← The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers
The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers
SuperCreativity And KeyNote Speaking With A Non-Fiction Book With James Taylor
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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 Joanna Penn and this is episode number 864 of the podcast and it is Friday the 15th of May 2026. As I record this in today's show I'm talking to James Taylor about super creativity and keynote speaking with a nonfiction book, we discuss why creativity is such a valuable skill in the age of AI. Creative purpose, collaborating with AI tools in the book creation process, bulk sales and books as part keynote speaker business. And of course, if you want my tips on speaking, check out my book, Public Speaking for Authors, Creatives and Other Introverts. So my interview with James coming up in the interview section. In Writing and Publishing. Well, first up, I need to emphasise again to please watch out for any scams featuring names of authors, publishers, Hollywood agents, podcasters, organisations like the alliance of Independent Authors. Basically, if you get an email from anyone with any kind of audience or recognizable name, even a small one like me, then please watch out. So many of you. This week there's been another rash of them from someone posing as me or my team. I don't have a team and all from Gmail accounts. I actually this time heard from someone who did pay to come on the show and of course that is a scam. It wasn't me. People don't pay to be on this show. It is essentially invite only. But I know how good these emails are. I get five to 10 of them a day, to be honest. And the best way to know right now if something is potentially a scam is that all of these, actually the ones I get anyway are from Gmail accounts. So people have had emails from like JoannaPen host Gmail.com and stuff like that. So that is not me. My email is joannathecreativepenn.com or joannahfpen.com any email from someone posing is me, even if they use my face, even if the email sounds like me is likely not me me. This is not how podcasts work. This is not how any of these things work. So please be careful out there. Please block and mark as spam anything that is likely from a Gmail account that is not personal in a you actually know that person kind of way. Because I know many of us have gmail accounts for personal things? I do. I have like one I use personally but that is not the one that you are getting. So yes, please be careful out there, watch out for the spams and scams and generally don't be paying for stuff unless you are very sure of what's happening. Okay, so into the updates for today. Well, first up, Audible is changing their royalty model. We heard about this last year, but it is now happening. At its core is member value, the price of a listener's monthly membership plan minus taxes and fees. So when a member uses additional credits they add the value of the credit to the member value. Then that total is divided proportionally among the titles the member engaged with based on the price and your share is multiplied by your contractual royalty rate. Obviously that sounds quite complicated, but essentially it is changing now. Under the new model, creators can select exclusive distribution for 50% royalties or non exclusive for 30%. You can opt in titles to make them eligible for Audible's all you can listen program. You can suggest pricing for titles, which is really big deal considering we've never been able to do pricing on Audible and gain better insights with more detailed earnings statements. Which is also good because the reporting on ACX has been truly awful for a long time now. The key thing is there is no choice. By the end of the year, the legacy royalty model will be discontinued. By that time, you must either choose to enrol your titles in the new model or discontinue distribution. We encourage you to enrol your existing titles as soon as possible possible starting May 26, 2026. So that's why I waited to kind of talk about this because as this goes out, it is next week. As this goes out from next week, all ACX creators can enrol existing titles. You just log on to ACX and do it. Personally, I will be doing this, but there is pushback from some indie authors. There's a number of articles, but kindlepreneur has a good roundup. They say Audible is moving toward a streaming style model where subscriber behavior, listening patterns, subscription value and engage all get blended together in a giant pool of money that gets divided up behind the scenes. In other words, the audiobook industry is starting to look a lot more like Spotify, Kindle Unlimited and other subscription ecosystems. The article is actually really good because it goes through how ACX has changed things pretty much every year since 2014 and a good perspective on how things keep changing. Nothing stays the same and some of these changes sort of creep along and others are quite significant and of course the audiobook industry. Back in 2014 we only had one one choice, which was ACX. I was one of the first people to jump onto it when it arrived for UK authors, unsurprisingly after Americans. And now we have so many options and in many country markets. Remember, Audible is not the most popular audio platform. I always hear Americans say, oh well, Audible's the only choice. I mean it's not. There are lots of ways to sell audiobooks wide now of course if you do rely on ACX for audiobook revenue, this could have a massive, massive impact. It might be good, it might not. Who knows they're changing it. And I guess if you already get a big share of audiobook revenue from Audible, it might get better, I don't know. But if you have multiple streams of audiobook income, I don't think it's that big a deal. As I said, I will be jumping on this next week. I believe in moving into things when possible. I am mostly non exclusive anyway. Audible is just one of my many streams of income, so it doesn't worry me. I love selling audio wide and also direct with Kickstarter with Shopify audio bundles particularly doing well. I have a Chirp deal right now on Spear of Destiny so my whole arcane backlist is doing well and being able to control prices is important to me and do these kind of discounting deals and you can get into Chirp if you are within audio which was previously Findaway Voices. So just I guess as a quick overview, I publish audiobooks on ACX when they are human voiced as at the retirement recording ACX is only for human voices and then also wide through in audio as I said previously, Findaway Voices which includes library distribution, Spotify for authors I do separately now and then book funnel for selling on Shopify and Kickstarter and eventually I put my audiobooks on YouTube as well for some ad revenue and discoverability. All of that's covered in my successful self publishing 4th edition, which yes, is available as a Me Human Human Me narrated audiobook everywhere. So to conclude, Kindlepreneur says the audiobook market is starting to behave more like the broader subscription economy that already transformed music, television and ebooks. Engagement matters more, ecosystems matter more, audience ownership matters more. So as ever you can put everything wide as much as possible, but that doesn't mean things sell. Also you put things in exclusive programs, that doesn't mean they sell either. We still have to drive our audience to whatever platform. And then on broader business topics, a short pep talk this Week from Joe Solari over on the Self Publishing With Ally podcast on why indie authors should ignore the market's mood and focus on their mission. Now, he says there's something that happens when creative people get together and everyone can see everyone else's numbers that isn't great. Yes, we compare ourselves and our books and our numbers and it feels like strategy. Jo says it feels like market research. It feels like you're doing the responsible thing. I've heard this exact sentence more than once. I'm just studying what's working. Maybe that was your initial intent, but a lot of the time what you're actually doing is installing somebody else's North Star in your business. Without realizing it, you're handing over the CEO spot to the marketplace. There's a difference between understanding your market and being consumed by the market. There's a difference