Orna Ross and Joanna Penn sit down for a candid, back-and-forth debrief on Author Nation and SelfPubCon 2025, and some of the bigger creative questions raised by the conferences. They unpack the benefits and challenges of physical versus online events, then broaden the conversation into creative courage and change. Discover Drew Davies’s “kill two things” rule, why Orna pressed pause on her Go Creative! series, and how Joanna is stepping into a new season with her Masters in Death, Religion, and Culture. As ever, you’ll enjoy honest reflection, practical takeaways, and permission to step boldly into your own next creative chapter.
Listen to the Podcast: Author Nation Conference Conclusions 2025
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About the Hosts
Joanna Penn writes nonfiction for authors and is an award-nominated, New York Times and USA Today bestselling thriller author as J.F.Penn. She’s also an award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and international professional speaker.
Orna Ross launched the Alliance of Independent Authors at the London Book Fair in 2012. Her work for ALLi has seen her named as one of The Bookseller’s “100 top people in publishing”. She also publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and is greatly excited by the democratizing, empowering potential of author-publishing. For more information about Orna, visit her website.
Read the Transcript
Joanna Penn: Welcome to the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast with me, Joanna Penn and Orna Ross. Hi, Orna.
Orna Ross: Hi, Joanna. Hello everyone.
Joanna Penn: Yes, hello.
Recap of Author Nation Conference
Joanna Penn: We are back, and today we're going to talk a bit about the Author Nation Conference, which we have just got back from in Las Vegas. So, we're going to talk a bit about that. Also, some hard choices and some new directions.
So, as ever, we talk about what's going on in our own writing and author business lives and we try and keep it real over here. Lots to start with, but Orna, I've been to Las Vegas to Author Nation last year and 20Books before, but this was your first one. So, why don't you start by telling us about your thoughts on Author Nation.
Orna Ross: Yeah, it was ALLi's first time at Author Nation. My first time in Vegas. Sorry, Vegas, I don't love you. But Author Nation was fantastic.
ALLi was there as a sponsor, and we had a booth to meet our members and tell prospective members about what we do and how we do it. We also had a speaking session; we had a lovely meetup with ALLi members.
All in all, I think, it's shaping up to be, I know that Joe and Suzie, the husband-and-wife team who are behind Author Nation, that they have a long-term plan, which is really great to see, for the next few years. The way they're shaping things up, I think it is already a really important pillar of the indie author community, and I think it'll only continue to get better and better really. For ALLi, it was a very good event and it's just so great to see everybody.
It was my first trip back to the US since COVID as well.
Joanna Penn: Oh really? Wow.
Orna Ross: Actually, no, I tell a lie. I did go to New Orleans to a conference that's no longer running now, but it was my first time back to west coast USA since COVID.
The Value of Conferences for Authors
Orna Ross: It's great when the community gets together. I love those conversations that you have when you just bump into somebody and something gets sparked, or somebody gives you permission to do something that you didn't even know you wanted to do, or all that kind of thing. How was it for you?
Joanna Penn: Yeah, I think that what you're saying there, one of the things about conferences in general is that if you keep going, it can be very hard the first time you go to a conference as a new author or a new anything, but that's why you have to go again, either to the same conference or the same genre conference or something, because the relationships that you were talking about there, the bumping into people in the hallway, it happened to me too with people I didn't even know were there.
Mostly, I had a lot of one-on-one conversations that I had organized in advance. So, I knew I was meeting people and then there were people like, oh my goodness, I haven't seen you.
There was one person I hadn't seen in six or seven years, and sort of the catching up with people you have built relationships with over time. I still remember you and I meeting for the first time after meeting on Twitter, back in 2010 or something like that, and then we bumped into each other literally at the London Library and our friendship went from there. So, sometimes you just really have to be humans in physical proximity.
And I do want to acknowledge that it's very difficult for some people. I understand that with budget, with time, money, caring. But if you can, I do think the investment of time and energy to go to something is a way to make author friends, to find Help on the journey because so often our friends and our family, people who love us in our real life, they just don't understand. They haven't got a clue. They think we're weird. They don't understand the trials of being a writer. So, you can find those people at these conferences.
