The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers

What are the challenges of writing and publishing books for children? How can you publish high-quality books and still make a profit? How can you market books to children effectively in a scalable manner? Darcy Pattison gives her tips. In the intro, Novel Writing November; Business models and ethics for authors [Self-Publishing with ALLi]; AI-Assisted Artisan Author – my final AI webinar for 2025; Metal-working! with WTF Workshops, Bristol; Blood Vintage, a folk horror novel – out now on my store, coming 15 October everywhere. Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Darcy Pattison is the multi-award winning bestselling author of more than 70 fiction and non-fiction books for children across multiple age groups. Her book for authors is Publish: Find Surprising Success Self-Publishing Your Children's Book. 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.  Show Notes Why writing children's picture books is more challenging than you might think Why Darcy moved from traditional publishing books to self-publishing for creative freedom and business control Working with illustrators through contracts, sketch revisions, and treating them as professional collaborators Using multiple print-on-demand services (Ingram, KDP, Lulu) instead of expensive offset printing for 70+ book catalog Marketing to educators through state and national conferences rather than individual school visits for scalable reach Focusing on STEM narrative nonfiction as a reliable income while still writing fiction passion projects Longevity as an author You can find Darcy at IndieKidsBooks.com and MimsHouseBooks.com. You can find the Kickstarter here. Transcript of Interview with Darcy Pattison Joanna: Darcy Pattison is the multi-award winning bestselling author of more than 70 fiction and non-fiction books for children across multiple age groups. Her book for authors is Publish: Find Surprising Success Self-Publishing Your Children's Book. So welcome to the show, Darcy. Darcy: I'm so excited to be here today. Joanna: This is such a great topic. So first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Darcy: Well, I have four children and I found myself reading books to them, and at some point I wanted to be on the flip side of that—to write the books that were read to kids. So I started writing. It took a long time for me to learn the craft of writing children's books. It's very different than adult books. Picture books especially are very different than just a novel. So it took me a while, but I finally got an offer on a picture book, and I have eight traditionally published books. Then at some point I decided that it was better for me to bring books to market myself. We'll probably talk about that more, but I'm actually a hybrid at this point. I do some pop-up books with a small Christian press, so I'm designing the pop-ups, but I do a lot of nonfiction STEM books for kids. I also do several novel series. Joanna: I think that's really interesting. First up, you said that the craft of writing children's books is different, picture books in particular. So just tell us more about that craft side, because I feel like often people say, “Oh well, it's only a few thousand words. It must be super easy compared to writing a lot more words.” Tell us about the craft side of writing children's books. Darcy: I do teach writing picture books all the time for the Highlights Foundation and other places. Picture books are a very tight art form. I sort of compare it to writing poetry. There are 32 pages, and you have a title page, a half title page, a copyright page. It turns out you have about 14 double page spreads, and in those 14 double page spreads, you have to set up a character and a problem. You have to complicate the story, then resolve it in some satisfying way, in less than 500 words, while leaving room for the illustrator to do their job. So it's a very demanding process. Joanna: And it's not the same now then, because like you say there, the 32 pages and all of this—I mean, this is a very print-heavy issue, I guess—but there are plenty of things now that might be on tablets. Has that shifted at all or is it still a real print-heavy world? Darcy: It still is a print-heavy world for children's books. Most people who independently publish will tell you that 90% of their sales are paperback. It's still 32 pages. I can do 27 pages, I can do 36 pages. The problem is if I ever need to offset print—and I've needed to several times when I have a large order—then it's cheaper if it's 32 pages, because they figured out how to print 32 pages on one piece of paper. If I go to 37 pages, it's two pieces of paper, more expensive. If I do 25 pages, you're wasting paper. So really the 32 pages is because of the requirements of print. I still go with that because children's books, even for independent people like me, are still by and large paperback or hardcover. Joanna: Then I guess, talking about a 32-page picture book, that's not the only thing for children. What is the range of books for children? Darcy: You can do board books. That's for the very young children. Those are hard for self-publishers to do because there's no one who does print-on-demand for that. You have to do offset printing. So those are more difficult. Then starting about age four to eight is picture book world. That's the young readers where the parents are reading to the kid. Then—and the ages are very fluid here because some kids read faster than others—but maybe about six or seven years old, they're starting to read more independently. They want these short chapter books. So those might be 48 pages or 60-page short novels where you're really paying attention. That's the only place where you really have to pay attention to the vocabulary levels for kids. Then after that, you have middle grade, and that would run eight to twelve years old, roughly. Then YA would be—again, the definitions are very fluid—but maybe 14 and up would be young adult. Joanna: Yes, and that YA category now I feel like has moved very adult. So I think that can probably be quite fluid as well, depending on what you find in the store. Let's come back to your journey. You mentioned the hybrid approach. You did eight traditionally published books, but in your book Publish, you said deciding to self-publish was a way to avoid creative death, which I thought was a brilliant line. Maybe you could expand on that and— Why is self-publishing a great choice? Darcy: Self-publishing is a very great choice. There was a time period when I had sold eight books. I teach on a very high level—I teach a novel revision retreat. To come, you must bring a full draft of a novel. We talk about how to revise that novel. One lady came to my retreat, she revised her novel, sent it out for submission. It sold in 11 days flat and went on to win one of the major awards in children's literature in America, the Newbery Honor. So I know what I'm doing. I know how to write, and yet I could not sell anything. It was so discouraging at that point. I either decided I would quit—I don't know what I was going to do, but I was going to quit—or I had to figure out how to bring books to market myself. So I decided, yes, I can do this. I can bring books to market myself. So I worked. I worked for five years. I just put my head down and worked. I published books that I liked. I did what no one else would accept, but I thought was good writing. I looked for great illustrators and I found some great illustrators to work with, because children's picture books have pictures. You have to work with an illustrator. So I worked for about five years and finally after five years, I kind of lifted my head and looked around and went, “Wow, look at this. I've got books out that I love. They're winning awards. They're selling, I'm making money. This works.” So for me, one person asked me recently to talk about this in terms of scarcity and abundance. For me, the traditional publishing world is a place of scarcity. Nobody respected my opinion, nobody respected my writing. As we know from Scheherazade, if you do not have a story, you die. So self-publishing is a place of abundance for me. I do what I want. I find stories that excite me, and I put them in the hands of kids. Joanna: So what year was it when you were like, “Oh, I really can't sell, I am going to try indie”? Darcy: Thirteen years ago. I've been doing this 13 years. Joanna: So around 2012, I guess. Darcy: Yes, 2013 I think. Joanna: 2012, 2013. That really was, I think, a real takeoff time in the self-publishing arena when you could actually start doing this. For example, doing print-on-demand through Amazon. These things weren't that easy when you started in traditional publishing—it wasn't easy to do self-publishing. Darcy: No, no, no. When I first started submitting books, self-publishing was not available. I did a book on writing very early and that taught me how to do the self-publishing process. It was not a book anyone was going to publish because it was revising your novel, which is very niche. For people who want to write a novel, that's a fairly big market, but those who finished the novel and want to revise it, it's even a smaller market. So I self-published that book and that taught me so much about how to set up your files, how to set up the accounts on everything, on KDP and everywhere else. Joanna: Yes, I do feel like so often actually just doing one—whether it might be maybe a short story or just something, but actually just going through the process gets rid of a lot of the difficulty with it. Let's come back to some of the things you have to do. So you mentioned illustrators there, particularly for the picture books. Illustrators are important, but it also might be cover design. What are your tips for finding and working with illustrators? Darcy: This is a long topic, but basically I find illustrators through a couple of sources. One is the SCBWI.org, that's the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. It's the only professional organization for people who write for children, and they have a gallery that's available to their illustrators, and it's not behind a paywall. You can just go look at it. Most illustrators use the Adobe suite of programs. There are other programs, but they learn on that one at least. Adobe has a social media platform for illustrators called Behance.net. The illustrators from