J.F. Penn fiction themes and merch plan

Happy New Year 2026!

I love January and the opportunity to start afresh. I know it’s arbitrary in some ways, but I measure my life by what I create, and I also measure it in years.

At the beginning of each year, I publish an article (and podcast episode) here, which helps keep me accountable. If you’d like to share your goals, please add them in the comments below. 

2026 is a transitional year as I will finish my Masters degree and continue the slow pivot that I started in December 2023 after 15 years as an author entrepreneur.

Just to recap that, it was: From digitally-focused to creating beautiful physical books; From high-volume, low cost to premium products with higher Average Order Value; From retailer-centric to direct first; and From distance to presence, and From creating alone to the AI-Assisted Artisan Author.

I’ve definitely stepped partially into all of those, and 2026 will continue in that same direction, but I also have an additional angle for Joanna Penn and The Creative Penn that I am excited about.  

If you'd like to join my community and support the show every month, you'll get access to my growing list of Patron videos and audio on all aspects of the author business — for the price of a black coffee (or two) a month. Join us at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn.

Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-winning, 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.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

• Leaning into the Transformation Economy 
• The Creative Penn Podcast and my Patreon Community
• Webinars and live events
• Finish my Masters in Death, Religion, and Culture
• Bones of the Deep — J.F. Penn
• Add merch to CreativePennBooks.com and JFPennBooks.com 
• How to Write, Publish, and Market Short Stories and Short Story Collections — Joanna Penn
• Other possible books
• Experiment more with AI translation 
• Ideally outsource more marketing to AI, but do more marketing anyway
• Double down on being human, health and travel 

You can find all my books as J.F. Penn and Joanna Penn on your favourite online store in all the usual formats, or order from your local library or bookstore. You can also buy direct from me at CreativePennBooks.com and JFPennBooks.com.

I'm not really active on social media, but you can always see my photos at Instagram @jfpennauthor.

Leaning into the Transformation Economy 

I’ve struggled with my identity as Joanna Penn and my Creative Penn brand for a few years now.

When I started TheCreativePenn.com in 2008, the term ‘indie author’ was new and self-publishing was considered ‘vanity press’ and a sure way to damage your author career, rather than a conscious creative and business choice. 

It was the early days of the Kindle and iPhone (both launched in 2007), and podcasting and social media were also relatively new. While US authors could publish on KDP, the only option for international authors was Smashwords and the market for ebooks was tiny. Print-on-demand and digital audio were also just emerging as viable options. 

While it was the early era of blogging, there were very few blogs and barely any podcasts talking about self-publishing, so when I started TheCreativePenn.com in late 2008 and the podcast in March 2009, it was a new area.

For several years, it was like howling into the wind. Barely any audience. Barely any traffic, and certainly very little income. 

But I loved the freedom and the speed at which I could learn things and put them into practice. Consume and produce. That has always been my focus. I met people on Twitter and interviewed them for my show, and over those early years I met many of the people I consider dear friends even now. 

Since self-publishing was a relatively unexplored niche in those early years, I slowly found an audience and built up a reputation. I also started to make more money both as an author, and as a creative entrepreneur.

Over the years since, pretty much everything has changed for indie authors and we have had more and more opportunity every year.

I’ve shared everything I’ve learned along the way, and it’s been a wonderful time. 

But as self-publishing became more popular and more authors saw more success (which is FANTASTIC!), other voices joined the chorus and now, there are many thousands of authors of all different levels with all kinds of different experiences sharing their tips through articles, books, podcasting, and social media. 

I started to wonder whether my perspective was useful anymore. 

On top of the human competition, in November 2022, ChatGPT launched, and it became clear that prescriptive non-fiction and ‘how to’ information could very easily be delivered by the AI tools, with the added benefit of personalisation.

You can ask Chat or Claude or Gemini how you can self-publish your particular book and they will help you step by step through the process of any site. You can share your screen or upload screenshots and it can help with what fields to fill in (very useful with translations!), as well as writing sales descriptions, researching keywords, and offering marketing help targeted to your book and your niche, and tailored to your voice. 

