On the Creative Self-Publishing stream of the Self-Publishing with ALLi Podcast, Orna Ross and Joanna Penn discuss creative challenges, including patience, mindset, and balancing creative freedom with traditional publishing ambitions. Joanna shares her experience submitting her novel Blood Vintage to traditional publishers, while Orna reflects on how family obligations disrupted her plans and required a flexible approach to creativity.
Listen to the Podcast: Tackling Creative Challenges and Adapting to Change
Orna Ross and @thecreativepenn discuss managing creative challenges, mindset, and flexibility in indie publishing on the latest Self-Publishing with ALLi Podcast. Share on XSponsors
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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 Transcripts
Orna Ross: Hello and welcome to the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast with me, Orna Ross, and Joanna Penn is with me for the Creative Self-Publishing stream. Hi Joanna.
Joanna Penn: Hi Orna, and hi everybody. Exciting to be back.
Orna Ross: Exciting to be back and a whole new stream really. We've been doing this together now for how many years?
Joanna Penn: Oh goodness, who even knows at this point? More than a decade we've known each other for sure.
Orna Ross: I think more than a decade we've been doing this podcast or some version of this podcast together, and it's had a couple of different iterations as we have changed over the years, and we have done quite an extensive revamp of the ALLi podcast in the last quarter of last year.
So, you and I had a chat about what we would do and how we would set it up for this year, and we're going to be talking much more about our own creative challenges and the solutions that we are trying to put in around those.
So, we'll be talking not just about the tools and the techniques and the tactics and everything that people in the community talk about, but also one step back, what goes on behind that, the thinking and the processes and the lessons we've learned.
So, getting quite granular about what we're doing, we're going to go into that in quite a lot of depth because we figure that's actually the most useful thing we can do at this stage.
Joanna Penn: Also, I was just thinking we can use this as a coaching session for each other and other people can listen in.
As we mentioned, we've been friends a long time and we talk about business and now we can talk about the more detailed stuff and mindset stuff, and we're just going to go into what we do as working authors, working author creatives and businesspeople, and then talk about those challenges as we go through.
So, I guess we can get straight into it. Shall I start?
Orna Ross: Yeah, why don't you tell us what you've been doing since the last time we spoke?
Joanna Penn: So, one of my big projects in that last quarter, which I mentioned in the last show that I was in the middle of, but I did the Blood Vintage Kickstarter. This is all tied up with me now having a US agent, and what we decided to do was to do the Kickstarter just for the hardback, the special edition hardback with the sprayed edges and the ribbon and the foil, it's a beautiful book, but I didn't sell any other formats. No eBook, no paperback, none of that, no audio, and my US agent, Renee, took it out on submission back in September 2024, just to put a timestamp on it, and months later and it is still on submission.
So, I have a couple of challenges here, and I'll just outline them and then you can comment. So, my first challenge is patience as in, as an indie author, I've never done this. So, I did not have a traditional career before becoming an indie. I started as an indie and I love being an indie, but this is something I would like to do.
I think this is another challenge; it needs to be okay for indie authors to want a traditional deal without people assuming some kind of hierarchical goal or some reasons that might be more about them than about me or the person who wants to do it.
So, I want to have two conversations with you really. One is about patience and the traditional publishing world and then also what an indie author means from the ALLi perspective, from what you think about how an indie author puts in a trad deal, even in English language, many people are doing foreign rights deals, but for, sort of, the main formats we normally keep for ourselves.
So, should we start out with your experience as well?
Orna Ross: There's so much there to unpack, isn't there? We'll start maybe just with the patience thing because that is so necessary, and one of the big advantages of being indie is that you don't have to wait.
I remember back in the day when I got my first trad deal for my fiction books. I sold the rights to them, or licensed the rights, in 2003 and they didn't bring the book out until 2006.
Joanna Penn: Oh, my goodness.