Then this can turn into business opportunities as well, with people that you meet in a sort of authentic way. The other thing is meeting some of the vendors. So, there is a vendor Day at Author Nation, and a lot of these vendors we do see at other conferences as well.
So, one of the significant vendors was BookFunnel, who I've been with since the beginning of their company, and Damon, who I met at a conference, like a decade ago when he decided to build BookFunnel to help people deliver eBooks. So, when you get to know the vendors also you can ask them questions.
And if you talk to somebody at one of those vendors. The guys at Draft2Digital, for example, or ProWritingAid were there, and my editor was there, Kristen, you can talk in a more personal way about your specific issue as an author.
So, all of that to say, it was a great conference. I tolerate Vegas and I have a lot of things like a humidifier in my room and all of that. I also went a few days earlier. I went to Antelope Canyon, which was something I wanted to do for like decades. So, I think that's another tip is try and tie in some life things you might want to do at the same time.
But yes, for the time, it was a great conference, and it was really good to connect.
Comparing Online and In-Person Conferences
Joanna Penn: But I did want to ask you, because of course, ALLi runs the SelfPubCon online conference, how do you think the online conferences contrast, I guess with a big in-person conference?
Orna Ross: Yeah, it was really interesting because SelfPubCon was 18th & 19th of October, and then just a few weeks later, Author Nation.
So, the contrast was more obvious. I never had them right up against each other like that before. I think there are advantages and disadvantages to both.
I would say that overall, nothing beats the human connection that you were talking about, and just meeting somebody physically is a different experience.
But of course, as you were saying, it's so expensive to get there, and the great thing about online is you can do it in your pyjamas, you've got the maximum sort of convenience and of course, SelfPubCon is free for a number of days and you can focus in on what you want to focus on, and you've got replays you can revisit. It's a completely different experience.
Of course, I should say that Author Nation also is available as a digital package. All the sessions were filmed and will be released. So, there is the opportunity to get a digital version of alternation as well.
So, I think online conferences have lots of pros and cons and it's the opposite way around, the cons for the online is the pro for the human one, and vice versa.
Some combination of both is ideal, I think, just in terms of maximizing the learning.
But you need to know what you want to do, and very much at Author Nation, because there were just so many sessions and lots of overlapping sessions. Going to a conference, not trying to do everything, which if you haven't been before, the typical sort of thing is you want to go in there and you just want to hoover up as much information as you can.
But when you do that, I think you tend to get less usable things, and it's better to possibly approach the conference looking in advance what you want to attend, who do you want to see, having some goals for yourself, and realizing that, like everything in this business, one conference isn't going to do it. It's a bit of a mix and match sort of thing.
Joanna Penn: Yeah, I think one of the other things, I did a big podcast episode on my show, the Creative Penn about it, and one of the things I was mentioning is one of the big mistakes of brand-new authors, and often it's getting ahead of yourself.
One of the things is that there were a lot of vendors and, as you said, sessions on things like selling direct, which we've talked about, but I consider it to be an advanced topic and something that you need things in place before you do things like selling direct, and yet there were kind of authors who were getting excited about doing that who hadn't even finished a book yet. People get excited about how they're going to publish a book before finishing a first draft.
So, I think that was the thing with the sessions, like you can do sessions on, even things like Facebook marketing, for example, if you haven't finished a book yet, by the time you have published a book and might be even interested in marketing, that will have moved on.
So, whether it's online or it is in person, look at where you are in a more realistic sense. Where am I in the journey, and then think about it that way. The journey of craft definitely is a different journey to business.
So, someone might have come out of traditional publishing with a 20-year craft background and yet be a beginner in terms of business. So, I think that kind of trying to understand where you are really is and then finding information around that is important.
How ALLi Helps Authors Choose the Right Vendors and Services
Joanna Penn: I did also want to ask you on that in terms of vendors, because there were a lot of vendors at Author Nation and there are a lot of companies online that we all get pitched by who sponsor things, and I was going to ask you, how do authors decide who to work with? Maybe talk a bit about the watchdog service and how people figure that out.
Orna Ross: Yeah, I was just going to pick up there when you were talking about education, how important it is to understand who's giving the education and what the context is.