between knowing what readers want and chasing what you think other authors are giving them. One of those is research, the other is mimicry. And mimicry dressed up as strategy is one of the most dangerous things that can happen in your publishing business. Strong words from Joe. That's why I appreciate Joe Solari. He does do some strong words when he gives these, these little pep talks. He says the authors who build durable publishing businesses, the ones still standing 5, 10, 15 years out, almost universally did it by going deeper into their own lane, not by widening into other people's lanes. They became the most reliable, most specific, most authentically themselves version they could be for their readers. And their readers rewarded that with loyalty that outlasts any algorithm change or trend cycle or whatever. You might read next Tuesday on Facebook. Facebook or TikTok or Instagram or substack or whatever. Now, as one of these authors, and it's so funny, I gotta tell you, back in the day, like back when I started this podcast, I would interview people and I still do it now, but I'll be like, oh, I just want to learn from you because you've been doing this so long and now it feels like it looks like I'm one of those authors, which is quite cool, really. But I'm almost 20 years now in this business. Almost. No, actually, yeah, almost 15. As a full time author entrepreneur. I resigned in 2011. So yeah, this September will be 15 years, which is mad. And I can tell you that everything takes far more time than you expect. Like, really, if you want to build a durable publishing business, it takes time. And it's so funny. People say to me, oh, you've written so many books. I'm like, yeah, I've been doing this 20 years. How many books do you expect me to have? But you have to enjoy the journey and life is short. So why would you write books you don't love or spend time creating things you don't truly want too? Now back to Jo's little podcast episode and article. You can read the transcript as well. Jo gives specific advice first, a North Star document or a one page business plan. Now I, I think one page business plan sounds like maybe too much. It doesn't need to be much. It's something simple that reminds you what's non negotiable in your publishing business, which will keep you from reacting to other people's comments, ideas and things you see when you're out in on social media. So I guess I was thinking about this, I mean freedom in terms of my highest value, it's freedom. So that'll be one reason I don't have a warehouse, I don't hold stock, I don't have a office. There's a lot, a lot of things I've done for freedom. A lot of choices I make around that. Like what is the most free option that how free can I feel if I make this option? But I also have these things on my cork boards and a poster in my office. So my big poster, many of you have seen it behind me like in office hours on my patreon and stuff. Measures Measure your life by what you create. Measure your life by what you create. I also have other things. I have create a body of work I'm proud of. Have you made art today? And also I want to write the books I want when I want and travel where I want when I want. So it's interesting when I look at those, they are all about creation, they're all about making. They're not actually about money, although money is part of I guess the freedom to write when I want and travel where and when I want. And in fact I'm more constrained around travel because of Jonathan's day job. So one of these days that'll be less of an issue. But it, this is so important to kind of figure out what your North Star is that will help you say no to all the other things that crowd in. I also have a note in my Things app, so something a little bit longer and it doesn't matter what you use for your to do list or how you manage your time, but I use the Things app and I set a little timing on it and it pops up every couple of months, random days and it says what I do and what I don't do. So what I do includes things like writing books I want to write when I want to write them. So very important to me. No schedule, no externally imposed deadlines, and writing whatever emerges because I never have a production plan. I am an intuitive author. Becca Syme has a great book on that. We've talked about it on this show, and I write what emerges and then I try to sell it. So, for example, Bones of the Deep. I didn't know that book was gonna pop up until I wrote that essay on human remains in museums before Christmas as part of my Masters in Death. And then finally it anchored itself into this trip I did, the tall ship sailing trip I did back in 1999, which I've never used in a story. And it was like it all came together. It emerged from the milieu of life. And that to me is creative freedom, which is probably the most important thing to me. And some of these books work, some of them don't work, but they come from me, that is for sure. They emerge and they are an intuitive process. Also on my what I do list, this podcast every week emails every two weeks to my lists and speaking every two years at an author event. And also now Kickstarter. So I do Kickstarter campaigns now. What on what I don't do, you can probably guess it includes TikTok regular video in general, any kind of video generally. I do like doing book trailers as part of my Kickstarters, but that's about it for video. Then I'm not going to do substance back. I'm not going to do whatever the current trend is. It also has included things like I don't co write. I am way too much. I mean I have co written and I have co written with friends but it is not a process I particularly want to do again. Also, I don't write romance. I don't do screenwriting. And it's so funny because once again I am slowly bending the rules on one of these things. It might be the screenwriting. I just can't help myself. But yes, it's good to have a what I don't do list list as well. So back to Joe. He says for one week, track all the social media you interact with, every Facebook group, newsletter, post, podcast, substack, everything you look at, including your sales dashboard and note how each one makes you feel. At the end of the week, look at the list and ask yourself, is this helping me with my business? Is it just noise about someone else's business, about the market or about people's feelings about the market. Does it change? Just, does it actually change how I should run my business? Or is it just feeling? And you'll be shocked at how much of what you're consuming has nothing to do with what you actually care about. So Jo says, cut it, get it out. That way you can hear your own signal over the noise. Again, this is so important. I think this is why I walk so much. I walk a lot. And walking is, I think, how I'm able to hear my own signal a lot of the time. Very important. So this idea of cutting things out and simplification and getting back to basics, I think is a rising part of the conversation in the author community right now. Elimination can be more important than adding things because there are so many choices. So if you're overwhelmed, just start cutting things out, even if they're good things, right? Like I had to cut out my books and travel podcast in order to do this master's degree and, and I do miss it. But I think it's quite unlikely that it's coming back because I have so many books I want to write now that that's how I want to spend my time. And when it comes down to it, the only non negotiable is writing the books that burn on your heart and getting them out into the world, the books that you care about. I mean, literally, that is the most important thing. Otherwise why would we be doing this? You know, we are writers. This is what, what we love. And the other stuff that's all negotiable. So in personal news, I've been working very hard this week on my AI webinars coming up and it is pretty difficult to get everything I now do and use in terms of AI into two hours for the basics and two hours for the advanced session. But it is such a good chance for me to review my own business practices, all the things AI can help me with. Teaching anything is such a good way to test the boundaries of things like writing a book. Really. When you write a book on a topic like a non fiction book, you really get to test what you know and explore all the different angles. And so, yeah, my new motto is do more of what you love and