Orna Ross: Yeah, and it kept being delayed and it was hugely frustrating because I had so disconnected from the book by the time it came out as well. You were promoting and talking about a book, and you had so moved on in your mind. So, that was weird.
To be honest, it also caused problems in the relationship because of the way I constantly felt I was being shifted just completely to suit them and whatever they had taken on and so on. There was very little, and there wouldn't be as a debut novelist, there wouldn't be a lot of loyalty to you or concern; they would just move you like a piece on the timetable.
So, I found that all quite frustrating. So, the big thing for me when indie came along, one of the big advantages, was that fact that you could just get a book, once you were finished, there wasn't a lot to stop you.
You might choose to take your time, and I do, as time has gone on, I actually take longer between getting the finished edited product and putting it out there, setting things up more like a trad publisher would than I did when it was different.
When we started, it was all about digital and get it out there and get another one out there.
So yeah, the patience, you're not a very patient person by nature, would that be fair to say?
Joanna Penn: Definitely not. One of the reasons I went indie in the first place back in 2007 was I learned how long things would take, and yet this still comes back to this; I've been doing this a long time now, and yet this is something I haven't done. And everything else, when I want to do something, I go and do it.
I put off doing a Kickstarter for many years after you. You did a crowdfunder much earlier than I did, and then I was like, now I'm committed I'm going to do it. But also, that was in my control.
So, this is another thing. This is out of my control, which I'm also really struggling with.
Orna Ross: Yeah, and I completely get that. Again, creative control and freedom, it's a huge thing to give up.
So, you must really want this. So, talk to us a little bit more about is, I've never done that, enough of a reason to make you go against the grain a bit here?
You must have a deeper reason, I'm thinking.
Joanna Penn: This does come down to, I'm turning 50 in 2025, and it's one of the things I have on my list is to do this, to go through a traditional publishing process at some point, and why not start now?
What I also like about Blood Vintage is it is a standalone, and so I'm writing standalones for this particular purpose, not because they're throwaway books in any form, but the characters and the world and the IP is much more encapsulated.
So, at this point, it's very unlikely that I would sell book 14 of my arcane series.
Orna Ross: Unlikely, yeah.
Joanna Penn: Exactly, I wouldn't even consider that because that IP is such a big world, it's such a lot in it, and Blood Vintage, I think, the benefits of a traditional publishing deal are you're reaching, potentially, obviously it's a literary lottery as you always say, but potentially you can reach readers who you can't reach or haven't reached or may reach in a different way.
So, it could be seen as a marketing play in one sense. It's look, I could potentially reach different people with this. So, I guess that's another thing.
I'm also pitching it for film and TV, and so if by some chance the stars aligned, that would also be interesting depending on what happens. So, I think for me, at baseline, it is literally something I feel that I can't comment on.
You can comment on your experience, and I've been in this industry for so long and yet I can't comment on it. So, I don't know, is that enough? I don't know, we shall see.
Orna Ross: Yeah, it's interesting. It's interesting why people want it. It's always interesting to me.
I completely understand wanting to do something that you haven't done and particularly something that's seen as, still carries a status that self-publishing doesn't have, because just by definition it means a third-party said, yes, I like your book and, yes, I like it enough to actually invest some money in it, and that obviously feels good.
There are so many reasons why we might want to do it, but it's a really difficult challenge, and it's certainly not getting any easier. As time goes on, it's getting harder and harder for good books to win the literary lottery.
Joanna Penn: I guess this is the other thing. I feel like because I've lived my career in public for so long, on the one side, there is potentially the ego thing of, what if this works?
That lottery ticket. If the lottery ticket comes in, it could be amazing. But it could also be very embarrassing for me, as someone who does this in public, to basically be rejected by every single publisher. But that in itself is also an experience I haven't had.
We actually had one rejection, which I thought was brilliant. The rejection was, this book is too commercial for us.
Orna Ross: Wow.