around the world put their portfolios there, and I find people there all the time. My family has hosted exchange students eight times, so I'm familiar with working with internationals. I'm not afraid of that. I've had illustrators from Colombia, Ukraine, Poland, Canada. So I don't mind finding an international illustrator to work on my projects and I work well with them. So Behance.net is one of my main ways to find professional illustrators. And then finally referrals. Just talk to other people. Ask them who they used, were they happy with the process, that kind of thing. Joanna: Then what do you give them? Do you give them like the story, the text, or— How do you actually work with an illustrator? Darcy: Everybody wants to know, can I write notes to the illustrator and tell them that this character must have red hair and white boots? Of course you can do that. If you're self-publishing, you are the art director and you are in charge. I prefer not to do that. I prefer to pick out an illustrator that I think has professional skills and an imagination of their own. So I give them my story, then they give me sketches, and when they give me sketches, then I'm very picky about the sketches. For example, you cannot in a picture book have every page the same. So it can't always be in the cafeteria. It must move from place to place. You must make sure the character looks consistent from page to page. There's a long list of things I go through to make sure that the illustrations are right at that point. So when I get the sketches, they get a long letter and I want a revision of their sketches. Joanna: So you've given them the whole story upfront, then they've given you the sketches, then you've gone back with a letter. How many revisions are you looking for in that process, and is this all set out in a contract upfront? Darcy: Yes. I always do contracts to make sure everything's understood. Usually the contract will say that I need 14 double-page spreads plus a spread for the cover and a spread for page 32. So I'm asking for about 15 to 16 illustrations and within that, then they must tell the story. So they get the manuscript. I try not to give them too many directions on where it goes and just see where they take it. Usually they're much better than I am and usually work well. Joanna: Yes, we all have different gifts, right? Different interests and different skills. Your skill is in writing as is mine. So that's what we do. Darcy: I've found I'm actually a pretty good art director though. I really have a vision for what this should look like in a picture book, so I know how the story has to flow well. The pacing is in the pictures also. So you have to think of all the things you would in a novel, like pacing, characterization. That comes through in the story, so I have to make sure all of that is right in the sketches. Once the sketches are approved, then it's not fair to ask them to change. You cannot do those last minute changes and go, “Oh, I want those white boots.” No, no, no. That's not fair to the illustrator. Joanna: Yes, so treating them like a professional. What about copyright assignment? Are you getting that in the contract? Darcy: Yes, everything's in the contract. There are different ways to do it. You can do a flat fee where you take all rights or you can negotiate a royalty payment. It's all in the contract. Joanna: And if people want templates for those kind of contracts? Darcy: That's the difficulty, isn't it? Because I'm not a lawyer, I don't give them templates, but there are reasonable literary lawyers. I'm glad to give them referrals to some literary lawyers who can do it, and usually they have pretty much a boilerplate and for less than $500 US, you can get a template that you can use multiple times. Joanna: There are also author organizations that have these kind of templates. The most important thing here is you need to sort that out upfront, and absolutely some of the ones I've seen, they do also include things like you can have one revision on this type of level or whatever. It's the same with covers, right? If you're doing older children's books, we are respecting other people's time and professionalism. Darcy: Yes, absolutely. You know, you may want one or maybe two or three revisions at that sketches stage, but after that, when they give me final art, there's almost no changes because we've hashed that out early. That's where they want you to is in the sketches stage, because that's where they can make the changes the easiest. Joanna: So another challenge is quality color printing, because as you said, most of your sales are going to be in print. Talk a bit about printing and distribution and how you manage that. Darcy: So I use three print-on-demand printers. I use Ingram because that reaches the wide distribution that I need, that goes to the schools and libraries and the education distributors and goes out in the world internationally also. So Ingram's quality is what Ingram's quality is. I think if we go into this and say we're going to print-on-demand, we need to accept what they do. I mean, people complain about everybody. Every printer gets complaints, but I think they all do a reasonable job. They correct mistakes when they're made, I think they do fine. So Ingram's print quality is good. It's not offset printing. It will never be offset printing, but we do print-on-demand because the economic issues make sense. We don't have to put a huge investment upfront of ordering 10,000 books. Then your money is tied up in that inventory and you can't recoup and you can't move on to the next book until you sell those books. So I don't think that's wise for self-publishers. I think it's wise to be more nimble. So then the print-on-demand makes a lot of sense. Then the second one I use is KDP, because I find that Ingram and KDP don't always work well together. So I just go ahead and upload it to KDP. It's always available on Amazon. It's never a problem. Then the final one is I use Lulu and I love Lulu's quality. They talk about great looking books. They have a coated paper, 80 pound coated paper that accepts the ink really well. So the books just look much nicer from them. I use them for the back end of my Shopify store, and then anytime I have special orders. So last year, my book Magnet came out and I got an order of 600 books that would be used for a public television station that was having an event. So they wanted 600 books to give people, and they ordered that. And yes, Lulu is where I print anything like that because the quality is just so much better. Joanna: So then with that example, the 600 books, I mean, one of the reasons, as you said, we do print-on-demand is because we don't have to pay for those print runs, but also we do make higher profit because there's higher price per book. So how do you manage the profit side of it with such high printing costs when the price of books just hasn't really gone up? With inflation, people still expect to pay the same thing. With those 600 books, how did you make a fair profit there? Darcy: So I price my books high. You cannot compete on price. I can't sell my picture books for $8.99. They are $11.99 for an eight and a half by eight and a half, full color, 32 page picture book. $11.99 is outrageous, but that's what I have to charge and they sell. What can I say? They sell. Joanna: Plus shipping with your Shopify store? Darcy: Yes, but I charge them shipping. So then you negotiate prices and you just make sure you're making a profit of $2 or $3 a book just like anybody else. People fight against that too. They go, “Well, I need my little chapter book just to be $6.99.” And I go, “Well, you can't make a profit.” You must think as a business person and you must price accordingly and then write a really great book that they will buy anyway. Joanna: Yes, I mean, this is the whole point. We are not competing on price. We cannot compete on price or shipping. Like people say to me, “Oh, well, but if I order from your Shopify store, it's going to take like two weeks or something.” I'm like, “Yes, because I'm a small business. My printer is a small business. It gets printed, it gets sent. I mean, I'm not Amazon.” Literally then people will go, “Oh, right. Yes, I understand,” don't they? I mean, once you explain it, people understand. Darcy: So if I have a large order, like 600 books, if I have three months to deliver, then I'll do an offset run, but I don't always have that luxury of having three months to deliver. They usually want it in two weeks and then Lulu can deliver. Lulu always delivers well. Joanna: Right. Okay. So I guess you sort of addressed this a bit with saying, look, the quality is the quality, but I do find children's authors in particular can be a little bit precious about this, and they're like, “Oh no, this has to be perfect, so I have to use offset printing.” Given that you have more than 70 books— I just can't see how it's practical to have a business with so many different books and insist on incredible quality every time. Darcy: I can't make a profit that way. I can't have a stock of even 500 books of 70. I can't even physically, like a physical warehouse, let alone the price. I can't tie up my money that way. So for me, print-on-demand is the only way that works. I cannot do the offset printing. Again, I do offset printing if I have large orders and I have plenty of time, but that's the only time I can get that kind of quality. So, yes, it is different, but there are printers now who are approaching offset quality with print-on-demand. The newer printers that are coming out are very, very good. Joanna: They are, but again, we have to look at the pricing there because the price is also higher. The quality of the paper and the ink and all that. Of course the same is true for anyone. I mean, like for me with 45-plus books, I never have kept stock, but you just don't know. You don't know which books people are going to buy on any given day. So having print-on-demand just makes sense. I think people who are just starting out, they're like, “Oh, well it's only one book,” but it's like, well soon it won't just be one book. Darcy: Well, we hope it's not just going to be one book. I mean, I want a career. I don't want just a single book out there. Joanna: Then I guess just circling back on anything that's different, because of course— You do nonfiction books for children, as well as fiction. Is the process just exactly the