outsource the rest to AI. This is becoming increasingly more possible as I will outline in the advanced session coming up this weekend. I'm recording this before the basics and as this goes out, I will have one more session coming up. I will probably do these again maybe September, something like that, depending on how they go, obviously. But my Goal is to just be super useful and bring you every use case that will help you to. I guess this simplification for me is. Is part of it now as more and more I can cancel tools that I was using and just use Claude for example. So I think it's very interesting how much these tools can help us simplify. Yeah. Anyway, there you go. I am also now circling back to my dissertation. Yes, I have one more thing to do on the Masters in Death, Religion and Culture, which is my dissertation on digital necromancy and spectral labour, which is essentially how our data is used after our death. And this is doubly important for authors as we create so much of a digital footprint. And I have a ton of books to read, a ton of academic papers to read and I'm also working on a creative project, working title Reborn. So and that might have some screenwriting involved. So those are some of my new focuses. While I also do the fulfillment for Bones of the Deep Kickstarter which I will be sending out this week, the digital rewards. So if you backed you will get Bones of the Deep this week. I'm very excited to have more of you read it. It's one of those books that again emerged and in many ways it's very personal. I mean it's totally not real. Obviously it's made up, but it is based on a real trip I did and the special edition has some photos in and it's been really interesting to think about the impact that trip had on my life. And I might have said this before, but I sailed on this tall ship, the Soren Larsen from Fiji to Vanuatu and I'd never been to the South Pacific before and I met a New Zealander on that trip and I decided after I got off the boat, went back to the UK, I decided then to leave the UK and travel and I flew to Australia in 2000, moved to New Zealand and was away for 11 years. And my husband's a New Zealander and so yeah, it changed my life really that trip, it sort of opened up my world to what was possible. I also did my first sort of snorkeling with the fish which opened up my scuba diving world and yeah, so had a big impact on me. It was only like 2 week trip but made a big difference. So yeah. Anyway, Bones of the Deep, it will be out everywhere by August I guess. So I'll let you know when it is out or if you're on my JF Pen email list you will hear about it. So thanks for all your emails and Comments and Photos this week Laura said, I especially loved this podcast interview with Sarah Kaufman on verbs so valuable. And then lots of photos. This week Suzanne sent pictures from the tomb of King Songjong in Seoul, South Korea from 1495, a UNESCO Heritage site a short walk from the Gangnam Style statue. I love Gangnam Style. I have now probably given many of you an earworm. I must say I will have a dance to Gangnam Style anytime. Lee sent a photo of Monakata shrine in Kyoto, Japan, and he said, if you look closely you can see what I can only assume is the shrine's guardian cat keeping watch on the pillar. There are several cats that visited the shrine, presumably going around their various religious duties. And Cheyenne sent a picture from a church in Cherbourg saying, a church that makes me think of you when I pass because of all the gargoyles. Some lovely stone ones, she says. From one angle they look so menacing, like they're demons coming after you. But from another angle they look just like scared little puppies who are as afraid of death as we are. So that's my take on momentum. So Mori death comes even for the demons. And I do love a gargoyle. And if you didn't know, gargoyles always have a water spout. Their job is directing water away from the stonework and it comes from French meaning throat. And if there is no drain hole, if you look up and there's no drain hole, they are called grotesques. So if you didn't know that, there you go. I have pictures of various kinds on my books and travel site and I did mention I gave up the podcast, but I still blog on it. And certainly I have a Gothic Cathedral landing page as well. Lichfield Cathedral comes to mind with some very cool gargoyles. So I'll link to that in the show notes. Okay. Please leave a comment on the show notes atthecreative pen.com or on the YouTube channel. You can email me, send me pictures of where you're listening or your favourite cemetery or churchyard. And yes, of course it can be multicultural. They don't have to be Christian cemeteries or churchyards. It's great to get some from different places and religions. My email once again, Joanna, at the creative pen.com I love to hear from you. It makes this more of a conversation. So today's show is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, the self publishing platform built by Authors for authors. KWL is dedicated to empowering your indie career and helping you connect with readers worldwide, maximize your book's potential, publish wide and talking of audiobooks you can publish audiobooks wide through KWL Direct. If you upload direct you will get access to the promotional possibilities. Or you can also upload on Inaudio and that will make your audiobooks available there. Kobo Writing Life empowers you to reach every corner of the Kobo global audience, ensuring your work is available wherever readers are searching for their next favorite story or non fiction book. Don't limit your discoverability to a single marketplace for ebooks and audio. With Kobo Writing Life you retain full control over your rights and pricing, giving you the freedom freedom to build your author business on your terms. You also get access to promotional opportunities on the platform. Go wide and let your books truly travel the world. Publish with Kobo Writing Life and you can use my link thecreativepenn.com kwl and that link goes to a landing page with all my books on Kobo and ebook and audio and useful episodes of the Kobo Writing Life podcast, which you can also listen to wherever you're listening to the this 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 18 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 all my backlist videos and audio on writing, craft, author, business and AI tutorial. This week I shared some personal branding prompts which gave us quite a laugh in the community. 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 thecreativepenn that's P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com thecreativepen right, let's get into the interview. You. James Taylor is a non fiction author, professional speaker, podcaster and entrepreneur who helps people unlock their creative potential. He hosts the Super Creativity Podcast and his latest book is Accelerating Innovation in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. So welcome to the show James.
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B
Well, thank you for having me as a guest. I'm looking forward to this conversation today. Today.
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A
Oh yeah, it's going to be really good. But first up, tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing.
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Well, today I'm a professional keynote speaker, so I deliver about 50 to 100 keynotes per year in 25 plus countries. And primarily I speak on creativity, innovation and artificial intelligence. But to go back into my deepest, darkest history, I actually used to manage rock stars. That was my old job. I used to be in the music industry for many, many years, years. And so I worked with members of Rolling Stones and listeners in the UK. I managed bands like Deacon Blue in the UK and then I went to the dark side. In 2010 I moved to California to work in Silicon Valley to work in the world of tech. And that got me involved in things like artificial intelligence. And right about 2017 I was speaking at an event in San Francisco and someone came up to me, said, you realize you could probably speak for a living, you could do this for a living. So I thought, well, how does that work? And he told me. And then I embarked on the career that I have today, which is primarily as a speaker with a writer now just kind of coming a bit more to the fore.