Joanna Penn: I know, and it made me laugh. I was just like, seriously, this is just a funny thing. But I almost feel like the experience of rejection, which I haven't had in this way, obviously, I've had rejection, but not from traditional publishers. So, in that way, it will give me more things to experience and talk about, even on this show, for example.
But I did also want to mention for people listening, the difference in money and when the money comes.
Orna Ross: Just before you do that, I'll just pick up on that little thing you said there about, it's too commercial for us. I think that's a really interesting comment, and I think this is something that people don't necessarily know just how stratified and niche.
We talk about going niche and finding your niche and bedding down into that. I think often indie authors or people who aren't really familiar with the industry don't realize just how much different publishing houses niche, and so they don't want a commercial book because they don't have the ability to sell it into their buyers, their booksellers and so on.
Just because a book has great commercial potential doesn't necessarily mean that people are going to say yes to it. So, they will have their own reasons for saying no, which have absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the book, and I think that's the thing I want to say most of all, because if it was rejected by every single publisher in the whole wide world, which is highly unlikely, it won't even be submitted to every publisher. But even if it was, it won't necessarily be.
And authors always think it's a measure. If you get a deal, it's a measure of the quality of the book. If you don't get a deal, it's a measure of the quality of the book. But actually, that's a tiny reason in the great pool of reasons as to why a book does or doesn't get taken on.
Joanna Penn: Yeah, and obviously if it goes through the whole process and nothing happens, I will be self-publishing it, probably in November again, like a year later.
But I've committed with my agent, Renee. I've said, look, I'm committed to this. I had set a deadline for December, and she had said from the beginning, look, just to be realistic, that's not going to happen. And I was like no, it will, it will. But no, I'm leaving it with her now.
But just to come back on the money, what was very interesting for me last year was when I did my year end money for the business, I was missing a chunk of money that I would normally have.
When I thought about it, it was like, oh, that's because Blood Vintage, I would normally expect X-amount from a book launch, I didn't get that. And that is an asset that is sitting right now. That asset is not making me any money, and that is such a mind shift to think that, even, let's say I do get a deal. Let's say it comes out three years later, like your book, you do get some percentage of an advance potentially on when they accept the manuscript, but then you might not see money for years and this suddenly became quite visceral for me, and it's not something I've experienced before.
So, maybe you could also talk about that because that is very different, isn't it?
Orna Ross: It's huge and the advance that you do get can sound like it's a nice chunk of change but actually, when you break it down over the amount of time, so you usually get a little on signing and then you get some more. Usually, it's broken into three between signing and actual release, and so it comes in slowly.
Then there are these very complicated royalty statements, which include returns, whereby the money's going in and out. Honestly, I've yet to meet an author who can make head or tail of the royalty statements that you get, and very often you don't earn any more than the advance, which is why agents tend to push for a big advance because that kind of determines how many copies of the book they're going to print, because the reason for doing a trade deal usually is because of the access that publishers have to bookstores, and so they're still very much factoring in print often still more than their digital sales, even.
Yeah, the money isn't what it sounds like, and yes, it ceases to be an asset as well. Once it's licensed, you don't actually have any control over how that asset is exploited.
Joanna Penn: I guess, hopefully, I will sign a sensible contract after all these years of being trained on it, but just to finish this up, because it's definitely your turn to talk about things.
But I wanted to talk about this openly on this show and also on my show, the Creative Pen Podcast, because I feel like in the indie space, we do emphasize a lot of things and the difference with traditional publishing, and now I feel like I am actually experiencing it, even before getting to any contract negotiation stage. So, very interesting as far as I go, and it will be interesting in a couple of months’ time when we do the next one of these, whether anything has changed.
Orna Ross: Yes, exactly, and that's the exciting bit. You put it out there and it's out of your hands in a way and you get on with doing other things, and great things can happen.
