Transcript
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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, I'm Joanna Penn and this is episode number 827 of the podcast and it is Saturday 6th September 2025. As I record this in today's show, I'm talking to the lovely Kim Boo York about writing fan fiction and multi passionate creativity. And even if you don't have any interest in writing fan fiction and to be honest, I don't, this is a fascinating chat about fandom and community as well as writing multi genre and multiple brands. I really enjoyed it, so I hope you do too. So that's coming up in the interview section in Writing and Publishing Things, Kevin Kelly has an article on everything I know about self publishing on his blog kk.org and Kevin has been at the forefront of tech and media for many years. He founded Wired magazine and he's written many books. He's famous in the creator community for his article A Thousand Truths fans published in 2008 and which still underpins how many of us make a living as independent authors and creators. He was on this show in May 2023 talking about excellent advice for living and I was thrilled to have him on the show. So his article is interesting as Kevin has published in many different ways which he lists out at the beginning and it's pretty much everything from traditional publishing to Kickstarter to self publishing on Amazon to coffee table photo books, a podcast, substack and many other examples. It is a long article and worth reading, especially as at his age and stage Kevin has nothing to prove. He's in his 70s and no one to impress anymore and so he doesn't pull any punches. I think it's it's a great article. So of traditional publishing, he says. For the most part the peak of this traditional system is gone, finished, over. Reading habits have altered, buying habits are new and attention has shifted to new media. It's an entirely new publishing world. Established mass market publishers are failing and they are merging to keep going. Traditional book publishers have lost their audience, which was bookstores, not readers. It's very strange, but New York book publishers do not have a database with the names and contacts of people who buy their books. Instead they sell to bookstores which are disappearing. They have no direct contact with their readers. They don't own their customers.
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Many of the key decisions in publishing today come down to whether you own your audience or not. So he goes into agents advances and says, one of the advantages of this traditional system going with a publisher, is that they bankroll your project. They reduce a bit of risk. Likewise, that is the genius of Kickstarter and other crowdfunders for self publishing. Pre sales bankroll your project, reducing risk. Crowdfunding becomes the bank. And he goes into a lot of the pros and cons of crowdfunding, which is great because he's certainly not a cheerleader all the way as I am not. It definitely only suits some people and it didn't suit me for like a decade. He reiterates, you are responsible for making sure your fans actually get what they were promised. This fulfilment aspect of crowdfunding is often overlooked until the end, when it turns out to be the most difficult part of the process for many creators. I agree with this, and this is why I personally reduce my risk for my Kickstarters by finishing everything before I even kick off the campaign. So right now for the Buried and the Drowned, the book is finished in every single format. I know the shipping costs which are included in the Kickstarter itself. I don't charge shipping later. I don't like doing that. I want people to know what they're paying at the time of finishing their pledge. I like basically knowing everything. And then as soon as Kickstarter washes up all the payments, I can deliver all the digital stuff, which I deliver, like literally on the day I can, and then I can deliver. I've already booked in the signing for my books for the Buried in the Drowned with Book Vault. I don't know the exact number I'm ordering yet, but I know an approximate number. So I've essentially arranged that already. So my fulfillment is it's not already done, but I know exactly how it's going to work. And I do feel that many crowdfunding campaigns fail because people just don't identify all the difficulties in fulfilment. So Kevin goes into different means of production and even his printing for Coffee Table photo books. He uses blurb for photo books, which I think is really interesting, as obviously that's something I'm interested in doing. He also mentions Lulu, KDP Print and IngramSpark and selling direct as well as ebook and audiobook stores. He says it is not hard to produce a book. It is much harder to find the audience for it and deliver the book to them. At least 50% of your energy will be devoted to selling the book. This is true whether you publish or self publish. Even with a commercial publisher releasing your work, you will end up doing the majority of whatever promotion gets done, as in planning, coordinating, executing and even paying for book tours and the like. You will be the publicity department no matter what. I think we all know that that's true these days. He then goes into subscriptions, blogging, social media, which he calls unmonetised publishing, which I think is quite a good phrase because we are publishing our words all the time. It's just whether you've monetized it, he says. We used to be people of the book, but now we are people of the screen. Our culture used to be grounded on scriptures, constitutions, laws and canon, all written texts. These were fixed in immutable black and white marks on enduring paper written by authors from whom we got authorities. Now our culture pivots on screens which are fluid, mutable, flowing, liquid and fleeting. There are no authorities. You have to assemble the truth yourself. As I said, Kevin doesn't pull any punches in this and this is hard reading for those of us who remain people of the book like you and I. Now, books are not going away for sure, but it is interesting. Interesting to consider the shift in culture, especially as I was thinking about yesterday, I was reading the latest Robert Galbraith book, which is a series I really like, and I I was aware that actually yesterday I started reading on my phone when I