So, it's not just about assuming that every session at a conference, whether that's an online conference or an in-person conference, is equally, in terms of what you need at that moment in time. Very often at conferences there are pay to play situations, where as part of the package of sponsoring the conference or being a vendor at the conference, you get a speaking slot.
So, new authors can go along to those and assume that because it's in a conference everything that's being said is completely true and valid, and it may well be or it might not be. It can be hard to work that out and there's just a huge network of companies now. They are expanding. As we speak, more will have opened, all vying for our money and our attention. It can be really quite overwhelming.
There were a lot at Author Nation. The vendor area was really big with lots of different companies that I had never heard of, and it was interesting going around and seeing what people are trying to do and are thinking about doing.
So yeah, since ALLi began there has been a watchdog desk, and there are a few people who work on the watchdog desk all the time, and it does a variety of different things, but one of the things it does is it lays down a code of standards. Companies that are willing to say, yes, that code of standards is fair and reasonable and we abide by it, can become partner members of ALLi. So, they are then vetted by the watchdog desk under various categories of value and service and so on.
That seemed to us a very important thing to do. Back when we started, it was very much about vanity presses. Remember them?
Joanna Penn: Yeah, they're still around.
Orna Ross: They're 100% there, but you just don't tend to hear about them in the community the way we did back then.
Then the ways in which services have expanded across the seven processes of publishing, there are just gazillions, and now with AI powered services where people can, very cheaply do things that would've needed a big labor investment before, they're springing up all over the place.
So, allianceindependentauthors.org/watchdog will tell you what the watchdog service does. There are ways in which you can evaluate a service and we have a guidebook, Choosing the Best Self-Publishing Services, and that's available at selfpublishingstore.com.
There's checklists and things that you need to look at. Obviously, you need to look primarily about rights and ownership, that's the first thing to look at. Then after that, it's about value for money and whether this service actually gives you what you actually need and want at this moment in time.
Joanna Penn: Yeah, as we were saying, don't go to sessions when you're not at that point and don't buy products and services when you are not at that point.
I mean we all do this stuff in the enthusiasm, but especially in this era of subscriptions. It's $5 for this here a month and $10 a month for this. And then you realize, my goodness, you can end up subscribing to all these things.
Let's say you are putting out one book, you are an author and you're putting out one book, and that might be it for another year or two.
A lot of this stuff, you don't want to be paying subscription fees every month for things. So, I always say to people, if you can, don't put down like a whole year for these subscription things. You often get a reduced rate for a subscription if you go in for a whole year, but I say to people, just do a month at a time and then next month you'll get reminded, and that's when I often will, if I'm not using it, I'll cancel it or I'll go to the lowest tier, for example.
Even, I use ElevenLabs, so for AI audio, I've got a voice clone, but I don't need it right now. So, I've gone down to their lowest tier, and then I go back up to the tier when I need a service.
Do you do stuff like that?
Orna Ross: Totally. Absolutely. Otherwise, the business becomes untenable, I think, and you need different things at different times, so it's no insult to anybody that you're dropping and need to move on for a while or maybe permanently.
Webinars as well, and education generally, conferences, I know people who purchase conferences and have not gone to one single session. So, budgeting not just your money, but also your time and attention, and focusing in on your needs at the moment. I think especially at the beginning, you can be very enthusiastic and just want to hoover it all up and it's very understandable, that enthusiasm, but step by step tends to work better.
Joanna Penn: Yeah.
Author Nation Insights: Constraints Breed Creativity
Joanna Penn: So, one of the sessions, the opening keynote, in fact, a guy called Drew Davis, was interesting to me in a number of ways. Now one, because I'm a speaker and you are too, I have a sort of a way I look at speakers and I'm evaluating the way they speak, let alone their content. This guy, Drew Davis, was a masterclass in keynote speaking. It was excellent.
If people are interested in being a speaker, getting professional training again in that is important, but he was just so good with what he did. His content was also awesome.