The thing is, if your book's not being seen, nothing like that is going to happen. If you're not in, you can't win that lottery. I would like to say though, that it's really important when people are doing what you are doing, you automatically do it with an indie mindset because you are dying the wall indie in your mentality, in your approach, in your mindset, everything.
But I do see a lot of authors still who have an all or nothing idea about third-party publishing, trad publishing, trade publishing, whatever you want to call it. It shouldn't be all or nothing. So, the idea is that as an indie author, you don't lose your independence because you've decided that you would like a deal like this. All you are doing is you are licensing some aspect of your rights.
That can be, as you mentioned earlier, it might just be foreign rights, it might be TV, film, or it might be that you want a deal with a third-party publisher. Whatever it is, you will want to limit the territory and the time that you give them and all of that.
You keep your independence, you meet them as a mutual business agreement, which is very different to, take all my books, tell me I'm good enough, that sort of validation mentality that we've all been trained into as authors and that one part of us always feels that way as creatives, I think.
So, selective rights licensing is how we talk about it. You strip out your rights so that you might find, the ideal deal for an indie is actually print-rights-only, and you keep your digital. So, you get that extra reader's bit that they can bring for you, but you actually get to benefit from that by keeping the digital assets of the audiobook and the eBook, which are much easier for you to distribute and don't require bookstores and so on.
But not thinking about it as an all-or-nothing thing, I think is really important.
Joanna Penn: That is enough about me. Orna, your turn. What have you been up to and what are some of your challenges right now?
Orna Ross: Yeah, I had an interesting quarter the end of last year because everything just went pear shaped.
This happens, and I wanted to talk about this because this happens every so often, doesn't it, in life?
So, I had family issues. that just went into a place where nobody in the family, we had a very good set up with my elderly mother and suddenly we hadn't, for various reasons, and other members of the family weren't available in the way that they usually are.
So, my time suddenly was not my own anymore for quite a while, in a way that really impacted on my work and my ability to do my work, because I have obviously a number of commitments. Obviously, I'm not just an author-publisher, I'm also still very much a working director at ALLi, and so there is always a lot.
Also, it was the quarter where it was supposed to be a real kind of blossoming of a number of projects that I had been working on for some time, were going to be finished off, and so patience is necessary as an indie sometimes too because I just wasn't able to get at things and I had to just slow everything down.
I'm lucky, I feel, that I developed a while ago a creative planning system for myself that is very flexible and very responsive to what's going on, and so I was able to work through it in a way where it didn't knock me.
I know that before I had that planning in place and maybe when just when I was younger, I would have really felt very frustrated and very stopped, and I'd be banging my head off a brick wall kind of thing.
So, I didn't go through any of that, but I did find it very mentally and emotionally, it was really challenging.
So, even when I did get some time, I wasn't necessarily using that time well, and I was unable to finish. I had the novel deadline for A Life Before, which is the first book in a fiction series that I've been working on for a very long time. I was supposed to finish that, and I had an editor's slot set aside, and my editor is not easy to get and so I ended up with a real problem.
I was going to miss that slot, and heaven knows when she was going to be able to do it again.
So, I had just done a Kickstarter, and people were waiting for a book. So, I ended up having to swap what was my book that I had offered as a stretch goal, I ended up doing that first and putting the novel behind it, which in itself I found frustrating.
So, I just wanted to raise it, just to say that these frustrations are very much part of life as a creative, and they come up every so often. My way of dealing with it, especially as I get older as well, I find that my energy levels are not what they were. The whole need to refill the well and to make sure that you build in downtime, creative rest, creative play. These things, the balancing of all of that becomes more and more important for me the more challenging things become and the older I get.
When I was thrown into the maelstrom of all of that, that was really useful to me.
Joanna Penn: Yeah, I think this idea of the cycles of life as well. You're going through that caring for elderly parent and that end of the family, and I'm also coming into that. But I also hear from people with young kids at the other end, and of course, you've had children, so you understand this, but what I hear from people is that frustration, like you said, the frustration of, how can I find the time to create?
