Joanna Penn is a New York Times and USA Today best selling author and a leading light in the self publishing movement. I was lucky enough to attend her one day course “Creative Entrepreneur – Build a Business with Your Writing” hosted at Escape the City.
This packed and highly practical course is not just for fiction writers considering self-publishing. If you blog non-fiction and are considering writing a book either to sell or drive traffic to your site, or even if you are a fiction author on a traditional trade publishing path, you will find a chunk of material in this course that is useful. It is a comprehensive end-to-end blueprint to turn writing into a business. If you are sceptical about whether it works, Joanna is living proof, having sold over 250,000 books.
Joanna’s background is in business consultancy and it shows. As the course title suggests, she is a pioneer of a new cohort of creatives who are equally comfortable wearing a business hat. Personally, I find this refreshing. The most successful published authors I know are also running their own businesses, but Joanna explicitly sees writing as an amazing business opportunity. She compares the finite income available from a salaried job to the current and future passive income provided by a novel once it is published. She is delighted by the fact that novels keep earning an author’s estate money, up to seventy years after their death.
As an advocate of the self-publishing movement, Joanna argues that the greater control she has as an independent author provides her with greater opportunity to monetise her own work, mainly because the margins for self published authors are so much higher. She does not play down that it takes a long time and it requires a lot of hard work.
I’m not sure if, when and where Joanna will run this course again, but there are a ton of resources and training materials available on her self publishing website www.thecreativepenn.com.
Jule P Owen - Illustration, writing 