Some people are just performance over content, but his content was good too. One of the things he was talking about was that constraints breed creativity, and that actually fits into what we're saying. What we're saying is, you have to constrain yourself. You can't go to every session, you can't take action on every point, and he had this framework around how to constrain yourself. I won't go into it all, but one of the things was that if you want to achieve something, you have to eliminate other things, and I know you resonated with this. So, this is Drew Davis for people listening.
He talked about eliminating the unnecessary, what can you stop doing in order to pursue the new thing, and if you start something new, you have to kill two things. Kill the easy one, then kill the hard one. So, kill the easy one, then kill the hard one.
In our notes, you resonated to this. So, tell us why this resonated with you.
Making Hard Choices in Your Author Journey
Orna Ross: We were talking last time that we spoke about my big shift and my need to dump, delegate, and kind of move things around, and just do things differently. I've been shaping up my own author business on the one side and how we do things at ALLi on the other, in order to go to the next step and go to the next level.
So, when I saw that in your big post about Author Nation, which by the way, if anybody is interested in the whole Author Nation thing and what was there, and whether you want to go next year, I really recommend reading that and we'll include the link in the show notes.
But yeah, kill the easy one, then kill the hard one, just jumped out at me from your transcript because I realized that's the way it had gone for me. So, I was just thinking a little bit more about that, about what are easy kills and what are hard kills.
For me, an easy kill is something that's low impact. It's low emotion. It's probably a should that you've been carrying over for a while, that you should drop and not let it run you anymore. Possibly something that did work, that doesn't work now, but the thing is, you're not hugely connected to it anymore, if you ever were, or it's not having a huge impact on the business.
But the hard kills then are high emotion. The return is still low, and I think, if you're killing things off, if you've got a high return, that's something else entirely. That's not what we're talking about here. But things you're attached to, and often that might be just your identity: this is how I do things; this is the kind of writer I am; this is the kind of person I am. Or it could be an ego thing or an artistic reason, but whatever reason it has been part of what you do and how you do it. It no longer is justifying the cost, either in terms of financial cost or the cost in time.
For me, examples of the easy kills was, we discussed this last time, leaving social media. It had stopped working for me at every level creatively, and it wasn't like it was yielding me a huge amount of book sales. So, it was a relatively easy kill for me. And what was happening in social media generally across all sorts of things, ethically, particularly, just killed it off. I no longer wanted to be in that space.
So, that was an example of my easy kill. But a hard kill for me was a series that I've been carrying around, and you know this better than anybody, the Go Creative series, which I tried to resuscitate again.
Joanna Penn: I was going to say, you killed it before, and then it came back.
Orna Ross: Killed it before, back it came like a multi-headed hydro monster. I really tried to make it work, and I think it is something to do with the identity/ego thing rather than it actually fitting in or being necessary in any way, but it was still really hard for me to completely kill it off this time.
But I did, and that's just an example.
So, why did I have to? And I still find myself saying, maybe when everything else is tick, tick, I'll go back to it, but I think it's really important to kill it.
One of the most important things about doing the hard kill is the signal it sends to yourself. It tells you that you're serious about the new phase because if you want to move and change and grow and expand, and go to the next level, whatever that is in your mind, the reason you haven't done that already is that something is getting in the way and you do need to let something go.
Say to yourself, I'm clearing the space, where I'm going is more important than what I have been doing. There's a whole deep energy thing there that goes way beyond time. Yes, sure it's about time, but the hard kills usually leave you feeling that you've cleared out a lot of mental clutter. Certainly, that's the way I felt afterwards, and I think that's probably part of it.
Joanna Penn: Yeah, this also fits into what I've been doing.
Academic Pursuits and Their Impact on Self-Publishing
Joanna Penn: Since we did this podcast last time, I've started on my Masters in Death, Religion and Culture at the University of Winchester. It is a full-time, one-year taught masters, and at the moment it's all it's pretty heavy material.
So, I'm doing one on sort of an introduction to studying death, and I'm doing it right now, I'm writing an essay. As many people will know, the academic side of things, there's a lot of reading, there's a lot of thinking, there's a lot of writing. There's also no AI allowed. So, it's a very intense thing. I'm writing an essay on natural burial and it's all kind of critical theory around this type of thing and theories around death. So, that's really interesting.