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A
Wow, I remember Deacon Blue. Yeah. Wow, that's crazy. Very, very cool backstory there, but we'll come back to the career side of things. But let's get into the sort of super creativity because my listeners, listeners are certainly creatives. Most of the listeners will have a book or either on the way or they might even have lots of books. But we all do want to be super creative. So how do you define creativity? I guess why is it important to keep focusing on this even if we do identify that way?
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B
For me, creativity is about bringing new ideas to the mind. Innovation is about bringing new ideas to the world. But without creativity there is no innovation. So creativity is really the engine of innovation, where that is designing new products, new services, creating new works of art, new books, for example. So the reason that creativity is becoming more important is because of what we're seeing just now in terms of things like artificial intelligence. That's going to replace a lot of the non creative tasks that we currently do in our jobs. But if you look at things like World Economic Forum, there was recently a study with a thousand global business leaders, work from companies like LinkedIn, they all highlight that creativity is going to be one of the foremost important soft skills for this new future. So creativity strangely will actually become more important, not less important as we go ahead. So that's the creativity side. And probably for many of the listeners, most listeners here, here, they'll consider themselves probably to be creative. That is not the norm. I mean, as I mentioned, I speak in about 25 countries a year. And if I ask the audiences primarily that I speak to which is corporate audiences put their hands up if they consider themselves to be creative, only between 10 to 40% of the audience will raise their hands. So that's for a number of reasons why people don't consider themselves to be creative. So my part of my job is to kind of show them why they are more creative than they think they are and why we're all born with this creative potential. And then kind of moving into the super creativity side is really to show them how they can really augment that creativity by collaborating more deeply with other people or machines, things like artificial intelligence. So Super Creativity, this book that I've written and also the speeches I give on it, is really about how we can augment our individual creativity by collaborating more deeply with other people or artificial intelligence. And for me, that's been the thing. I've been fascinated for the past few years. And probably for many of our listeners who are now using AI in their writing and their researching and their marketing of their books, they're probably kind of getting into this space as well. So I really wanted to kind of dive into that. But the collaboration both with other people, but also with other machines and things like AI.
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A
So in terms of the super creativity, then, do you have any practices or ideas before we get into collaboration? So many of us authors work alone and of course we can come back to the AI stuff in a minute. But in terms of super creativity, are there ways that we can even supercharge what we do already? And of course there are people listening who might not feel creative. So give us a few tips there as how we can potentially change our mindset or even become even more creative.
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B
So in the book I talk about these I call the eight P's of super Creativity, which are purpose, personality, practice, people, process, place, product, and persuasion. Persuasion is really the marketing piece at the end there as well. Probably the one that could be most useful to many listeners here today day is the practice piece. So that is either the practice or the process side of things. So for many of us, what that usually consists of is just having some type of daily creative practice that we have. And for different people, they'll do it in different ways. Many of your listeners will know. But the works of people like morning pages kind of style, a Julia Cameron style of having some type of daily practice. Other people do it in slightly different ways. The process bit is really interesting. Interesting. So I talk about this creative process that we all have, and I talk about these five stages of the creative process. So the first stage that we have, let's Say if we're writing a book, for example, the first stage is really that preparation stage. So that is usually the stage that we're trying to absorb as much information as possible about the thing that we're going to be writing about the topic. If it's non fiction, they're going to the places, visiting the scene, scenes that we're going to set certain things within the book for. So that stage there, that, that, that kind of preparation stage is really about absorbing as much information as possible. From the outside. It's not going to look very creative, we're just absorbing at that stage. Now the mistake that a lot of people tend to make is they immediately try to jump from that preparation stage to looking to generate ideas. But what all the studies show us is we should spend a little bit of time in what we call the incubation stage, which is that next stage. And this is where it's often very useful. If we're working on a, on some, done some research, we put things to one side for a little while, maybe a few weeks, move on to another project, think about something completely different. Your brain will continue to work in the background, your unconscious brain will kind of work on that content you've been absorbing. And then what often happens as a result of that is we kind of come to this third stage, which is that insight stage, that aha moment. And, and that happens for various different reasons. And you can kind of see that in slightly different ways. So you're more likely to get inspiration in your day to day work. And then as we know, as you are, you're a writer of many, many books, many people thought, well that's it, I've done it. You know, the idea, the idea for that, that book or that, that chapter has come to me, that is really just the first 5% of the, of the process. The next stage is, is where we have to come forward for this next stage where we're kind of looking, and we're looking at all the different ideas we have and deciding which ones do we want to pursue, which ones are going to make the grade. And this is that kind of what we call the evaluation stage, this fourth stage. And once we've done that, then we move to that final stage, which is the elaboration stage. So if it's a startup, this is when you're building your minimum viable product. You know, as a writer, this is where you're writing, actually doing the work, putting those words out onto the page, for example. And it's a very iterative process. So it's not going to necessarily linear. You'll go back and forth. And even as you're getting input, let's say, from readers and audiences in that last stage, that is then giving you the material to move into those, back to the kind of preparation stage and think, oh, I wonder if the, if this, this next book in the series, maybe I go in a slightly different direction with this character, for example. So each of those different stages, you can do different things at different stages to kind of increase, increase your levels of creativity.
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A
Yeah, I love all of that. But can we go back to purpose? Because you mentioned that as one of the P's and I think this is something that a lot of us need. So as we're recording this in April 2026, the world is an interesting place. There are lots of things going on that have people worried about the world. And while we're not talking about politics, I think one of the things that people struggle with is, is what's the point in writing this story, for example? Or what's the point in trying to get my words out there when things are difficult or, you know, so I feel like coming back to purpose is perhaps the thing that helps people even take it into the process. As you, you were talking about. And then of course, just from a sort of practical angle is purpose about making money, for example, or reaching people or. So maybe you could just talk about the purpose side of things.