was having a coffee in a cafe and then I carried on on my Kindle before bed. And so that is two screens that I was reading on. And I also watched a bit of Netflix, a show on Netflix. Again, another screen. So when we consider that even if we are reading text that often it's on a screen, I think that's really interesting. Oh, Kevin says in his conclusion, the way I approach publishing today is with as much self publishing as I can handle. So yes, I certainly agree with that. It is well worth a read. Link in the show notes or just go to kk.org and in other self publishing news, a few people have emailed me about this that KU authors can now distribute ebooks to libraries and I'll link to Dale Roberts has a subset stack where he covers this. Several people said that they wanted me to comment on it. Now I couldn't find actual KDP help text about this and personally I feel that you really do need the company themselves to say whether or not this is allowed. But Dale has a screenshot of something that says it's possible and you can use Drafted Digital or Publish drive and select Library Distribution only. I really think KDP help should add something on this if it's allowed. So make sure if you want to get your ebooks into Library Breeze and you are using a system like Drafted Digital or Publish Drive that you don't check all the other boxes because that will put your ebook elsewhere and then you'll be in breach of your KU contract. So yes, be careful with that. So in AI news this week, the As I record this on Saturday, the details of the Anthropic case have just come through, so the settlement so as a reminder, the original case ruled that training on copyright works legally acquired is fair use. Anthropic have been buying physical books and scanning them as if reading books, which is fine as they paid for the copies. And there have also been, as we know, lots of licensing deals between AI companies and publishers, with no doubt more to come. But training on pirated works in copyright required a settlement. So the Verge and others report that there is a $1.5 billion fund set aside which might be around $3,000 per book pirated. This is still to be set in, but this is what's being discussed. However, this is the important part. There are some rules around what will get paid out. The book has to have been registered with the U.S. copyright Office within five years of the work's publication and registered before Anthropic downloaded it. So that's June 2021 for one of the databases and July 2022 for the other one. So if you have not registered your copyright with the U.S. copyright Office, as indeed I haven't because I register here in the UK and many authors don't register anyway, because this is the crazy thing with copyright, you don't need to register in order to have copyright on your work. But if you want to get a settlement in any court case, then registering is the way to do that. So it's a sort of hedge against court cases. I suspect many indie authors did not register and in fact Victoria Strauss Writer Beware reports that some publishers have not registered author works even if it was contractually obligated to do so, saying for larger houses it's standard for the publisher to register on author's behalf at the publisher's expense. So even if you think your book was included, and you can obviously check the databases, you then also need to check that the copyright was registered and that it's within these dates. All the links you need are at Writer beware links in the show notes or the Authors Guild also has a thing. But yeah, make sure you check this. I was then wondering if we would now see a whole load of lawsuits where authors join together to sue publishers who didn't register their works. Although of course the settlement amount, if it's say $3,000 per book, legal fees would be much bigger than that anyway. So really interesting that this is going ahead. I see lots of people going, oh, this is a real win for authors. But I think people are forgetting that this essentially solidifies training on copyright data as fair use. And if you think that even if it's billion dollars, Anthropic is worth a heck of a lot more than that. And these AI companies are worth a ton of money. So it makes me think that other AI companies will just go, oh yeah, yeah, we need to pay that too, get it over and done with and then get on with ingesting all the copyright data they can now legally do. So for those people who are like, oh, well, I don't want my books used in AI training, I can't see how you can stop that. An AI company can buy a physical copy of your book and then scan it legally. So I'm fine with this and upload my books to these systems anyway. Certainly up to Claude, which is Anthropics and ChatGPT and Gemini. But I hope authors who are anti AI realise the implications of these rulings as opposed to getting carried away with this one settlement. But I fully expect more licensing deals to come, more settlements, and hopefully this will settle down and we can move into the more practical reality of working with these tools. And Again, in my 2020 book on this, I had a whole chapter on copyright and licensing works in copyright. So this is something I wrote about years ago, so you could imagine I'm like, yeah, can we move on now? Anyway, please do check if you. You might get some money. You never know. If you did Register on useful AI tools, 11 reader this week has opened up to selling direct, so authors can earn 60% royalty on sales of AI narrated audiobooks. Our goal is to create a product that enables anyone, whether you're an indie author or a publisher, to create an audiobook in minutes and be able to monetize it. Madeline Shu, who leads growth and strategy at ElevenLabs, told Publishers Weekly, who have an article about this. Authors can use the free 11 reader platform by uploading manuscripts with limited customization options or access fuller features through paid ElevenLabs subscriptions that allow multicast narration, music integration and MP3 downloads. Okay, so just to be clear, if you use 11 reader, you can upload your epub and then anyone can buy the audio version of that through 11 reader, but you don't have control over which voice they use and all of that kind of thing. If you use ElevenLabs Studio, which is what I do, you fully control the audiobook experience and then also people can buy them on 11 reader.