same, but you don't have a story necessarily? It's more like facts and things. Darcy: Most of mine are narrative nonfiction. So I'm usually telling the story of a scientist making some kind of discovery or an animal. And usually it's not a species, usually it's a particular animal that's done something amazing. For example, Nefertiti, the Spider-naut is the true story of a spider that went to the International Space Station. She's a jumping spider. She doesn't spin webs. She jumps to hunt. And the question was, could she jump in space? Because if you jump, you float away. So would she starve to death or would she adapt somehow to that microgravity of the International Space Station? She did indeed adapt and she learned to hunt in space and lived long enough to come back to Earth. Joanna: What did she eat? Darcy: Well, they had fruit flies, so they had a little habitat she lived in and they raised fruit flies for her. They raised three generations. Joanna: She wasn't a stowaway. She was deliberate. Darcy: No, no, no, no. It was a deliberate experiment on the International Space Station. Joanna: Oh, that's really cool. So how did you decide to do that book? Was that a commission or is that just something you are interested in? Darcy: I heard something on the radio. Then what I like to do is original primary research. So I contacted the scientist who's in charge of all of the live animal experiments on the International Space Station. She lived in Colorado and my daughter lives close, so we went to see my daughter and I set up an appointment, interviewed her, and wrote the book. Joanna: I love that because like you said, I mean this is creativity, isn't it? It's kind of hearing something and then making it. So does that book sell or is that just something that you did and it's just a passion project? Darcy: No, no, no. It sells really well. The cover either repulses people because it's a very close-up of the face of the spider, so they either hate the cover or they love the cover. For example, I had a school right when COVID hit that ordered 1,400 copies because they wanted to give one copy to each of their fourth graders to read during the summer. That one has licensed other things also, like for reading programs and things. Joanna: Well, let's talk about that then, because bulk sales to schools is something that children's authors often can do very, very well that the rest of us struggle with. So tell us a bit about that and— How can people can think about things like bulk sales, which is when you sell many books at once? Darcy: Bulk sales come and go. You can't necessarily predict them. What I do is I really pay attention to the science curriculum. I make sure that each book I write and produce fits the curriculum some way. So I like to say that teachers don't just like my book, they need my book to adequately teach sound to their students. So my book Clang is about a German scientist that went to Napoleon's court, entertained Napoleon with his sound experiments. Kind of like Bill Nye the Science Guy does—entertained him. Then Napoleon funded his work. So in the book, there's everything you need to know about sound, how sound waves are produced, vibrating strings, vibrating air columns, all of that. It's also a great story about this scientist who goes to Napoleon's court. So I think teachers need my book to keep kids interested in that topic. So if it fits a curriculum, then it's more likely to be picked up for reading programs, for summer programs, for summer camps, that sort of thing. And so my book on AI, about the story about Lee Sedol playing against AlphaGo, that sold—suddenly I get on Ingram, it sold a thousand copies and I'm sure it was for a summer camp. Joanna: Yes, that one—we're going to circle back to AI, but let's come on to marketing, because I'm sure people listening are going, “Well, I want to do that. How do I sell all of those books?” How are you getting your information into schools? I mean, obviously you are in the USA, it's a massive country, so how are you doing that? Marketing to schools, in particular, and libraries, I guess. Darcy: Well, everybody says go do school visits. Yes, yes, yes. You can do school visits and you can make money that way, but I prefer to try other avenues because school visits are limited to the length of school year. You might have 150 days possible and I'm not going to go out for 150 days doing school visits. So instead what I do is reach out to organizations in the United States. Well just this month I've been to the Arkansas Association of Instructional Media. That's the school librarians. At their conference I had an audience of 60 or 70 people and I talked about my 20 STEM books. Then the next week there was a leadership conference for the Arkansas Literacy Association, and they brought in leaders from the local councils around the state, 20 councils. So there was about 60 or 70 people. Again, these are the leaders, the opinion makers in their region. They did a “build your stack.” So they bought 90 books and each person got a free copy of the book, courtesy of the organization. So what you have to do is find those sorts of organizations in your area, in your state, your region, and say, “Can I fill out applications to speak at their conferences?” For me, that's the audience, not parents. Parents are a moving target because if their child is seven years old this year, next year they're going to be eight, and pretty soon they're going to be 14 and they've aged out of my books. But teachers and librarians always have those eight-year-old kids coming through their system. Joanna: Yes, I think that's super smart and super scalable. I mean, some people really love going into the schools and they love teaching at that level or whatever. I think that's a really interesting, but it's not scalable though. Darcy: No, it's not. I feel like there's other revenue—like some people talk about getting paid for that speaking. It's basically paid for doing assemblies and stuff like that. Joanna: But as you say, yours is a more scalable approach. So is that the same way you hit librarians as well? Darcy: Yes, yes. I'll be going to the Arkansas Library Association Conference in October. So that's just local. Then I also reach out to national organizations. I've spoken at the National Science Teachers Association conferences, just went to the American Library Association Conference. So there are many of those regional and national organizations that focus on kids and kids reading that are my target. Joanna: So those STEM books, have you really done a lot more of those because those are the types of books that those markets want? Darcy: Yes, those sell really well. If I find a topic that's not been covered well with other books, then I can write a book that does pretty well. Then I can still write the fiction that I like, and some of those do well, and some of those don't do well. The bread and butter is probably my STEM books. Joanna: Yes, because they, as you say, would be a lot easier to sell if that's a topic that is covered at that age group. Then just a broader question about age groups. You mentioned you have four children, and I often meet people and they want to write a kid's book, and it's often they're writing a kid's book for the age that their child is. Then sometimes they grow out of the idea because their kid is now a lot older than they were and they've changed their mind about the book, or it was the wrong kind of age. Now, obviously your kids are presumably grown. Darcy: Yes. Joanna: So what advice would you have for people listening who feel like, “Oh, I want to write a book for my kid,” but are wondering— How does that turn into a business? Darcy: Katherine Paterson is a well-known children's book author. She wrote Bridge to Terabithia, which was a popular movie about 10 or 15 years ago. She once said that when she reads an adult novel, she hears an orchestra, but when she reads her own work, she hears a flute solo. I just write flute solos. I don't write the big complicated orchestral pieces. It's just not the way I write. So you just need to find what's your strength and what's your passion. I like children's literature. I read it all the time. I'm reading picture books, novels—I'm reading all the time. I just like the genre. So find a genre that you like and dive in. Joanna: Right. So you can keep writing for an age group if you keep reading in the age group, even if your kids have grown. Darcy: Yes, absolutely. Joanna: Yes, that makes sense. I mean, you have to know the genre and, of course, tastes change as well. I mean, even since you started in like 2012, there's a lot more diversity now in children's books and that's a really important development. Also I guess, translations—you've moved into translations and licensing. How have translations and licensing worked in terms of the business? Darcy: Translations—I did a test last year of five Spanish books. They've not sold particularly well. I need to find new ways to market them, but it was an experiment and I need to find new ways to market them, frankly. However, I do have an agent in China, and they just sold a nine-book series to a Chinese publisher. So we'll see how that goes. They have also sold a six-book series to Korea. So working with a foreign agent has worked for me. Joanna: Yes. I've sold into South Korea as well. They clearly have an interesting book culture. Okay, and then just coming back on the AI side, because you mentioned your children's book about AlphaGo beating Lee Sedol in 2016, as part of your Moments in Science series. So I wondered— How are you using AI tools as part of your creative and business processes? Darcy: Well, I do use AI sometimes, so I love Google NotebookLM for research. I think the AIs hallucinate too much to let them do my research, but when I do the research myself and I find research reports, I drag them into NotebookLM. For example, my new book out this year is NOT Extinct. It's about the Takhi horse, commonly called the Przewalski's horse, which in the 1960s was considered extinct in the wild, and they have worked for decades to bring them back. Now there's about 3000 in the world. So the story is about that process of conservation of the species. So I found tons of research reports and I dragged them into NotebookLM, and then I asked it to give me a timeline and it can go through it, and it annotates the timeline for me. It says this came from