Once again, I questioned what value I could offer the indie author community, and I’ve pulled back over the last few years as I’ve been noodling around this. 

But over the last few weeks, a penny has dropped. Here’s my thinking in case it also helps you.

Firstly, I want to be useful to people. I want to help.  

In my early days of speaking professionally, from 2005-ish, I wanted to be the British (introvert) Tony Robbins, someone who inspired people to change, to achieve things they didn’t think they could. Writing a book is one of those things. Making a living from your writing is another.

So I leaned into the self-help and how-to niche. But now that is now clearly commoditised.

But recently, I realised that my message has always been one of transformation, and in the following four areas. 

From someone who doesn’t think they are creative but who desperately wants to write a book, to someone who holds their first book in their hand and proudly says, ‘I made this.’ The New Author.

From someone who has no confidence in their author voice, who wonders if they have anything to say, to someone who writes their story and transforms their own life, as well as other people’s. The Confident Author.

From an author with one or a handful of books who doesn’t know much about business, to a successful author with a growing business heading towards their first six figure year. The Author-Entrepreneur.

And finally, from a tech-phobic, fearful author who worries that AI makes it pointless to create anything and will steal all the jobs, to a confident AI-assisted creative who uses AI tools to enhance and amplify their message and their income. The AI-Assisted Artisan Author.

These are four transformations I have been through myself, and with my work as Joanna Penn/The Creative Penn, I want to help you through them as well.

So in 2026, I am repositioning myself as part of The Transformation Economy.

What does this mean?

There is a book out in February, The Transformation Economy by B. Joseph Pine II, who is also the author of The Experience Economy, which drove a lot of the last decade’s shift in business models. I have the book on pre-order, but in the meantime, I am doing the following.

I will revamp TheCreativePenn.com with ‘transformation’ as the key frame and add pathways through my extensive material, rather than just categories of how to do things. 

I’ve already added navigation pages for The New Author, The Confident Author, The Author-Entrepreneur, and The AI-Assisted Artisan Author, and I will be adding to those over time. 

My content is basically the same, as I have always covered these topics, but the framing is now different. The intent is different. 

The Creative Penn Podcast will lean more heavily into transformation, rather than just information —

And will focus on the first three of the categories above, the more creative, mindset and business things. 

My Patreon will continue to cover all those things, and that’s also where I post most of my AI-specific content, so if you’re interested in The AI-Assisted Artisan Author transformation path, come on over to patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

I have more non-fiction books for authors coming, and lots more ideas now I am leaning into this angle. 

I’ll also continue to do webinars on specific topics in 2026, and also add speaking back in 2027.

It’s harder to think about transformation when it comes to fiction, but it’s also really important since fiction books in particular are highly commodified, and will become even more so with the high production speeds. 

Yes, all readers have a few favourite authors but most will also read a ton of other books without knowing or caring who the author is. 

Fiction can be transformational. Reader’s aren’t buying a ‘book.’ They’re buying a way to escape, to feel deeply, to experience things they never could in real life.

A book can transform a day from ‘meh’ into ‘fantastic!’

My J.F. Penn fiction is mostly inspired by places, so my stories transport you into an adventure somewhere wonderful, and they all offer a deeper side of transformative contemplation of ‘memento mori’ if you choose to read them in that way. 

They also have elements of gothic and death culture that I am going to lean into with some merch in 2026, so more of an identity thing than just book sales. I’m not quite sure what this means yet, but no doubt it will emerge.

I’ll also shape my JFPennBooks.com site into more transformative paths, rather than just genre lists, as part of this shift. 

My memoir Pilgrimage always reflected a transformation, both reflecting my own midlife shift but I’ve also heard from many who it has inspired to walk alone, or to travel on pilgrimage themselves. 