Another paper I'm doing, I've actually got a book by me right now. Those of you who love this kind of thing, the book is called The Devil's Atlas, which is a guide to heaven, hell and the after world.
I'm writing an essay on a particular, early medieval fresco and where the ideas of hell came from in Christian sort of ideology. So, that's another one.
Then the third one, which I think is something I'm going to turn into something at some point, is the ethics of being a fiction writer and being inspired to write a story based on human body parts. So, it's a crime thriller. So, there's a body found in the Huntarian Museum, which is a medical anatomy museum in the Royal College of Surgeons in London. I visited it in 2012. You're surrounded by body parts and jars. I think everyone can imagine what an anatomy museum looks like, and I didn't even have a second thought about writing a novel based on the way I felt in that place.
So, this essay, I'm really challenging the ethical side, because museum ethics have changed a lot since 2012 in terms of consent and power around where these bodies came from, around different aspects of being able bodied or disabled, or what are considered freaks in the Victorian period, that kind of body part. There are all kinds of really interesting ethics around that. That's just three topics I'm doing at the moment and I'm reading so many books. I'm just reading a lot every day and then writing a lot and thinking a lot.
So, coming back to what we were saying in terms of giving up the hard things, because I am doing so much work, I cannot write another book right now. So, what I'm giving up, not for long, obviously, I'm going to give it up for this year, but I'm not writing a new book in this period. That is really weird to me, but there's just no bandwidth. So, I had to give up that.
I don't do much on social media either, but giving that up has been difficult. But also, what I think is that I've been doing this for almost 20 years now, like 2005 was when I really got into writing professionally, and so I need the break.
Also, I turned 50 this year and I have a backlist of 50 books, almost 50 books, so I'm marketing my backlist, I’m doing all this, but I know that this academic rigor is going to help my Gothic Cathedral book when I get back to it, I know the ideas I'm getting will help my fiction. So, it's giving up something for a time in order to just change things a bit.
So, is it different to yours really?
Orna Ross: Yeah, I think it is different, because to me you're almost like somebody on a sabbatical and it's not even a full sabbatical. You've still got your toe in the water, very much, you're doing things.
Joanna Penn: I'm still podcasting.
Orna Ross: Your idea of on the down low is hilarious. It's more than most people manage to do on a good week; there is that. But yeah, I think it's quite different. For me, it was very much a sort of stepping up after I had been forced to step away a little bit more than I wanted to, for personal reasons last year and the beginning of this year, and then I had a rest.
But I was very much ready then to step up and, what's the next five years look like? I'm at that point of the five-year plan and wanting to get more time and more attention on my novels in particular, and all of that.
So, I think it's quite different, but I think it's interesting that the basic things remain the same, and that there is a bit of a struggle when you're trying to move from what you used to do to what you want to do. There's always that gap that you have to cross, and it always feels a little bit scary, and am I making a mistake and do I really want to.
Joanna Penn: I think one of the weirdest things with academic writing, if you're not publishing, which obviously I'm not, it's like a taught master. So, the essay which I'm spending so much time on, and some of these essays will be as much time as I've spent on a book, there is an audience of one, which is the professor.
And after years of writing for publication, and also with the podcast and with this podcast, all of this stuff goes out into the world and multiple people will consume it, and it becomes more of a conversation. And this is so weird to me that these essays I'm writing, which as I said, I may turn into other things later, but there won't be anyone else reading it. I found this very strange.
Also, I'm having to change my voice. I have had to adopt an academic voice.
I was just going to ask you about that. The difference in the writing itself is quite notable. One of the biggest things, certainly in fiction and poetry, is we are really trying to write evocatively and bring all kinds of sensory detail in and all of this stuff, which they just don't want in an academic thing.
So, I'm finding it quite difficult, but also interesting. So, I am adopting a character, and the character is somebody who writes in an academic voice.
Orna Ross: Jo, the disinterested, rigorous observer, balancing things right and left. Yeah.
Joanna Penn: Yes, and I think the other thing, I'm really enjoying the rigor of the research and the attribution. So, I am using some AI tools to help me find things to read, but then of course, I'm taking that journal article and going to the university search facility, finding the article, downloading the article, reading the article, attributing it in the right way and all this.