this report so that I know that it's documented really well and I can trust that the research is there. I really like that one once we get away from, can it do real research and deal with facts? I do use it sometimes for outlining. I like Claude better than some of the other platforms, and I do use it for book descriptions sometimes. Joanna: I would say that Gemini Deep Research is, I think, the best in terms of— Have you used any of the Deep Research? Darcy: I have not. No. Joanna: So Gemini Deep Research, I would say is extremely good and has a very, very low hallucination rate. So that would be the one I would suggest for research people. Like you mentioned earlier that many of the illustrators use Adobe tools and of course Adobe has Firefly, it has generative AI now. How much generative AI is being used in the illustrators' work, or is that not even something you worry about? Darcy: So far it's not been used very much. Most of the illustrators, I see their sketches at first and then they generally do digital work, but it's clearly their work. There's no question on most of them so far. That will come up, I'm sure in the next five or 10 years, but so far it's not been an issue. Joanna: But it's not something you are embracing because, like you said, you know what you want. So you could be doing this yourself, for example. Darcy: So I have one story. The Kitty Tuber series. It's about cats who make videos and so they're kitty tubers. The main character is Angel and she has one blue eye and one copper eye. I can't tell you how hard it is for ChatGPT to do a cat that has different colored eyes. It's just almost impossible. Finally, I think last week I tried it, and it's finally getting to where it can do it, but it's a difficult task. The programs just aren't there yet. Joanna: Again, I would suggest Midjourney, which is excellent. I know quite a lot of people doing kids books on Midjourney and you can do consistent characters now. So I think there's a lot of potential, and certainly for marketing, even if you don't want to use it for actual creation of the books. Darcy: I think that's coming. I don't think you can stop it. I think it will be lovely, but I just haven't done it yet. Joanna: No, absolutely. Well, you've got your processes for sure. I did want to ask you, because we were saying before we started recording, we've kind of known each other online for a really long time now, and you have managed this career now for a long time. What are your tips for longevity in the market? Both, I guess, in terms of the business and the mindset and just staying the course? Because both of us have seen a lot of people leave the industry in the time we've been doing it. Darcy: A lot of people do leave, and I'm sad when that happens because that was my impetus for doing this, is to stay in the business. I think that's one of the reasons I wrote this new book, Publish. I made the mistakes so other people don't have to. I think staying in the business just means that you stay excited about your work. You find things that you want to write about and you are passionate about. I mean, why do we write at all? Because there's some question that we want to answer or there's some bit of information we want to pass on to kids. I think you have to keep finding that center and just stay really positive. Keep up with the industry. Don't think that it can be run the same way all the time for business. I am not a very good business woman. I started with no information. I've never taken even an accounting class. So accounting just killed me at first. It's really hard for me to do the business, but I think you just have to keep pushing and trying. So I'm very curious, and I research and solve problems. Joanna: Yes, I think that curiosity is what keeps us going, to be honest. I feel at this point that if there's still books I want to write, then I'm just going to keep writing them. Darcy: Absolutely. Joanna: And yes, we both run businesses, but there are lots of better ways to make money than writing books, especially children's books. Darcy: Yes. Joanna: Which is fascinating. Okay, so tell us— You have a Kickstarter running right now. Tell us about that and a bit more about the book. Darcy: So Publish is a book about self-publishing children's books and making a success at it. I did make all the mistakes so you don't have to. I've been doing a blog called IndieKidsBooks.com for three years and writing things on there that I thought would eventually wind up in the book. Mostly they're about what I'm working on right now, what I'm worried about, what the current state of publishing is like. So it's a great resource for you. But I wanted to put things together in a book that would explain the process for people who don't do this, who just come to it with curiosity and go, “Can I do this?” It's not easy. Self-publishing is never easy. You have to do everything from the creative to the accounting. It's not easy, but oh my gosh, it's fun. I want people to get that. I want them to understand that it's not a horrible thing. It's not being put in the ghetto. I submit my books to awards, and I win awards, and I make money. You can do that too. Joanna: Fantastic. Where can people find you and your books online? Darcy: So the best place to find my books is MimsHouseBooks.com, M-I-M-S-H-O-U-S-E books.com. And if you're interested in self-publishing, IndieKidsBooks.com is where I kind of chronicle my journey. So you can find the Publish book on Kickstarter. Right now it will be live when this recording goes out. It will be also available for pre-order on Amazon, but look for the Kickstarter. I think you'll find a lot of things on there that are interesting. Joanna: Brilliant. Thanks so much for your time, Darcy. That was great. Darcy: Oh, thank you so much. The post Writing, Self-Publishing And Marketing Books For Children With Darcy Pattison first appeared on The Creative Penn.

What if the key to finding your authentic voice as a writer lies in exploring someone else's fictional world first? How can multi-passionate creators manage multiple brands without losing their sanity? KimBoo York reveals how fanfiction can be a powerful training ground for original fiction, and why being your “weird self” is more valuable than ever in an age of AI. In the intro, Everything I know about self-publishing [Kevin Kelly; his interview on The Creative Penn]; KU library distribution [Dale Roberts]; Anthropic settlement on piracy [The Verge; Authors Guild; Writer Beware];Selling direct with ElevenReader; I'm talking about Creativity and AI on Brave New Bookshelf; I'm also talking about An Author's Guide to AI on The Novel Marketing Podcast; My final AI webinar of the year, Sun 21 Sept; The Buried and the Drowned short story collection. This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  KimBoo York is the author of romance, fantasy and nonfiction, as well as a productivity coach and podcaster at The Author Alchemist. Her latest book is Out from Fanfic: Transforming Creative Freedom. 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.  Show Notes What is fanfiction? How to transition from writing fanfiction to original fiction by identifying the aspects you love Managing multiple creative brands under one studio umbrella without losing your mind The legal landscape of fanfiction Why fanfiction has been an innovation hub for story trends How AI and generative search create opportunities for cross-genre writers You can find KimBoo at HouseofYork.info. Transcript of interview with KimBoo York Jo: KimBoo York is the author of romance, fantasy and nonfiction, as well as a productivity coach and podcaster at The Author Alchemist. Her latest book is Out from Fanfic: Transforming Creative Freedom. So welcome back to the show, KimBoo. KimBoo: Hi, Jo. It's great to be back. I love talking with you. Jo: Yes, and we had a good chat last July 2024 when we talked about intuitive discovery writing. So we don't need to go further back than that, but just give us an update. What does your writing life and your business look like at the moment? KimBoo: Well, I think I speak for everybody when I say that 2025 has been a challenging year. So I've had to take on a little bit more freelance work as I've restructured how I'm doing some of my business. You were an inspiration for that. I'm kind of separating out my different brands now instead of trying to be one thing to all people, and that's taking a little bit of work. I've launched a new pen name, which I'm not going to talk about here, but it seems to be doing well off the launchpad. Then, of course, I'm redoing some of my older works, doing the business end. We're doing new covers, doing some new links, doing some new giveaways. So it's been a busy year and I look forward to what's going to be happening in the future for me, especially as I go into 2026. So that's kind of where I'm at right now. Jo: Well that's interesting. Just talk a bit about this separating different brands. Just remind us what are the different personas that you have and the different brands you've split into? I feel like a lot of people think about doing this, and I have done myself. I've got my two author names and I felt that they were very different, so it was important to me, but I know how much work it is. So talk a bit about that process of separating brands. KimBoo: Well, I flopped back and forth, so for a long time I tried to keep everything very separate and that took so much work and energy, as you know. Then I tried to put everything under one banner, and that just became cluttered. It became hard to identify my demographics, it became hard to do advertising. You can always do targeting in advertising, but with the more organic stuff, how do I post on social media? How do I talk about all my work? So I am somebody who is a multiple project starter. I always have multiple things going on. So I have KimBoo York, me, myself, and I, who is the author and the writer, and I do fiction under that name. I have Cooper West, which is one of my older pen names. That's gay male romance, romantic thrillers, paranormal romance. I have The Author Alchemist, which is kind of my podcast and my craft writing and writing coaching brand. I have The Task Mistress, which is my productivity brand. I just published a new book, a collection of essays on holistic productivity under that brand. I have The Skeptic's Inspirational, which is daily inspirational