- [34:56]
B
Things, yes, I talk about these three different purposes. And it's not that there's just one part that is just. But usually there's one that maybe predominates on different projects. So let's just talk about each of these three kind of main purposes that we tend to see. So the first one is kind of creativity as play. So it's what we're basically as humans, we're hardwired to do this instinctive joy that we get just for creating for its own sake. There's nothing that really kind of sits kind of more than that. We just have fun. We have. We find pleasure in creating something that could be a musician creating a piece of music, or a sculptor creating a sculpture or entrepreneur creating a new business or a new product or a service. There's just this sense of play. And one of the things I talk about in the book as well is this idea of being childlike, not childish. And, and what you tend to find is in children, if you look at children, you see this very instinctively. If you see a three year old or a five year old, you give them some crayons and they will just naturally just work, they will create. That's kind of part of who they are. And it's pretty abstract. And then what happens is they go to school and they're taught useful conventions and this is how you should do it. And you even see their work start to change. You start to see them move from abstract type of paintings that they're doing to more formal kind of structures as well. And then you get your peer group and then you go to college or university and you go to the world of work and you're taught all these useful conventions. And that's fine. But as adults, it is a responsibility of us to go to become what we call post conventional, where we see these conventions that we have as useful signposts, but we're willing to also challenge them. We're also willing to have a playfulness in what we do. So the first one, one is this just as hardwired things as creativity, as play. The second one, and this is maybe for a lot of your listeners, the reason that they are writers is as self expression. It's a way that they, for some people, they will say it's a way of placing something out into the world. I was actually just in France recently and I was talking to a young visual artist, a painter from Hungary, and she had to go up and give a speech and she really hated doing it. She was having to talk about her work and she really was uncomfortable. And you. I could see the discomfort. My kind of heart went out for her because that is not the way necessarily that she primarily expresses herself. She expresses herself through her art form, which is painting in her case. For many of us, we might struggle to get on a stage, but we can express ourselves in the written word as well. And that's kind of what we do. So we have something we want to say, a position we want to have, and we want to express that and get that out to the world. And then the final one is just this idea of legacy. And that is not going to be for everyone. But I can tell you, for me personally, legacy is not the reason that I write and do a lot of the stuff that I do. But maybe that changes. Maybe as we get a bit older, we want to leave a body of work in what we've done as well. So those are the three, often the kind of the purposes that we have within that. But then you mentioned that the financial side of, of what we do as well. So this kind of starts to come into, and it's almost like within that self expression because we need to be able to get people to buy our books or download our books and read our books in order to give us the ability to write new works and to create new things as well. So financial side is, is an important component of it, but it's not the only one. And just to put this in a little bit more detail on this, a bit more granularity, I think it was a great question any writer should ask themselves. One of the first questions that I asked myself as a relatively new writer for nonfiction is why am I writing this book? What is the purpose of this book? For me primarily it was. Is a form of self expression. And then you can have to go, well, that's, that's fine, but I also need it to have some type of financial basis for it. It doesn't need to be the main driver of my income, but I need to have it have some type of revenue model for it as well. And I'm happy going to talk about revenue models because probably the, the type of revenue model that I have as a writer is going to be different for maybe other listeners, for example, because I tend to focus more on bulk selling of books rather than individual kind of selling of books.
- [39:15]
A
Yeah, I definitely want to come back to revenue models and business, but a few other things. First I want to, to circle back to collaboration because I've certainly co written with some humans and I know a lot of listeners either have co written or collaborated with other humans or. And some of it works and some of it doesn't. And you have some great information here on human plus human creativity and collaboration. So maybe you could first give us some tips on how we can be more effective collaborators with other humans. Humans.
- [39:47]
B
So there's a whole section about this idea of creative pairs. Often if you look at either great creative, creative work or innovative companies, very often when you strip it all back, you'll find at the core of that lots and lots of creative pairings. So that is usually two different but complementary personalities who are willing to develop and challenge and improve each other's ideas. So we think of like jobs and what Wozniak, let's say in the world of business, or Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. For authors, often that relationship is the work with their editor. There was a documentary I saw, and I think it was a New Yorker documentary that came out a little while ago talking with a writer of history books about his relationship with his editor. And it was a really beautiful kind of relationship. And these were two very different personalities. But what worked is that the fact that they were different, different. And a core component of that, of having what we call these kind of creative pairing pairings is a sense of, of trust or what maybe some people today would call psychological safety that you're willing to challenge someone's ideas but in a space of trust. In fact, the Germans have a great phrase for it. In English it translates as someone to steal horses with which I love is this idea. And hopefully our listeners have that person with where you can go to them. Listen, I have this idea for a book or a chapter or a character and that person is a kind of yes. And it's like, well, yes and. But have you thought about doing this way or what would happen if you did this? Or they stress test your ideas, they make your ideas better. And for many of us, maybe it's our husband or our wives, our partners, some of us are lucky enough to have editors. And I know that when I started on writing this latest, this book, I actually had someone like that that I kind of worked with a human and so not. Not an AI that I kind of worked with just to, to help especially on the kind of taking all these random thoughts and ideas I've been expressing in forms of keynotes and putting it into more of a book form. Because the, the format and the structures that we use for telling stories in a. As a speech, let's say, are quite different from the structure that we would use for. For a book or nonfiction book. So I didn't have as much experience there. So I wanted to have someone that could say like you actually. Have you thought about structuring it this way or. This is a great story arc you might want to think about. This is a great structure you might want to do it in. So I mean, I don't know for you, Joanna, who is your creative pairing? Who is your someone that you know, steal horses with?
- [42:16]
A
Well, it's funny, I really think since the arrival of Claude, Opus 4.6, it is absolutely Claude. Yeah, all the way mean. So we could come on to that next in terms of how AI has changed because I do still work with a professional editor for both fiction and non fiction. But it is very much in the make my finished work better. It is not in the exploratory phase. And I find particularly the latest reasoning models to just be fantastic at this. And my Claude is not sycophantic. You know, the opus 4.6, I'm sure you've been using it too, but it's just not. It doesn't behave in the way That a lot of people, people think these AIs did, or they did behave like that, and now it's kind of changed. So let, so maybe let's talk about that. What are your thoughts on collaborating more effectively with AI tools, especially as they become more and more powerful as we, as we record this? Claude Mythos has not come out, but it's certainly, certainly rumored. And I'm pretty excited.