So, I'm really enjoying that, and I think it's so important in the era of AI to check attribution because of course the models make stuff up, hallucination, another word for they are creative and they make up stuff. So, you really do have to do this, and I like the rules around it in the university. So, I'm finding it just a very interesting thing, but I'm also struggling to read any more than I do, because I'm reading hours every day and doing all this. So, I'm definitely finding it a challenge to read as much fiction, for example, because I don't want to read anymore.
But you've done academic stuff. Is it something you miss, or any sort of thoughts on why it's important in a publishing world, because obviously academic publishing is such a different beast?
Orna Ross: Completely different. It's interesting actually at the moment, the way self-publishing is connecting with it. So, one of the things, I actually had three events over the last while, Author Nation was just, and four, if you count SelfPubCon, the online event, but three physical events.
Before I went to Author Nation, I went to an academic conference in Dublin about WB Yates. It was interesting being back in the academic world, and I actually decided, that is my last academic conference. It was interesting. I've always enjoyed them. And the Yeats summer school in Sligo, I've gone regularly, but I taught at UCD for a good few years and that's where the Go Creative Series was born actually, I taught creativity and culture, and my own thesis was literary studies, a historical piece.
So yeah, I came from that background into publishing, myself. I think probably with hindsight, looking back, and I don't think this will happen to you because you've been so free beforehand, but I carried a lot from that academic background, that rigor, that idea of something being good enough, and this is the way to do it, this is very much not the way to do it.
Even though I worked in feminist studies, which was breaking down a lot of that and was multidisciplinary.
Joanna Penn: Mine is, yeah.
Orna Ross: Which makes total sense because knowledge can't be boxed really.
Joanna Penn: It was multidisciplinary. It also introduced the idea of the personal as being, every bit as valid, and the idea that there could be a disinterested voice, which very much was the drive in academia before these kinds of studies. The idea that you could be in some way objective was completely blown out of the water by feminist studies, queer studies, gender studies, generally. So, I enjoyed all that. Nonetheless, I still feel that I carried a lot of weight around for a long time, and I think I threw it off at the end of this conference. I thought, no, these are not my people really. They're really interesting, fascinating, love their minds. Really interesting to watch how they think and engage with each other, but actually, no. So yeah, that was an interesting experience. That's interesting. On finding your people, what I do love about this course is that I'm with a whole load of people who do not flinch at death.
People don't want to talk about it, and completely fine for some people, but on the course there's an embalmer and a priest who does the burials and things like that. So, people want to talk about a topic that I have brought into my writing for many years, and yet many people don't want to talk about it.
Even in self-publishing, the dominant discussion is romance and love and of happy joy, and over in the corner, all the dark thriller writers, crime writers and horror writers and stuff like that.
But it's interesting, you used the word free there, and this is another thing I'm finding difficult, which is in writing the essay. Normally, I've got a lot of opinions, and I'm not used to having to back up my opinion with someone else's opinion. That seems to be, with academia, you're like, you can have your opinion, but then you have to back it up with a whole load of other people's published opinions.
Orna Ross: Yes, exactly. You have to refer to everything ever written on this topic, and I think that's another thing that has affected me hugely, was around research, because once you've done a Master's thesis or beyond, you are really expected to have read everything about your little tiny niche, know everybody who's written in it and all of that.
I think I carry that into research for my novels, because I couldn't rest until I knew absolutely everything. Whereas now I eventually over time came to realizing, no, just get the bit you need and drop the rest.
I would get completely lost. I enjoy it hugely, the research. It's easier than the writing, isn't it?
Joanna Penn: Yeah, I think I'm going to have Melissa Addey on my podcast next year, because Melissa does a lot of academic writing still, and publishing things, and so is the kind of feeling that in the self-publishing world, we need more rigor, but not to the nth degree. So, I think there's definitely stuff I will bring in, but I won't take it as far as a lot of this stuff is.
But I do think, especially as I said in this era of AI, I would like to see more rigor in the self-publishing community around attribution, especially in non-fiction. But also, I've always done an author's note and always included a bibliography in my fiction as well, but I think that would actually be good practice as part of the community. I don't know, what do you think?