They're not angry at the children or the family, just frustrated at themselves for needing that downtime when they're not doing the family thing. It's, oh, if I have an extra hour when the baby's asleep or when the elderly mother is asleep or whatever, why can't I work on my book?
So, what are your thoughts on that? You mentioned creative rest, but giving yourself permission to almost let things go.
Orna Ross: Yeah, because I think if you don't take the rest, the rest will take you, and I think that's what's happening sometimes when we “can't” do something, is that our brains, our bodies know better than that part of us.
There's a part of every indie author that's a complete workaholic and will throw everything into that hat, and we have to not live from there because there lies burnout and there lies unhappiness and there lies loneliness and all sorts of other things. So, keeping that balance in place is just so important.
We're never balanced. We always feel off. Nobody ever sits there saying, I feel completely balanced now in this moment. It just doesn't happen that way, but I think, and you're really good at this, building in, we were just talking before we came on, we were arranging the timings for the next podcast that we'll do over the next number of months, and I was talking about building in the buffer zones and you said, make sure you put the time, block that time off now in your calendar, those free days that you need to refresh.
So, I like to think of, we need time to focus. Flow is made up of focus flow and then there is the sort of completely free flow where you don't do anything and you just let yourself, and I think if we can realize sometimes there's that front mind that's just, do more work. It's not really a good part of our brain to follow and frustration lies there. Whereas, if we can realize that when we are, sometimes it really helps me just to say I am resting for my book, rather than thinking because I'm resting, I'm not working. I'm actually resting so that when I do come to work, I will work so much better, or I'm playing for my book.
That can help us as well, I think, to really enjoy the time that we maybe are spending with family or other time, or time that we just have to take because our heads won't work, we can actually switch into.
It's a real creative leech of energy to be beating ourselves up about something that we can't control.
Joanna Penn: On that, I'm currently reading Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Berkman, and I really liked his book Four Thousand Weeks which I also recommend to people, but I wanted to read this because this fits in. This is from the opening chapter. It says, “the world opens up once you realize you're never going to sort your life out.”
It's basically like, you know, the work is never over. So, even if you say, oh, I'll just get another thing on my list done, there will be another thing on your list. It's a great book; I really recommend that. And Four Thousand Weeks is very Memento Mori, definitely my kind of thing.
But is there anything else you want to say on that?
We have one other topic that might be interesting.
Orna Ross: Yeah, let's jump into that.
Joanna Penn: When I realized that I was going to miss this money at the end of the year and I did want to update How to Write Non-Fiction, which is one of my core craft books. The first edition was in 2018 and since then, I'd written Pilgrimage. So, I'd written a memoir, and I really wanted to put the lessons learned from my memoir in that book.
I also wanted to narrate the audiobook, because the first edition was done by someone I hired. So, I went through this whole process of, is it worth updating this nonfiction book, because of course that takes a lot of work. A second edition is a whole new book. So, you remove the first edition. It's not just upload some more files, basically.
But I decided I really wanted to do that. I also wanted an earner, because I was like, okay, if I'm not going to make the money from Blood Vintage and potentially whatever next novel I write, then I want to do this.
And I wanted to talk to you specifically about this, one, obviously, How to Write Non-Fiction, the second edition is out now, but also you and I have talked a number of times. We have said to each other, Oh, I'm really going to just focus on fiction, and then both of us end up doing some nonfiction and we both love the nonfiction too. So, I wondered what you thought about coming back to nonfiction because you've also done this too, right?
You've come back to your GoCreative! Stuff.
Orna Ross: I have, yeah. That's really interesting, and it feeds back into what we were saying, I think, a minute ago about the work never being done. If any sort of space opens up, we fill it, don't we? That mountain of work will always be there.