Of course, transformation is not just for our readers or the people we serve as part of our businesses. It’s also for us. 

One of the reasons why we are writers is because this is how we think. This is how we figure out our lives. This is how we get the stories and ideas out of our heads and into the world. 

Writing and creating are transformative for us, too. That is part of the point, and a great element of why we do this, and why we love this.

Which is why I don’t really understand the attraction of purely AI-generated books. There’s no fun in that for me, and there’s no transformation, either.

Of course, I LOVE using Chat and Claude and Gemini Thinking models as my brainstorming partners, my research buddies, my marketing assistants, and as daily tools to keep me sparkly.

I smiled as I wrote that (and yes, I human-wrote this!) because sparkly is how I feel when I work with these tools. 

Programmers use the term ‘vibe coding’ which is going back and forth and collaborating together, sparking off each other. Perhaps that I am doing is ‘vibe creation.’

I feel it as almost an effervescence, a fun experience that has me laughing out loud sometimes. I am more creative, I am more in flow. I am more ‘me’ now I can create and think at a speed way faster than ever before. My mind has always worked at speed and my fingers are fast on the keys but working in this way makes me feel like I create in the high performance zone far more often. 

I intend to lean more into that in 2026 as part of my own transformation (and of course, I share my experiences mainly in the Community at patreon.com/thecreativepenn ).

[Note, I pay for access to all models, and currently use ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking, Claude Opus 4.5, and Gemini 3 Pro). 

So that’s the big shift this year, and the idea of the Transformation Economy will underpin everything else in terms of my content. 

The Creative Penn Podcast and my Patreon Community

The Creative Penn Podcast continues in 2026, although I am intending to reduce my interviews to once every two weeks, with my intro and other content in between. We’ll see how that goes as I am already finding some fascinating people to talk to! 

Thank you for your comments, your pictures, and also for sharing the episodes that resonate with you with the wider community.

Your reviews are also super useful wherever you are listening to this, so please leave a review wherever you’re listening this as it helps with discovery. 

Thanks also to everyone in my Patreon Community, which I really enjoy, especially as we have doubled down on being human through more live office hours.

I will do more of those in 2026 and the first one of the year will blearily UK time so Aussies and Kiwis can come. I also share new content almost every week, either an article, a video or an audio episode around writing craft, author business, and lots on different use cases for AI tools. 

If you join the Patreon, start on the Collections tab where you will find all the backlist content to explore. It’s less than the price of a coffee a month so if you get value from the show, and you want more, come on over and join us at patreon.com/thecreativepenn

My Books and Travel Podcast is on hiatus for interviews, since the Masters is taking up the time I would have had for that. However I plan to post some solo episodes in 2026, and I also post travel articles there, like my visits to Gothic cathedrals and city breaks and things like that. Check it out at https://www.booksandtravel.page/blog/ 

Webinars and live events 

Along with my Patreon office hours, I’m enjoying the immediacy and energy of live webinars and they work with my focus on transformation, as well as on ‘doubling down on being human’ in an age of AI, so I will be doing more this year.

The first is on Business for Authors, coming on 10 and 24 January, which is aimed at helping you transform your author business in 2026, or if you’re just getting started, then transform into someone who has even a small clue about business in general!
Details at TheCreativePenn.com/live and Patrons get 25% off.

In terms of live in-person events, it looks like I will be speaking at the Alliance of Independent Authors event at the London Book Fair in March, and I’ll attend the Self-Publishing Show Live in June, although I won’t be speaking. There might be other things that emerge, but in general, I’m not doing much speaking in 2026 because I need to … 

Finish my Masters in Death, Religion, and Culture 

This represents a lot of work as I am doing the course full-time. I should be finished in September, and much of the middle of the year will be focused on a dissertation. I’m planning on doing something around AI and death, so that will no doubt lead into some fiction at a later stage!

Talking of fiction … 

Bones of the Deep — J.F. Penn

The Masters is pretty serious, as is academic research and writing in general, and I found myself desperate to write a rollicking fun story over the holiday break between terms. 