- [43:13]
B
Yeah. So, because I've been in doing this AI thing for a little while, it's given me the ability to experiment with things, things that early versions of what many people are using today. So I'll give you an example. Even before I started writing a book, I decided to write a book proposal, even though I kind of pretty much sensed I wanted to independently publish this book through my own publishing company. But I thought, actually I think it's a good practice just to put it down into a kind of proposal form, even if I don't go to a traditional publisher or hybrid publisher. And one of the things I did within that was get a sense of like, well, who is my ideal reader? Readers? And I used a very, very early version. This was a few years ago. I was using an early version of an IBM AI tool which I was creating what we call psychometric map of my ideal reader. And this basically tells me of like 72 different factors, like how this person thinks, how they feel, what their value system is very broadly for my ideal reader. And I, I pulled in a different source. I knew the kind of magazines and the books they were kind of reading and what their general worldview was. And so I created this going one step beyond just creating your ideal reader to really going to understand their psychometrics. And I do this in my keynote. So before I ever give a keynote, for example, or give an important pitch or a presentation, I use AI to analyze the psychometrics of the audience I'm going to be speaking to. So this might tell me, for example, this audience, they value humor a little bit more, or this audience values a bit more practicality, so they want actionable next steps. Or this audience is going to be a little bit authority challenging, so they're going to push back. So even in those very early start, just starting to think about the book, who was I writing this book? What was the purpose of the book? I was using AI to understand the psychometrics of my absolutely perfect ideal reader. I gave her a name. It was a female reader. There was someone similar to that I kind of already knew. And probably for some of your readers, your listeners they kind of do this instinctively anyway. They maybe have a person or a few different people they think of in their head. Then what I was doing is from that stage is I would. Because I've been dipping lots and lots of keynotes and this may be an important distinction in the way that I have decided to write books as opposed to maybe other people write, where they write books, is that my family were all jazz musicians. So the difference between a rock musician or pop musician, a jazz musician is a rock or a pop musician will go into the studio, studio. They will create this opus, this work, and then they will go and tour that for the next two years. A jazz musician, on the other hand, goes out and performs the songs and things from, you know, that the album that they're eventually going to create thousands of times, hundreds of times to find out what works with audiences. And then they go into the studio and to record that what the stuff that works best. And so I created a book More like a jazz Musician. So I'd delivered keynote versions of the book hundreds of times before I ever decided to go and actually write the book. So it'd been stress tested with real people to a certain extent. But then kind of getting into it, I think, well, what works as a keynote is not nothing going to work as a structure for a book. So what I did is I started using, at this point, I was using ChatGPT models to think about the structural edit of the book. What was the structure of the book going to be. And what's great is you can basically I could feed it every single keynote that I've given over the years, all the every notes, everything I've done. And it could start to kind of, I could start to kind of riff with it and kind of really get into thinking about how I was going to create this. So I'm using a little bit like that creative pairing that we spoke about earlier. And then I've done that. So I've now got an idea of a kind of structural edit. Essentially. I then go back and speak to some humans and people about it, like, what do you think about this? And what do you think about. About this? And try some things out over dinner conversations. I'm thinking about doing this. What do you think? And then once I did that, I just did the thing that I really didn't want to do, but I guess you have to do was to sit on a seat for multiple weeks and just get that crappy first draft done. And that was just me writing from my voice in my way of doing things. Every so often, maybe I would go use an AI to research a particular thing. But I didn't want to slow down the pace too much. I wanted to just kind of. I was focused on getting that word count done. And once I had the first draft, I then brought back the AI back in. In this case, I'm still using OpenAI at this stage to act more like a kind of editor, I guess, to tell me what was weak about the. And I at this point I was starting to give me the overall framing of the book. What was weak, what chapters needed to be weak, need to be improved. I then went back, started reworking each of the chapters, and I then worked the chapter, chapter by chapter, using that AI. A bit of a sparring part. But once again, the AI is not really writing my words for me. It's maybe saying this part could be said better. You might want to think about doing it this way or you're missing a really powerful case study or an example here or at the very end of each chapter, I have have actionable next steps and missing some things here. So I've kind of done that, gone through that entire process and of writing and now I'm essentially the second draft. So at this point, what I'm doing is I'm using another AI tool, Claude, in this case, to have a different perspective on it, to give it the work. I mentioned a couple of, I think editors I really respect and different writers I respect and said just I'm going to create like a beta readers group, virtual beta readers readers group. Give me the feedback on this. Now, for someone that's listening to this, and we're recording this in April 2026. As we record this just now, here's some good news for you. There are now I know a bunch of tools out there that use AI swarms, as we call them. So you can basically feed it your book and it will create synthetic readers, thousands and thousands of synthetic readers that read your kind of style of book. And it will then give you feedback from these synthetic readers. And essentially I was just doing an early but version of that. And so I got the feedback from the synthetic readers, the AI readers, and then kind of reworked a little bit. And some of the stuff I just decided not to do because it just, it didn't go in alignment with what I was trying to say in the book. And then the next stage from that is then I had a beta reader group of, I think 30 human beta readers who are my ideal readers, sent the book to them. They gave me feedback I then used AI to kind of give me an overview you a report of all their feedback and I can was able to then go back into reworking the book and that's. This is still just really now like draft three of the books, not the final book at this stage but just to give everyone a sense of like just kind of opening the kimono as they say in America. This is how I used an example of like you can see how the human and human and human machine was kind of working together.
- [50:04]
A
Yeah, I love that. I also often say to people who are speakers first that you can, can if you have recordings of your talks or if you use your slide decks to record them as MP3s and then just use that transcript as the basis of a draft. Obviously it's not a the book or a chapter, but it can actually preserve your voice, your speaking voice which can I think be really effective for speakers. But yeah, I like your multi step process there. And then of course if you have audience avatars in AI that can help you design your book marketing. So just maybe take this into book marketing and how you're doing doing that.