posts blog. That's going to be a book here soon. Patience & Fortitude, which is my grief blog and mourning blog and book, which is the house where I published my memoir “Grieving Futures: Surviving the Death of My Parents.” And I could go on, but you kind of see what I'm getting at there. They're very different things and I realized that what I needed was a studio type of branding. So HouseofYork.info is my studio home. House of York is my studio. It's the thing that produces all of these different brands, and so I do still have that brand. Everything is a House of York production. It sounds a little ostentatious when you put it like that, but for me mentally, it's a great way to keep things separate and yet connected. So they're all me, they're all connected, and I can talk about different ones in different places, but they're also very clearly defined for marketing purposes. So that's what I really wanted out of that whole thing. Jo: Yes, it is really hard. But you don't have different email lists for all of those things though? KimBoo: No, I do not. Right now I just have the House of York email list. I'm moving into segmenting them. So I will have some different email lists going down the line, and certainly my newest pen name, the secret one, is going to have its own separate email list. So eventually, yes, there will be separate email lists, but I'm working on developing a way where I'm not having to do six email lists a week. Cycling is important, right? Planning things out, scheduling. Who would have thought? So I will eventually, and that is the goal, is to have these different segmented lists. I would also be able to do a full blast to everybody if I had something special coming out that I wanted all my lists to know. So again, that's one of the reasons why I went with this studio framework of doing all of my brands and putting everything under one umbrella while keeping them branded separately. Jo: No, I like that. I mean, I often have thought about this, because I have the two main websites—well actually now I have three. The Creative Penn, J.F. Penn, and Books and Travel. And so they're my main websites. Then I have my Shopify stores and then I have YouTube channels. I have often thought, oh my goodness, I should have one landing page where I can send people to. Then I thought, well, who do I send to one landing page, because I actually have different people do different things. I guess this is great to start on actually, because I feel like you are a multi-passionate creator, and so am I. We have long careers and it's like, well, you can't just stay in your lane. You know, I feel like some people say, “Oh no, you should just stay in your lane.” And we are like, well, it's not actually possible. KimBoo: No, no. I'm a seven-lane highway. I can't. Jo: Well, it's interesting though, because it's not a seven-lane highway. It's actually like three A-roads, we call them here, like three major roads and then there's some little back lanes, and then you might have one that's a bit of a cul-de-sac. KimBoo: Sadly far more accurate. Yes. Jo: But I think that's important too. I mean, I was actually looking at your grief one and the death of your parents, and I mean, that's like a whole completely different area that perhaps is almost standalone. Different people may find that book than find your romance or your productivity or whatever, and that's fine. They don't need to find anything else. So I think that's really good too. It's having all these different things. So just to make people listening feel better if you are a multi-passionate creator, so are we. You just have to manage it, right? KimBoo: Figure out what works for you, but you've got to just try different things until you land on the system that works. I think that's the lesson takeaway here. Jo: Yes. Or the way it works right now, and then you change things. In fact, let's get into the book because this is another one of these kind of quite random books to be fair, which is Out from Fanfic. I'm fascinated by this because obviously I've heard of fanfiction, but it's not a sort of world I am in at all. So just start by explaining— What is fanfic? And what are the main sites? KimBoo: Sure. So I'm going to start actually with the Wikipedia definition, which is “fiction typically written in an amateur capacity by fans as a form of fan labor, unauthorized by, but based on an existing work of fiction.” And honestly, that is the basis for a thousand different arguments about what exactly fan fiction is. It became very trendy there for a little while to look back and say Dante's Inferno, that's fan fiction. Bible fan fiction. Right? What is fan fiction? It's one of those, well, you kind of know it when you see it type of things, right? I consider it to be the interaction of a creative person, whether it's writing, drawing, painting, creating videos with a property or fiction, a story that they love. It's them engaging with it on a personal level. So that's really what fanfiction is. It's a hobby. It's the same kind of hobby as building Lego houses or model trains. You're taking something that exists and creating your own work, I guess is the word I would use, but creating your own world out of it. So it's fun. That's the bottom line for me is writing fanfiction and reading fanfiction is fun. Jo: So, yes, it's fun. Let's just be clear, you mentioned the word property and that it is fan labor, and it's unauthorized. Right up front we have to say, this is when it's not your character. So it might be, I don't know— Give me some examples of what people have done. KimBoo: Okay. So take any show. Supernatural, Teen Wolf, Game of Thrones, movies. The Avengers, that was one I was in for a long time. It's currently in a lot of Chinese dramas like Nirvana in Fire and The Untamed. You take those characters and that setting and you write your own version of it. Say, a cut scene or a post scene, or you change some of the canon facts of the story and you say, well, what if this person hadn't died? Or what if these people had met earlier? Or what if this one character had left when they were young and then come back 20 years later? And you just add in these elements and have fun with taking it in a new direction. But as you said, they aren't yours. They aren't your characters. It's not your setting, it's not your story. You don't own that, in the sense you own your own writing. Of course, you always own your own writing in a creative sense, but in a legal sense, you do not own it. That's something people really need to be aware of. If they're interested in fanfiction, if they're going to explore it, if they're going to use it as a writing tool, you can, but you can't officially publish. You can't publish and make money off of this. This is definitely hobby level stuff, which I don't say to denigrate. I've read some amazing fan fiction that's truly life transforming, how beautifully and amazingly well done it was. But it's hobby. You can't publish it. You can't do anything with it legally. Jo: I guess you can publish on a website. So what are the places that people are publishing their fanfic on? KimBoo: So they are posting it. The oldest site right now is fanfiction.net. It's still around, it still looks like it did in like 1998. Truly, I don't know how people use it. The one that most people are familiar with is called ArchiveOfOurOwn.org. It is a project of the non-profit organization, Organization for Transformative Works that was started 2008, 2009, I think, for the express purpose of having a place for fanfiction to exist. They've done a lot of work on the legal end to protect people's rights to write and post fanfiction online. I try to draw the line between saying that they publish fanfiction and they post it for that reason. That's just a me thing. I don't think that that's really widespread in fandom, but for me mentally when I'm talking about it, you post your fanfiction to AO3, as it's known colloquially, and you share it and people can read it and comment on it and like it. It's a great site. Their tagging system is truly a thing of beauty, but again, it's not publishing in the sense of you're publishing a book, you're publishing something. There is fanfiction on Wattpad, but they've fought against it. They've taken down fanfiction in the past. They do allow it, it's kind of under the table on Wattpad, but there is a lot of fanfiction on Wattpad. I think, going back a ways, the One Direction fandom really had its moment on Wattpad. That was a long time ago, but there's still people posting fanfiction on Wattpad. A lot of times people cross post, they post on Wattpad and they post on AO3. So it just depends on where you want to put your work. Jo: Okay. A few things here. So it would be obvious to me, like if it's, I don't know, Captain Kirk from Star Trek. KimBoo: Oh, classic. A classic. You know, and a very obvious modern character. But think about Thor for example. So Thor obviously being Norse God, none of that is under copyright, as in anyone can write a Thor story. But then there's Thor, the movies and the things that are Thor-like in that are movie-based as opposed to the original base. So how does that kind of work? Like how do you know? Especially when in people's minds, sometimes things might get mixed up. You know, you might mention Ragnarok now. Ragnarok is in all the ancient stories, but the way they did it in whatever Avengers movie or whatever it might be is specific. So are there lines here that people need to watch out for? KimBoo: I would say these days, yes. There's a little bit of a line you need to watch out for. I mean, if your story's about Thor being a member of the Avengers, then obviously it's like, yes. But if it's just an independent story about Thor and his brother Loki, or Loki himself, there are definitely tells to use to be able to differentiate. Now, to be clear, on sites like AO3 and Fanfiction.net and Wattpad, people do identify. They say like Thor MCU, which is Marvel Cinematic Universe, which tips you off, or Thor mythology, right? So then, oh, this is based on the Thor lore of the old style myths rather than the new style myths, I guess you might say. So there are definitely ways to identify that and I think a lot of fan fiction writers take care to make sure of that because you don't want somebody coming into old school Thor and Loki mythology, thinking that they're getting the fun Avengers good time, “let's beat