I’ve talked about this ‘tall-ship’ story for a while and now I’m committing to it. 

Back in 1999, I sailed on the tall-ship Soren Larsen from Fiji to Vanuatu, one of the three trips that shaped my life.  

It was the first time I’d been to the South Pacific, the first time I sailed blue water (with no land in sight), and I kept a journal and drew maps of the trip. It also helped me a make a decision to leave the UK and I headed for Australia nine months later in early 2000, and ended up being away 11 years in Australia and New Zealand. 

I came home to visit of course, but only moved back to the UK in 2011, so that trip was memorable and pivotal in many ways and has stuck in my mind. 

The story is based on that crossing, but of course, as J.F. Penn my imagination turns it into essentially a ‘locked room,’ there is no escape out there, especially if the danger comes from the sea.

Another strand of the story comes from a recent academic essay for my Masters, when I wrote about the changes in museum ethics around human remains and medical specimens i.e. body parts in jars, and how some remains have been repatriated to the indigenous peoples they were stolen from.

I’ve also talked before about how I love ‘merfolk’ horror like Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant, All the Murmuring Bones by A.G. Slatter, and Merfolk by Jeremy Bates.

These are no smiling fantasy mermaids and mermen.

They are predators.

What might happen if the remains of a mer-saint were stolen from the deep, and what might happen to the ship that the remains are being transported in, and the people on board? 

I’m about a third in, and I am having great fun! It will actually be a thriller, with a supernatural edge, rather than horror, and it is called Bones of the Deep, and it will be out on Kickstarter in April, and everywhere by the summer. 

You can check out the Kickstarter pre-launch page with photos from my 1999 trip, the cover for the book, and the sales description at JFPenn.com/bones 

Add merch to CreativePennBooks.com and JFPennBooks.com 

I’ve dipped my toe into merch a number of times and then removed the products, but now I’m clear on my message of transformation, I want to revisit this.

My books remain core for both sites, but for CreativePennBooks, I also want to add other products with what are essentially affirmations — ‘Creative,’ ‘I am creative, I am an author,’ and variants of the poster I have had on my wall for years, ‘Measure your life by what you create.’

For JFPennBooks, the items will be gothic/memento mori/skull-related. Everything will be print-on-demand. I will not be shipping anything myself, so I’m working with my designer Jane on this and then need to order test samples, and then get them added to the store. Likely mid-year at this rate!

How to Write, Publish, and Market Short Stories and Short Story Collections — Joanna Penn

I have a draft of this already which I expanded from the transcript of a webinar I did on this topic as part of The Buried and the Drowned campaign. 

It turns out I’ve learned a lot about this over the years, and also on how to make a collection, so I will get that out at some point this year. I won’t do a Kickstarter for it, but I will do direct sales for at least a month and include a special edition, workbook, and bundles on my store first before putting it wide. I will also human-narrate that audiobook. 

Other possible books 

I’m an intuitive creative and discovery writer, so I don’t plan out what I will write in a year. The books tend to emerge and then I pick the next one that feels the most important. After the ones above, there are a few candidates. 

Crown of Thorns, ARKANE thriller #14. Regular readers and listeners will know how much I love religious relics, and it’s about time for a big one! I have a trip to Paris planned in the spring, as the Crown of Thorns is at Notre Dame, and I have some other locations to visit. My ARKANE thrillers always emerge from in-person travels, so I am looking forward to that. Maybe late 2026, maybe 2027.  

AI + religion technothriller/short stories. I already have some ideas sketched out for this and my Masters thesis will be something around AI, religion, and death, so I expect something will emerge from all that study and academic writing. Not sure what, but it will be interesting!

The Gothic Cathedral Book. I have tens of thousands of words written, and lots of research and photos and thoughts. But it is still in the creative chaos phase (which I love!) and as yet has not emerged into anything coherent. Perhaps it will in 2026, and the plan is to re-focus on it after my Masters dissertation. 