- [50:39]
B
Yeah, so I, I still decided to go old school with a human editor, book editor that someone had recommended to me and I use that human book editor just to go through the book. And at that point we're, we're talking about style, some stylistic things that we wanted to do and they can pick up other things as well. So I've kind of got that book and then I'm now obviously starting to use AI to understand what tags, what kind of copy do I want to have in terms of putting onto Amazon and putting it onto IngramSpark and all these other platforms I want to put it out into. I then really used this once again I'm using now Claude here and with Claude in particular you have something called Cowork. It wasn't quite fully happening at that point, but there was like early versions of it called code to almost now start working with a, creating a virtual marketing team that would give it the book and then they could start thinking about what is the strategy for the, what is the marketing strategy for this book? What does the campaign look look like? What are the things that we need to do? And that was then starting to break it. We're now three months out or so before the book is due to get released and I'm now starting to kind of deploy that particular campaign. And so for example, I'm on a podcast just now as well and we tried different versions. We have A human like going out and reaching out to potential shows me to podcast, be a guest on. But I also have an agentic AI that's also going out and reaching out to lots of different finding and researching podcasts, podcast and reaching out to those podcast hosts to have me as potential guests. So they're doing some of the tactical work there at the same time. One mistake I made, and I don't know if you've experienced this as well, and if I was to go back, one thing I would do differently is I decided to record the audiobook version after the physical book was already committed and it was ready to go out. And I noticed so many just little small errors or things I would change after having spent two days in a studio recording the voice for the entire book that I could have changes I would have made. And, and this is something other people did ask me why you're not using 11 labs or using an AI clone of your voice to read the script. And there's some things I feel quite personal and my voice is one of those things as a, as a professor, professional keynote speaker that I decided I wanted to keep and I wanted to have in there. So it's going to be different for everyone which things they decide to offload to AI, which things they decide to give to a human member of their team, what they decide to keep to themselves.
- [53:07]
A
Yeah, I mean I, I human record my non fiction but I have an AI voice clone with 11 labs for my fiction now, so. But obviously also for people. You can't put an 11 Labs voice cloned audiobook on Audible and a lot of your sales will be Audible, especially for a book this. So I think that's, that's also important. But yeah, I agree with you on doing the audio edit. There's always things you want to change. But as you mentioned, you're self publishing this or independently publishing this, so you can just go in and change your files. Yeah, I guess.
- [53:40]
B
And that was the other reason and this was part of the marketing and now we're kind of moving into like the marketing and the business model behind the book. And so for me, the book doesn't have to be a financial driver in its own set. So the way that I sell books and usually people like myself, professional speakers, is we bulk sell books to our clients. So let's say if I'm speaking at this month, I'm speaking at four different events, each have about a thousand people at them. And those organizers, what they will do is they will buy say we want a thousand copies of the book. And so as well, at the end of that month you might have sold 4,000 copies, not individual copies. So anything that sells on Amazon or in other places, almost like a positioning piece, obviously you want people to buy the book and learn things from the book. But in terms of the distribution model, it's slightly different because I'm primarily selling through bulk sales of the book. Now here's a little twist that you can do on this and this is a decision I kind of made even before we released this version of the book is I speak to lots of different industries. So there was a speaker and an author and I've forgotten his name now, I think you was from Florida. And what he decided to do was to write a slightly different version of his main book every year, but for a different industry. So what this allowed him to do is to reach out to the. Let's say in my case, I'm doing a version of the super creativity book just for legal professionals because I speak to a lot of law firms and legal groups. So I've already started working on a version of the book which is a little bit more acute to that audience. And so as a speaker it allows me to go to all these law firms and legal associations and bar associations and say, hey, I've just written the book on creativity and artificial intelligence for the legal industry. That makes you a very bookable proposition for a client. And then that obviously then you can sell books of that as well. And that's before we get into obviously the foreign language versions as well. So that's just a model that happens to work work pretty good for my part of the industry. But obviously it's going to be very different for other types of authors.
- [55:47]
A
No, I think that's great. And non fiction authors, as you say, there are different revenue models. And yours is your income, I guess would be what, 80, 90% speaking revenue or do you have other things as well?
- [55:59]
B
Yeah, primarily speaking. It's the keynote speaking and it's anything that kind of comes from the back of that. So sometimes this boardroom advisory work work that I do as well. But primarily it's the speaking side. So really the book is, is just the simplest form to get my ideas out and the most affordable form because the other thing you want as many people getting your ideas as possible. And there is no better, more affordable way of getting someone's ideas than in the form of a book. I think it's just the most unbelievable transmitter of knowledge a book. And so that's why, why I love, I Decided just to kind of write the book as well. When a lot of other, some of my friends say, listen, books are old hat. You don't need to do a book anymore. You can do these other things, other forms as well. And online courses and I've done lots of online courses in the past and membership sites and I've done all those things. But there's just something that is just great about a book to be able to summarize your ideas at a particular point in time and also is a great transmitter of value to other people. And it's, it's just, it's affordable. It's any book. Someone can download a book on Audible or wherever they want to get a book on listening to a book online. It's just an affordable way of absorbing that content.
- [57:10]
A
Yeah, well, of course we're all fans of books here, but just, I mean I do speak, I don't tend to do keynote speaking. I do more content speaking at conferences. But for people listening, keynote speaking is where you tend to get the higher revenue. So if people listening have books already, so let's say they have non fiction books or even fiction books that could be turned somehow into to different topics. If people want to get booked for speaking gigs, preferably ones that pay, how would you recommend authors think about moving into speaking if that's something they want to do?
- [57:49]
B
Yeah, so obviously it's much easier for nonfiction authors to do that. And I mean, I'll give you an example that I was speaking at an event last week in New York for l', Oreal, the hair care and cosmetics company. And they had six different speakers. One of them was a speaker on really macroeconomics and what was going geopolitics. Another one was an expert on communications. Another one was expert on AI, another was expert on storytelling. And so you have to kind of think, does my topic have value for that type of audience, that corporate, let's say audience. And an easy way of finding that is if you just go on to any of the speaker bureau websites, just type in speaker bureau bureaus, look for the speaker bureaus and then type in your topic area, emotional intelligence or whatever the topic areas and look at the other speakers and see is there obviously a number of speakers are talking on this area. Importantly, look at how busy they are and look at their fee levels as well. I interviewed a great, I did an online summit a few years ago called International Speakers Summit where I interviewed 150 of the world's best professional keynote speaker. And I interviewed Sally Hogshead who's an author and a speaker. And she said to me, james, you're going out speaking about creativity, but if you just twisted it a little bit and spoke talked about a lot more in terms of innovation rather than creativity, you would earn an extra $5,000 per keynote. So creativity and innovation, an extra $5,000. So that's just a little simple that you as you're going to understand the industry, that's a simple thing to get to understand. Then kind of once you do that is it's like any, you have to treat it like a business, obviously. And what makes someone a great storyteller? I consider myself a storyteller, but primarily on stages. What makes a great storyteller in the on the written word is not someone makes a great storyteller on the stage. So depending on where you're at, you might need certain training and certain skills development. If you're listening to this from America, there's things like National Speakers Association, NS usa. If you're living in the uk, there's Professional Speakers association in the uk. These are great ways just to kind of develop your skill set and learn from other professional speakers. And here's the good news. I didn't know anything about professional speaking in up until 2017, 18. And it was only just from having a conversation with someone who said, listen, you have some original thoughts, you can get paid to speak about this on stage and then spending the next year kind of really researching and understanding and looking at how doing it and creating, creating a minimum viable offer product a speech. That was a very short period of time, a year. So most of the listeners here have gone through that process of writing a book which takes many, many months. So you have the stamina, let's say, to kind of do this type of work. You just need to find out. And I found out for myself. I thought I was going to be a speaker in marketing. I thought that was going to be my thing. And it turns out that's not what the market wanted from me. They wanted me to talk about creativity and artificial intelligence. So you have to kind of listen to the market like you have to listen to your audience.