up the bad guy” story, because they'll just get mad. They're like, “Hey, this wasn't what I wanted to read.” So fanfiction writers are very careful about identifying exactly what they're writing for and how they're writing for it. Oftentimes, yes, you wrote a riff on Little Red Riding Hood. Well, you know, okay. That's definitely in the public domain. They can post that on AO3. They can also publish that as their own original story because that is public domain that is not owned by somebody. So fanfiction authors are usually generally pretty careful about that. Jo: Yes. I guess why I am emphasizing all this is because I still feel like many authors don't really understand what is in the public domain, what is fair use under copyright. Also, it differs. So there are some countries where copyright expires earlier. I think, is Sherlock Holmes one of these where it's sort of—don't quote me on this, people go check it in your country—but it's like some of the Sherlock Holmes stories might be out of copyright and others are still within. I think Tolkien's Universe as well. There's like different ways that things have been extended when they haven't in other areas. So I think this is really interesting and you definitely have to check all this before you publish it. I did have another question. I mean, you mentioned the One Direction thing. Is this just all about having sex with different characters? Is it all romance and erotica? KimBoo: It is not, and in fact, gen—general fiction—is one of the most popular tags on AO3. Romance is very popular. They want the characters, their favorite characters to kiss, right? That is a very popular element of fan fiction, but it's absolutely not what it all is. It's not all written by 14-year-old girls. That's another stereotype that comes out. In fact, if you go back in history, I would say the modern fan fiction era—and a lot of academics would agree with me—began with the Kirk/Spock fandom right out of Star Trek and that like those women were full grown women because this was the late sixties and the seventies. There was no internet. If you wanted to share your stories, you had to have access to a Xerox machine. Remember Xerox machines, right? You had to have access to a Xerox machine or a mimeograph machine, and then you had to have access to the postage that would be required to mail these magazines out. So like you couldn't be a 14-year-old girl and write fan fiction in that era. So it's always been, I would say, owned by older writers, and not teenagers, as the stereotype goes. Yes, a lot of the fiction out there is romantic. Some of it's erotic, but a lot of it is also just general. I was just looking… what was I looking at the other day? Game of Thrones fan fiction. You look at Game of Thrones fan fiction and there's lots of different pairings that are popular in that. The “Time Travel Fix-It” tag is very popular in that fandom. Jo: So people are trying to avoid the final series. KimBoo: Exactly. Like they either want to avoid season eight, six through eight completely, or they just want to redo it, or they want to have something different. So they have one of the characters time travel, you know, the gods step in, whatever, and go back and fix everything. It's really popular in The Untamed fandom as well, the “Time Travel Fix-It” tag. So it's not just about the romance. I have a current Untamed fan fiction in progress right now actually, and it's very alternative universe. I wanted to see what would happen if one of the main characters was actually given some autonomy and power earlier in her life. I just wanted to see what would happen if that happened to her and how that would change all the threads of the story going forward. And is there some romance? Yes, there's some romance. There's also a war. There's also magic and killer slaughter turtles. It's just fun. Jo: Yes. I think fun is definitely the focus here. So coming back on the IP side, there are books—like 50 Shades of Gray is supposedly based on, I think, was it Twilight fan fiction? Not supposedly, very much absolutely. KimBoo: Yes. Yes, it was. It was based on Twilight fanfiction. Jo: So how did that become a publishable original novel that was basically huge? KimBoo: So what you're talking about is what we call in the scene “filing off the serial numbers.” And a lot of authors have done this. E.L. James is not the only one. Cassandra Clare's done it. Naomi Novik's done it. Plenty of authors who don't want to be named have done it. And many I've known. You take a fan fiction of yours that's very popular or that you just personally like, and you go and you file off the serial numbers. You don't just change the names. You change the setting, you change some of the dynamics, you change some of the character traits of the main characters. You have to really file it down enough that if someone was coming after you to say, you based this on our story, versus you stole our story. That's really where the line has to be drawn. Again, it's not a clear one, but if you do it enough, you can get away with it. So that's what E.L. James did. If you did not know that it was Twilight fan fiction, you would never realize it was Twilight fan fiction. Even if you've read Twilight, like most people, they might say, gosh, these characters are kind of similar, but oh, that's just tropes, right. So exactly. That's what she did, and that's what a lot of authors do. Jo: Yes. So the tropes, I mean, tropes are kind of universal, right? As you said, I mean, the time slip, go back in time and fix things. I mean that could go in any world. It doesn't have to go in a Game of Thrones world, you know? I never read the Twilight books or watched the movies, but I have read 50 Shades of Gray. It is obviously it's set in a modern world. There are no vampires, there's no werewolves. So a lot of it is different. So I feel like that's important as well. So let's come back to you because I was really interested in the book you wrote. In talking about your own experience in fan fiction, you say, “My sense of shame was very real,” and I was really interested in that because I don't know you very well, but having talked to you before, I just can't associate that with you. You seem very confident. So explain about that. Why are some people embarrassed or even ashamed of being involved in fan fiction? KimBoo: Well, you've kind of hit on some of the reasons earlier when you asked is it all romance and erotica? And I talked about also it's not all written by 14-year-old girls. For a very long time, these associations with fan fiction was that it was very similar to romance genre, honestly, not that different. “Oh, that's something women enjoy.” “That's what those horny lonely women in their basements are writing.” You know, “sexy fan fiction,” and “it's not real,” and “it doesn't take any effort.” “It doesn't take any work. It's just fake people. They're riding on the coattails of other people's work.” So there was a lot of shame. I mean, there were a couple of people even up into the nineties that—you know, I won't give out names or anything—but whose careers were almost derailed or completely derailed because it was revealed that they had written fan fiction in the past. Publishers wouldn't touch them. It was a bad scene all the way around. It's hilarious because one of the oldest forms of fan fiction that we have these days is what's called Sherlock Holmes Pastiches, and Sherlock Holmes Pastiches started appearing in the 1800s, like they started appearing not long after Sherlock Holmes stories were printed by Arthur Conan Doyle. They were very popular up through the twenties and the thirties, right? They were all written by very educated men. And they weren't called fan fiction, they were called Pastiches. So those were okay. Those were fine. Then you get up into the sixties and the seventies and you have women writing Star Trek fan fiction. Yes. A lot of it was Kirk/Spock, and some of it was truly terrible, but again, I've read some truly terrible books published by traditional publishers, so I'm not really sure that's a fan fiction only problem. You get a lot of new writers coming into fan fiction, so there is a lot of bad writing out there. I'll just be upfront about it, and you can see it right away. You're like, “ooh, that's not good,” but a lot of these people are writing for the first time. I can't tell you how many times I've read an author's note at the start of a fic that's like, “This is the first time I've tried to write anything, but I was just so inspired. I wanted to do it.” To me that's beautiful. That's amazing. That is wonderful. Even if the work itself is very clearly the first thing they've ever written, you're like, “Hey, you've started on an amazing journey,” and that's the beautiful part. But the shame, the shame that's been associated with it. Like when I was first thinking about getting published in the nineties—because I don't know if anybody's listening, but I'm an old person—I realized that I would never be able to admit to having written fan fiction when I was younger. I was a Kirk/Spock girl in the eighties. I totally wrote that. Jo: I've got to ask on this. Is this a gay romance thing with Kirk and Spock? KimBoo: Yes. Jo: Okay. Right. Yes. I'm checking, yes. KimBoo: I assume everybody knows that. Yes. No, Kirks/Spock was one of the first, we call them “ships”. It's slang for relationship that grew out of, I think, X-Files fanfiction in the nineties. The Kirk/Spock ship is one of the big motherships of fandom. If you go on AO3 and look up how many stories are tagged “Kirk/Spock”, there's a lot. There's a lot. Jo: What about the mixed race? Because wasn't it the first kiss on screen with Uhura and Kirk? Was it those two that had a Black and a white actor? KimBoo: Well, first interracial kiss. Jo: Interracial kiss. Yes. That's the right terminology. I was like, what is the terminology here? But that kind of thing. Often this kind of fun writing can also push more boundaries. We've seen so many things come out of indie that would never have started in traditional publishing. I mean you, well, you think about romance, there's no way traditional publishing would have started this romance trend. It is so big now, and they sucked up all the big ones, haven't they? So, yes. Interesting. KimBoo: Reverse harem or “why choose”, I think is what they call it these days, that pretty much came out of the One Direction fandom. Jo: Of course. That makes sense. KimBoo: Yes. The Omegaverse, I don't know if you're familiar with Omegaverse. Jo: Some. Okay. Kimboo: You know what, we don't have two hours, so I won't explain it, but look it up. Omegaverse came out of the Supernatural fandom. A lot of people don't know that they read Omegaverse now. The gay male, the MM Romance publishing industry, which really got started when indies came on the scene, right? 