I feel like the Masters study and the academic research process will make this an even better book, But I am holding my plans for this lightly, as it feels like another ‘big’ book for me, like my ‘shadow book’ (which became Writing the Shadow) and took more than a decade to write! 

How to be Creative. I have also written bits and bobs on this over many years, but it feels like it is re-emerging as part of my focus on transformation. Probably unlikely for 2026 but now back on the list … 

Experiment more with AI translation 

AI-assisted translation has been around for years now in various forms, and I have experimented with some of the services, as well as working with human narrators and editors in different languages, as well as licensing books in translation.

But when Amazon launched Kindle Translate in November 2025, it made me think that AI-assisted translation will become a lot more popular in 2026. AI audiobook narration became good enough for many audiobooks in 2025, and it seems like AI-translation will be the same in 2026.  

Yes, of course, human translation is still the gold standard, as is human narration, and that would be the primary choice for all of us — if it was affordable.

But frankly, it’s not affordable for most indie authors, and indeed many small publishers. Many books don’t get an audiobook edition and most books don’t get translated into every language. 

It costs thousands per book for a human translator, and so it is a premium option. I have only ever made a small profit on the books that I paid for with human translators and it took years, and while I have a few nice translation deals on some books, I’m planning to experiment more with AI translation in 2026. More languages, more markets, more opportunities to reach readers. More on this in the next episode when I’ll cover trends for 2026.

Ideally outsource more marketing to AI, but do more marketing anyway

You have to reach readers somehow, and you have to pay for book marketing with your time and/or your money. Those authors killing it on TikTok pay with their time, and those leaning heavily on ads are paying with money. Most of us do a bit of both. 

There is no passive income from books, and even a backlist has to be marketed if you want to see any return. But I, like most authors, am not excited about book marketing. I’d rather be working on new books, or thinking about the ramifications of the changes ahead and writing or talking about that in my Patreon Community or here on the podcast.

However, my book sales income remains about the same even as I (slowly) produce more books, so I need to do more book marketing in 2026. I said that last year of course, and didn’t do much more than I did in 2024, so here I am again promising to do a better job!  

Every year, I hope to have my “AI book marketing assistant” up and running, and maybe this will be the year it happens. My measure is to be able to upload a book and specify a budget and say, ‘Go market this,’ and then the AI will action the marketing, without me having to cobble together workflows between systems. Of course, it will present plans for me to approve but it will do the work itself on the various platforms and monitor and optimize things for me. 

We have something like that already with Amazon auto-ads, but that is specific to Amazon Advertising and only works with certain books in certain genres. I have auto-ads running for a couple of non-fiction books, but not for any fiction. 

I’d also ideally like more sales on my direct stores, JFPennBooks.com and CreativePennBooks.com which means a different kind of marketing. 

Perhaps this will happen through ChatGPT shopping or other AI-assisted e-commerce, which should be increasing in 2026. More on that in trends for the year to come in the next show. 

Double down on being human, health and travel 

I have a lot of plans for travel both for book research and also holidays with Jonathan but he has to finish his MBA and then we have some family things that take priority, so I am not sure where or when yet, but it will happen!

Paris will definitely happen as part of the research for Crown of Thorns, hopefully in the spring. I’ve been to Paris many times as it’s just across the Channel and we can go by train but it’s always wonderful to visit again.

Health-wise, I’ll continue with powerlifting and weight training twice a week as well as walking every day. It’s my happy place!

What about you? 

If you’d like to share your goals for 2026, please add them in the comments below — and remember, I’m a full-time author entrepreneur so my goals are substantial. Don’t worry if yours are as simple as ‘Finish the first draft of my book,’ as that still takes a lot of work and commitment! 

All the best for 2026 — let’s get into it! 

The post My 2026 Creative And Business Goals With Joanna Penn first appeared on The Creative Penn.