- [60:50]
A
Yeah, I think that's really interesting. I, I was also a member of the PSA here and I learned in Australia with the NSAA as it was. Yeah, over there. And that thing about who you speak to. So I mainly speak to author conferences who, I just want to be frank, don't pay very well, very well, if at all. So exactly what you said, that if you want to be a highly Paid speaker. You have to pick the author, audience who's going to pay as well as a topic that kind of works with them. It is a. It's a very different thing to writing a book, I think.
- [61:22]
B
It's a. It's a different model. And this is what was interesting when I interviewed those 150 professional speakers is the thing that came back loud and clear is there is a model to suit everyone. So the model that works for me, which is getting paid high fees to go and travel around the world speaking on stages to primarily corporate audience. That is not the only model. There is another model which is called you. You sell from the stage model where you maybe don't get paid anything to go and speak on the stage or very little, but what you're doing is you're selling your consulting, your online course, your books, your other products, sometimes with the back of the stage. And that's a, that's another model as well. I have friends who have young families and they're writers and they don't want to schlap on planes like, like I do. So I know one, one speaker in particular who never leaves his own city. And he is a very successful professional speaker. He happens to live in Orlando, Florida, which is one of the busiest conferences. So literally he just, he never. He's home with his kids every night. He gets to do all this cool stuff he wants. He never has to step on a plane if he doesn't want to. So that just kind of shows you the range. And I remember I interviewed one, one person for a speech which was the Buddhist monk, that was his title, and French speaker and author. And he figured out he could live very affordably by living in Thailand. So he lives in Thailand for part of the year. And he's very into meditation and mindfulness and yoga and writing. And so he figured out he only had to give two keynotes per year to pay for his entire lifestyle. That was. Was it. So that gives him a lot of freedom. A lot of freedom. He does those two corporate keynotes a year, and for the rest of the year he's doing his yoga and he's doing his meditation and he's doing his writing and surfboarding. Whatever he, he's into as well. So you can see there's a whole range of different ways you can design that life.
- [63:17]
A
Yeah, we talk a lot about definition of success, and it's great to hear those different examples. So before we finish up, I just want to come back to your journey into the writing side, into books and self publishing. And we all understand, me and the listeners, we understand how hard it is to write a book and also to market a book. But we got the bug. So I wonder how much have you got the bug. Do you plan on doing more writing more books or do you still want to lean more heavily into speaking?
- [63:48]
B
Primarily the income for me will still come from speaking. And I remember listening to Elizabeth Gilbert once when she talked about her writing she said she knew never she always wanted to have other things. So the right. She never had to push onto her writing that it had to be the income stream for her if it was successful. Great. That's fantastic. So I have a little bit of a similar kind of view to that. So what I've decided to do in terms of my own writing is that I will do. I've got like five different other non fiction book ideas I'm now looking at. Some of them relate to speeches that I already do. Some, some don't. I'm looking at different versions of the Super Creativity book. So there'll be other versions coming, coming out, different industries, different languages. So that gives you a few years that you can do that. But the other side that I want to develop is the kind of fiction writing side. And so I'm already starting to work on, on a fiction book at the moment a little bit like this idea, you know, one for them, one for me. So one for them is. Is for the corporate audience, that kind of world that I live in. And the other one is for me it's for my own creativity and my hope and I don't know this. Maybe we need to speak. In a year's time I've written a published it is that by just doing the fiction side it will make me a better storyteller on stages as well for my corporate audience. It will help me understand story arcs and slightly different ways of expressing stories of building emotion and building the antihero characters within a book, for example. So I'm hoping that they both feed off each other. But we will see.
- [65:12]
A
Yes we will. All the best with that. So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online? Online.
- [65:18]
B
Easiest place to go is to go to JamesTaylor me JamesTaylor me and you can find the book which is called Super Creativity there or just go to wherever you your local independent bookstore and get to get a copy of Super Creativity. The audiobook may already be out by the time you're listening to this as well. And if you want to learn a little bit more as well, we also have a podcast called the Super Creativity Podcast where I interview lots of wonderful guests talking about this area of super creative creativity.
- [65:44]
A
Well, thanks so much for your time, James. That was brilliant.
- [65:47]
B
Thank you Joanna. Thanks for having me a guest on the show.
- [65:53]
A
So I hope you found the interview with James interesting and that it gave you some ideas around creativity alongside AI non fiction books and the professional speaking business and more. Let me know what resonated from the interview or the introduction. Please leave a comment on the podcast Show Notes at the the creative pen.com or on the YouTube channel. You can email me joannathecreativepenn.com and please send me pictures of where you're listening or your favorite cemetery or churchyard or other religious place. Next Monday I'm talking to Jeff Adams about accessibility and May 21 is global accessibility Awareness Day, a day to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access and inclusion and the more than 1 billion people with disabilities and impairments. And so we'll be talking about what that means for authors. So happy writing and I'll see you next time. Thanks for listening today. I hope you found it helpful. You can find the backlist episodes and show notes@thecreativepen.com podcast and you can get your free author blueprint@thecreativepenn.com blueprint. If you'd like to connect, you can find me on Facebook and X at the Creative Pen or on Instagram and Facebook. Fpenauthor Happy writing and I'll see you next time.