2008, 2010. Almost all of those authors, you go back to 2010, the MM big names, they all came out of fandom. One of the brilliant things about writing fan fiction and being in fan fiction is that you can see some of these trends coming. Like I knew reverse harem was going to be big. I knew Omegaverse was going to be big. I knew romantasy was going to be big long before anything hit because it was being so popularized in fan fiction because in fan fiction you don't have to worry about whether it's going to make you money. All you're doing is you're having fun, you're trying out new ideas, you're throwing things at the wall, you're seeing what's interesting. You're coming up with new ideas and new stuff, and sometimes it clicks and takes off. You have that freedom as a fan fiction writer because you're not worried about how much money is this going to be? And is this on market? And is this a niche? None of that concern is there. You're just writing because you want to write. Jo: Yes, and it feels like you're part of a group, you know, if you love the same thing as other people love. Then as you say, it's part of the fandom for whatever that property is. I mean, your book is called Out from Fanfic, so it's kind of turning from writing fanfiction into more professional writing, I guess. I mean, one of the things I was thinking is, of course there are a lot of writers who are commissioned to write within these universes. So do those sort of companies recruit from fanfiction? KimBoo: They do now. It was less common in the eighties, like when you had the Star Trek novels really taking off. And in the nineties when you had the Star Wars novels taking off, they still went with a lot of traditional publishers, even though the workhorses of the pulp fiction genres these days, it is a lot more popular and it's a lot more. A lot of traditional publishers are looking to popular fan fiction authors to mine for the next big thing. There was a dust up recently. There were three Harry Potter fanfics, Dramione. That's a ship, that's a portmanteau of Hermione and Draco. So Hermione and Draco as a couple is actually incredibly popular in fandom. There were three very, very popular fan fictions that are Dramione fanfic that have recently been taken and filed off—although they didn't do a good job filing off the serial numbers, everybody knew it right away—and then started being promoted. They actually used Harry Potter references in their marketing, which of course, the Harry Potter people were just like, “You got to stop that right now, like you stop it.” But the reason the publishers published this is because some of these stories had a million, 2 million readers online. So they knew this is a popular story. They could file off the serial numbers and make some money off of it. So yes, nowadays it's a lot more common for traditional publishers and agents to look at fan fiction authors who are very popular, who have a following, and who've done a lot of writing. So it is more common these days for sure. Jo: And then I guess your other thoughts on Out from Fanfic, like for your own journey, it sounds like you are still doing a bit of both, as in you still write some fanfic. How do people cross over if they're like, “No, I want to write my own”? Is it just mainly a case of your own characters? And your own world, I guess? KimBoo: Absolutely, so it's easier for some people than for others. I actually wrote the book because I did know quite a few authors who tried to write their own original fiction, and what I noticed in a lot of those cases is that they tried so hard that they went so far out of their lane that they weren't interested in their stories anymore. They're like, “Oh, I just, I get bored by my own writing. I just want to go back and write fanfiction.” And I think, and the whole reason that I wrote the book is to try to help people who are used to writing about characters that they love and writing about settings that they love learn what those things are. Like dial it down, figure out—well, I call them parameters—like figure out what the parameters are of those characters. You know? Do you just like wacky klutzy characters who are also geniuses? Well, that's more of a trope that you can put that in any story. It doesn't have to be Stiles Stilinski from Teen Wolf. A lot of different things that you love, you can pull into your own writing out of your fan fiction without repurposing your fan fiction, without using other people's characters. Learn what you love of those things and use them, because it is a transition. It is definitely not super easy to transition to writing original fiction if all you've ever done really is written fan fiction. I, of course, had a little bit of a lift up because I had been writing original fiction for most of my life. So I was already familiar with some elements of it. I did learn a lot writing fan fiction. In fact, I think I wrote over 1 million words of fan fiction before I think I really found my voice as an author and realized what I really want to write. So it can be a learning ground if you look at it that way. I also don't want to take the fun out of it. I don't want to say, “Oh, you should use this as a training grounds,” but you can, if your goal is to write original fiction and you find that challenging. Jo: Yes, I think that's really interesting. I was reflecting then, I mean, I have thought before, I would love to write a Bond book. Which, I think they've all been men who've written the Bond books. Obviously there's lots of them written in more modern times. It's really interesting because then I think, well, my thriller, my ARKANE series, you could definitely trace a lot of Bond kind of tropes, a lot of Indiana Jones and Lara Croft tropes. You say it is taking the things that you love about the movies and the books and the TV shows and then picking them out and then creating your own stories where there is still elements like that. I mean, those are not the original things. It's how you turn that into your own work, but it's skating that line, isn't it? That remains difficult. KimBoo: Right, and as we talked about a little bit earlier, tropes are more universal. So if you can kind of dial, like you said, the Indiana Jones, Lara Croft—well, what is that trope or the mummy? Like, oh, it's the archaeologist going on adventure and running into and finding cursed things and finding cursed items. That's a trope, but if you're not looking for it, you could just say, well, I just like writing in Indiana Jones. I don't know how I'm going to write my own original story, but if you sit back and look at it like, okay, what is it about Indiana Jones or what is it about Kirk? Or what is it about Wei Wuxian from The Untamed that I love? What is that? Can I pull on that? Can I introduce it into my own characters and my own stories? Jo: That's cool. Then in the book, you have a brief section about how things have changed for indies over the last few years. Obviously I always have to talk about AI, and you said, quote from the book, “What is the point of churning out repetitive stories written to market when an AI program can do it faster, better, cheaper?” “What does it mean to be a human creator of anything?” I love that because then you give people hope and you talk about how this is actually ideal terrain. That's your words for you. So talk about this. Because I get people emailing me all the time saying, “what is the point?” So respond to that. KimBoo: What is the point? What is the point of anything? Okay. No, but I think there's so many moving parts, and Joanna, you talk so well about how AI is impacting our industry, but for me personally, it's opened the door to allowing me to write what I really want to write and allowing me to put my own humanity into the writing. This isn't true for everybody, but for me, trying to write to market, trying to write to narrow down and stay in your lane, as we talked about earlier, felt like trying to turn myself into a machine. I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to. I tried and I tried and I failed abysmally over and over and over again. So the humanity is what we own as humans. Our experiences, our insights. AI, and specifically LLMs—because I like to be specific when we're talking about that specifically LLMs—the training that they've done has been so broad and across so many genres and across so many types of writing and so many eras of writing that it's very generic. Even at the point where you say you can push a button and have it write a book— which we're definitely not there yet as anyone who's played around with LLMs knows for sure. It's going to be median, it's going to be average, right? Because that's what AI is really all about. Taking our own spark of creativity and ingenuity and allowing ourselves to grow into that rather than being worried about churning out the next pulp fiction, I think is an opportunity. Now, some people who've made a lot of money churning out a lot of these books see it as a threat and I understand that, but things change. Things change in our industry all the time now. Like we had a hundred and fifty, two hundred, three hundred years of things not changing at all. Then we had self-publishinga, nd indies changed everything. eBooks changed everything. AI is changing everything. If we invest in ourselves as authors and writers, as creators, as people with creativity, I think it is an ideal terrain because then we can explore the things we love to write. It's one of the reasons why I think that cross genre books such as Cozy Fantasy or romantic contemporary can start to bubble up is because people feel more confident that they can reach the readers they want and that they don't have to try to fit their round peg into a square hole type of situation. So that's my thoughts on it. I mean, I know other people have different opinions, but that's where I'm at. Jo: I actually think this is a better time for, coming back to where we started, around the sort of multi-passionate