Yeah, the nonfiction is really interesting. For a long time, I remember we used to say, it's like a palette cleanser, and then we both went through this phase of saying, no, I don't want to do any nonfiction anymore. I've done it, kind of thing. I've said what I wanted to say.
I actually went so far as to remove the GoCreative! Series altogether, but it didn't leave me alone and it's back now with a bang. I think I needed to grow a bit to finish it off. I think that was part of it, but I shouldn't ever have withdrawn it, and I really don't know why I did, thinking back. I can't remember what my thought process was because it was perfectly helpful and useful as it was.
But anyway, I'm happier. I'm happier with it now. I think that's another thing to notice about ourselves is not everything we say is true, no matter how didactically and emphatically we say it, and very often actually forgetting didactic and emphatic or saying something that isn't going to be true in another while.
Again, I have found, the book I've just finished, that stretch goal book, is kind of a mix of poetry and nonfiction. It's a poetry book and will be sold in the poetry genre, but the poetry is not mine. The poetry is by W. B. Yeats and my part of it is little nonfiction essays in between the poems, and they're in a very different style to my usual style.
It's essentially an academic book with a wider sort of reach, but it's referenced as bibliography and all the academic furniture, kind of thing, is in place.
Having spent so long on the fiction, it was just such a relief to write it. Nonfiction comes much easier to me, because of the kind of nonfiction that I generally write it's much quicker. So, it was such a relief as well to start a book and finish it within a very short period of time, having spent so long.
So, I think what I'm trying to say is, often a challenge is met by contrast. So, for me, the contrast between fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, the different elements of them, when I get very tired of one, the other can refresh me in a way, creatively, that feels very good.
That's why I've stopped saying I'm not going back to nonfiction, and I feel that nonfiction is going to be part of what I do going forward as well.
Joanna Penn: Yes, and I guess when we say things, we mean them at the time, but they might change in the future. Again, we've been doing this a long time, and of course, there are different times of your life.
Like, I remember when you did the crowdfunder and I was like, I'm never doing that. I don't want to have that many people, that many bosses, and it's interesting how we respond to things at the time and then things change.
Actually, I think it was Book Vault coming along with the ability to have someone else do the shipping that changed my mind on that. So, that's just an overarching thing; you change but also the market changes, technologies change, the people around you change. So, you can't expect something that was true a year ago, let alone a decade ago, to still be true. It's just not going to happen.
Orna Ross: Yeah, and I think the essence of creativity is that ability to allow things to change and to move with those changes, because that's where you see people who have been successful in doing things one way, but the conditions change, either their personal conditions or the conditions in the marketplace change, and that inability to roll with that, you lose out and it can be really problematic.
Joanna Penn: So, I guess hold your intentions lightly is part of our recommendation for 2025.
I think we are done, Orna.
Orna Ross: Okay, that flew.
Joanna Penn: It did fly by.
I guess we'd love to know what you think, listeners, you can always leave a comment or put something on the show notes on selfpublishingadvice.org. Is this helpful that we're just talking more about what's going on with us and our creative challenges, because we're still challenging ourselves, aren't we?
Orna Ross: Yeah, absolutely, and this podcast in a way is us changing things up a bit, so we would love your feedback in terms of whether it's useful to you and if you have any ideas or things that you would like us to cover, it's very much a conversation. So, do please let us know what you think, and we'll be doing this every two months. So, every second month. So, our next one will be in March and I'm sure the landscape will look completely different by then.
But until then, happy writing and happy publishing.
Joanna Penn: Happy publishing. Bye everyone.
Great episode! I find it very helpful to hear about the thinking behind the decisions you make for your creative and business lives. I feel a bit inundated with how-tos these days, so it’s refreshing to hear why instead. Thank you for your honesty in sharing your thoughts.
Just wanted to say I love this new angle for your segments on the podcast, Orna and Joanna! I find this style of conversation and discussion about issues within a creative life really helpful and interesting. Thank you for this!