Orna Ross: I think so absolutely, with you 100% on the attribution thing and the critical thinking.
Critical thinking skills are a little bit missing sometimes in our community. The emotion and the drama can take over sometimes, and what we were talking about at the beginning of the show about assessing services even, people can just float into things, or signing agreements that they haven't read, and all of that kind of thing.
I think if you're academically trained, a lot of stuff comes with that. That is very useful, not just in your writing and your thinking, also in your business in a strange kind of roundabout way.
Joanna Penn: Then my final point on this in terms of the business, and I want to just say to people, I am putting aside the writing of new material, but I have a big backlist, and this is the reality of being an author with a backlist, and it's true in traditional publishing too. Most people make most money from their backlist. So, if you don't have a new book in a year or six months or whatever, then you can still market the backlist. I have ads running, I actually have my first BookBub Deal tomorrow as we record this that I've had in years.
I have email marketing running. I'm continuing the podcast, the Creative Penn podcast. I am taking a break on my other podcast, Books and Travel, because I just don't have time for that too. I'm continuing with my Patreon. It's almost like I'm like most authors now, most authors have a day job, and my day job is now doing this master's degree whilst I also on the side keep the business running, keep the wheels going on the book marketing.
So, I think that's important too. We do have more freedom. Once you have a backlist, there are ways to repackage that, to remarket that, and to just keep things turning.
Orna Ross: Everybody talks about that. One of the things we didn't mention was the ALLi Indie Author Income Survey, which we released at Author Nation, and we'll be doing a sort of an online release now shortly. But one of the things that came out again, and it's no surprise to anybody, I think it turns up in every author income survey, that the more books you have the higher your income. Just as a general correlation, there are outliers as there always are, but generally speaking. I found myself saying a lot to people at Author Nation, young, young in the sense of young businesses rather than young people, but people who are just starting out beginner publishers who were in that hard place of finished the first book and halfway through the second one. I think that's the hardest moment of all. If you can get to number three, I think that's a real change in your author business.
Joanna Penn: Then if you can get five books working for you, more freedom comes back to you at that point. It's just really hard when you're in the early stages of the content creation and the early stages of the publishing business side as well. For sure.
We are almost out of time. Is there anything else you wanted to mention? I guess we're heading into the holiday season, and people are thinking about next year, and anything else you want to talk about?
Thinking Ahead to SelfPubCon Live
Orna Ross: Events again, I suppose we're looking forward now to the London Book Fair, that will be our next big physical outing for ALLi.
Last year we were really pretty disappointed with the indie author offering and the year before, I think we said the same. So, it was time for us to do a little something about that.
So, this is just a sneak peek that we will be doing some form of SelfPubCon live at the London Book Fair in March.
I'll have more about that on the ALLi Podcast over the next weeks and months. It's not going to be a big, major conference like Author Nation, nothing like that. More like a day of mentoring where we bring our advisors and our entrepreneur members together with people who are starting out in a structured kind of way to facilitate some structured mentoring around specific problems, and then with a few talks and a bit of social and stuff thrown in. Yeah, more on that anon.
Joanna Penn: Yes, we will be doing another one of those after that. It is crazy to think we're almost in 2026.
Orna Ross: I know, and we're already talking about the next one and three months will have passed.
Joanna Penn: Pass so quickly.
Joanna Penn: But I think as ever, as we often say, some things stay the same and many things change. But we are still creating and still writing and still here. I think that's what I felt at Author Nation too. It was, look, some of us are still here.
I remember when I started out, I would look at people like Kevin J. Anderson for example, and be like, who are the people who are still here after decades? What is it that they do that enables them to keep going? In fact, Becca Sime had a great session on sustainable creativity and author business. There are practices to put in place that mean you can keep doing this for the long term.
I think what I'm doing and what you are doing, which is giving up some things, taking a bit of a break, doing things differently, that's all part of it. We are not stopping, we are just doing things a bit differently, and who knows where we'll be by this time next year.
Orna Ross: Exactly.
Joanna Penn: Right. So, that's us for today.
Happy writing.
Orna Ross: Happy publishing. Bye-bye.
