creating new things than optimizing the old, so I'm gonna have to rethink that. I'm not going to just roll that over because clearly there's reasons I didn't do it because I always had something more interesting to do. But yes, certainly I think what's good is that you can set up these stores or you can use whatever store you want to do or not do it at all. But you don't have to do bells and whistles. You can just get started and just the basics. I also had a goal. Experiment more with AI tools. And I certainly did this. As ever, I consider myself an AI assisted artisan author. You can read that or listen to the episode@thecreativepen.com A4 as I've already said, I've been using Midjourney for book cover images and social media stuff, as well as a book trailer for Blood Vintage where I also used Runway ML. I used descript and otter AI for my podcast. I use ChatGPT and Claude for for brainstorming, help with organizing ideas, writing sales descriptions. I literally have not written my own sales description since ChatGPT launched and Claude is even better. I'm also now using Google Notebook LM for surfacing new ideas from my own content and Google Gemini Advanced with Deep Research, which only came out like 10 days ago, which I am absolutely loving to help with book research. Both new use cases in the last few months. If you'd like more detail on how I use all these tools, I do tutorials and demos within my community@patreon.com thecreativepen right financials this is an interesting one to be honest. While I will not be giving you specifics, The Creative Pen Limited is still a multi six figure GBP one person business, but my income was down by about 20% this year, which is pretty significant. I don't mind a little bit, but 20%? Very interesting. Now there are a few reasons why. First of all, I spent several months on things that needed doing but didn't earn any money. So redoing the author blueprint, updating the website, doing the stuff for the podcast, all the new stuff I needed to do. I also wrote two books which as right now haven't launched or earned much as the year finishes. So how to Write Non Fiction, the second edition, which as this goes out not has not launched and also Blood Vintage. So the Kickstarter for Blood Vintage was only for that limited edition hardback which is the least selling format for me. So most of the money is still to be earned for both these books. For Blood Vintage, it might be ages anyway, whether I license it to a publisher or release it myself. Also, I didn't do any significant paid live events or paid webinars or affiliate partnerships. I also didn't do as much paid marketing and I really slowed down on social media. This is partly because I felt pretty jaded by the grind of both paid ads and social media. I also feel like with AI there's just so much AI generated content which I'm not so interested in, and so taking time away from both of these things helped me create more in my own life and also continue at a sustainable pace. Because obviously I've been doing this for many years and I can't just keep going at a pace all the time. And this is why I am still here, I think, is because sometimes I can take a step back. I'm also at a point in my career and my life where I've met a lot of my financial goals and so I make creative decisions for different reasons. For example, there's no doubt I could have made more money from blood Vintage in 2024 if I had released it myself in all editions, but I have a goal to get a book deal at some point, more of that in 25, so it's with my agent. And in fact, even writing standalones over series books generally means less income for indie authors, so I'm happy with the choices I've made. But I also intend to have more releases in 2025 and reinvigorate my paid marketing with the intention of making up that revenue. However, my tax year finishes at the end of April, so it may be that by the end of the tax year my tax year income actually equals the previous tax year income because the money's going to come in for how to write non fiction. Possibly not for Blood Vintage, but who knows. So yes, I think it'll be interesting to revisit that in May once I have my tax year end. So Health and Fitness While writing and podcasting are my job, health and fitness are pretty much now my major hobbies, and I spend time on fitness stuff every day. Remember, we are not just brains. We need a healthy, happy body to keep creating in A sustainable manner. And this is also part of my sort of more digital, more physical mentality where I combine my ever increasing use of technology with aspects of doubling down on being human. And there's nothing more human than using your body to do things. So I have been powerlift consistently twice a week, pretty much all year, as well as walking most days. And while I had decided to do my first competition in 2025, I went ahead and did one anyway in September. I chose not to push myself that day, but I selected weights where I could achieve every lift. So I had a perfect nine of nine lifts. This is British powerlifting, if you're interested. My numbers were my squat was 50 kilos, my bench press 40 kilos and my deadlift 100 kilos. And there's a picture of me with my medal. But no, I will not be sharing any action shots as you don't need to see me in a powerlifting singlet and long socks. This is one of the things that almost put me off doing it. The required kit for British powerlifting is not flattering at all. Luckily that's not what I have to wear when I just work out normally. I did end the year with personal bests of my squat 70 kilos, my bench press 42.5 kilos and my deadlift at 105 kilos. So I'm really pleased with that as my year end personal bests. I also started calisthenics mid year, going to a quite a different kind of gym and it's a different kind of movement, handstands, ring work and going upside down a lot as well as hanging from the bar and various other things I'm only now starting to get used to. It is a fun challenge for sure. I laugh a lot, but it also pushes my comfort zone and gives me a new perspective on things and more blood to the brain. But overall, happy and Cats is my final heading. Most importantly, I'm still happily married to Jonathan, living in Bath, England with our two lovely British shorthair cats, Cashew and Noisette. And Noisette is the little black one if you see the pictures on Instagram or anywhere. Fpenauthor. So realistically, my baseline happiness is sorted and I am very grateful for that because I totally acknowledge that the world throws a spanner in the works for for now and then. But I'm grateful that as of right now things are good. So everything else is a bonus. I hope your 2024 had some wonderful times as well as no doubt some challenges along the way and I hope you have time for reflection as the year turns once more. So I hope you found this episode interesting and I hope you have time for reflection on your own creative, business and personal goals for 2024. I love to hear your thoughts, any questions and how your year went? Please leave a comment on the podcast show notes@thecreativepen.com or on the YouTube channel. Comment on X at the Creative Pen or email me joannathecreativepen.com and send me pictures of where you're listening or your favourite cemetery or churchyard. Coming up later this week, I'll share another solo episode with my creative and business goals for 2025. In the meantime, happy writing and I'll see you next time.
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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 Creative Pen or on Instagram and Facebook F Pen Author Happy writing and I'll see you next time.