creator. For many years it's been, well, if you write cross genre—which I do—if you write all over the place, if you don't do series, if you write standalones, if you do this, that and the other, you are not going to make good money. Many of us have made good money like that, but we've certainly felt like, oh, well I should do this. I should go into this one genre, or I should try not to write. Like I've got three books in my Brooke and Daniel series, and when I wrote them, I was trying to write a standard British crime and ended up with a male psychic character. I was like, why isn't this selling? And I figured out over time that the British crime niche is not supernatural when it certainly doesn't have a male psychic in. So it's so funny because I love those books and I've always been like, why? Why can't the people who love this type of thing find these books? I actually think they have more chance in a world of generative search, for example, where people can get much more granular. They're like, “Well, I like this, I like this and this and this and this, and this. Find me something that I might like.” So I feel like that is much going to be much easier for our work to be surfaced than someone who just has one category on Amazon, for example, that they buy in. KimBoo: Absolutely. I think one of the more hilarious examples of that is the search I did recently for Supernatural Cozy Apocalypse. A cozy apocalypse. That is a nice one, right? There were books that came up in that search and I was just like, “Oh, this is cool,” because I wanted something that was like the end of the world, but also people coming together and found family and maybe a little supernatural. Like, dragons are coming up out of the earth because of climate change. I found the book Apocalypse Cow. It's about a cow at the end of the world, and it's fun. These are great for us cross genre writers, which I'm leaning into more. I think my serial Dragon's Grail is in a lot of ways still very much the epic fantasy Second World type of thing, ut I'm looking at it and it doesn't really fit into epic fantasy, it doesn't really fit into romantasy. It doesn't really fit in. So I'm having to think of different ways of building up that explanation of it because it is kind of intrinsically cross genre and it's going to be a challenge, but I think it's a great challenge to have in this day and age. As you said, generative search is really going to be a game changer. I don't think people are ready for how much that's going to change everything. Jo: Probably for the last year now, I used ChatGPT to find books. I just find it so much better. I'm like, “Here's a list of things that I really like. Go find me some books.” I just think it's so cool to find much more weird stuff that just would not have been surfaced otherwise. I guess where I'm going with this too is, and what I say to people is— You need to be your weird self. KimBoo: Well said. All of what I just said, that was what I meant to say. Jo: Be your weird self. I can see that with your work across different things, like I bring up your parents' grief book again. I mean, a lot of people might not have expected a book like that alongside someone who also writes about productivity and this fanfic stuff. So that breadth of humanity is, I think, what people who might come in one of your books and then they're like, oh, this person has a whole load of stuff that brings more depth is just a different side of them. I think this being the full human that you are is so important coming into this sort of new world. KimBoo: I agree, especially coming out of the world where you were supposed to be just one thing, and do that one thing, and be there for only one thing. For me as a reader, I love seeing what other writers are working on. I love seeing a writer whose romance novels I really love and they're branching into, you know, space opera. I'm like, I'm all about it. Like I love to read that. It's more about what I enjoy reading in the author's own take on those stories less than, “oh, this is space opera genre and that's all I read.” I don't think readers are like that. Some are, you got your whale readers who never leave their niche, but I think a lot of us, we like a lot of different things. I think this is a great time for authors to be able to expand and take advantage of that. Jo: Absolutely, and maybe realize that, sure— You might not hit it out the park with every book, but then who ever did? KimBoo: Like, I know there's readers out there who love your psychic British crime stories. Absolutely. I don't have a doubt. Jo: Well the, what's so funny is they get the best reviews of all my books. They get the best reviews. It's just the number of people who actually like that kind of book are quite few and far between. But hey, I didn't know that when I started writing them. I am writing this book about gothic cathedrals at the moment. Nobody asked for that. KimBoo: They didn't, but I am certainly looking forward to it because I love gothic architecture and so I'm excited about that. Jo: Oh, fantastic. Well, this is the thing, and I think we need to keep that in mind. So I guess as we close, write what you want to write and hopefully in this new world with AI search people, more people will find us. KimBoo: The dream. Jo: The dream. Happy times. So where can people find you and your books online? KimBoo: Okay, well I suggest that people go to my main hub studio website, which is HouseofYork.info, and that's all one word, HouseofYork.info. That has links to all my sub-brands, including KimBoo York and Cooper West and Patience & Fortitude, the one about grief and mourning where they can read my dog's obituary as I just lost my pet. I'd love people to love my dog as much as I do. So go check that out. HouseofYork.info, you can find everything there. If you want to reach out to me, I'd love to hear from people. Jo: Great. Well thanks so much for your time, KimBoo. KimBoo: Thank you so much, Jo. It's been a pleasure as always. This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability while maintaining the authentic conversational tone of the original interview.The post Writing Fan Fiction, And Multi-Passionate Creativity With KimBoo York first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How do you know when an idea should become a poem or a short story instead of a longer work? How can indie authors publish and market poetry and short fiction in today's market? Joanna Penn and Orna Ross explore the creative processes, and the business behind writing short-form work, and discuss why being authentically human matters more than ever in our AI-driven world. In the intro, How publishing has changed since 2015 [Jane Friedman]; The Two Authors Podcast; Anthropic settles piracy copyright lawsuit [WIRED; The New Publishing Standard]; AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars; The Buried and the Drowned out now; Long distance walking and resilience at midlife [Books and Travel] Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Orna Ross is a multi-award-winning historical fiction novelist, poet, non-fiction author, and the founder of the Alliance of Independent Authors. Her latest poetry collection is Night Light As It Rises. J.F. Penn is the Award winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, dark fantasy, crime, horror, and travel memoir. Her short story collection, The Buried and the Drowned, is out now. This discussion was originally published on the Self-Publishing with ALLi Podcast in July 2025. How poems “choose” their writers and the difference between emotion-driven poetry and character/place-driven short stories W.B. Yeats' prose outline technique for poetry and why it helps writers actually finish their poems The challenges and rewards of creating print collections through Kickstarter for niche audiences Why submission to magazines isn't the only path—the case for direct publishing and building reader relationships Marketing strategies specific to poetry and short fiction, from video content to reader teams The importance of professional editing and beautiful book design for short-form collections You can find Orna at OrnaRoss.com and Jo at JFPennBooks.com and BooksAndTravel.page. You can find The Buried and the Drowned at: www.JFPenn.com/buried. You can find Night Light As It Rises here. Transcript of the discussion Jo: Today we are going to be talking about what we've both been working on recently. Actually, we've got a lot of craft-related discussion going on today as we talk about writing, publishing and marketing poetry and short fiction. There are writing craft things in today's show and also business aspects. I had this idea about this show because Orna, you shared a poem written about your mom's death on your Go Creative podcast, and I did tear up and I'm sure a lot of people listening would've teared up too, and it must have been really hard to write. So I wanted to ask you —  Why did you decide to write a poem about this really difficult topic, and how do you know when something should be a poem as opposed to something longer? Orna: So poems pick me rather than me deciding. I don't actually, with longer work, I will make a decision. I'm going to do a book on such and such, but poems kind of come along or they don't. And so this one arrived and that's why I decided to do it. In terms of why I decided to share it, which is a relatively new thing for me to do, and certainly new to do on the Go Creative podcast, something I am going to be doing going forward and share the poetry. I'm challenging myself at the moment to kind of go out there more and share those things. Typically I would have just shared that with my poetry patrons. I wouldn't have gone any further with it. So now I'm trying to just be more human in the world of AI as you and I talk about a lot, that whole double down on being human thing. Well, you know, reading a poem that you've written yourself is probably about as human as it gets and that's why I decided to share it. Then in terms of how do you know whether something's a poem or something longer for me, and again, I think it's really personal for each different writer, but for me — Lyrical poems are short and just a single flash of feeling and image coming together for concentrated emotion. If I can sense the whole experience in just one vivid moment kind of thing, that's a poem for me rather than an essay or a story. So there'd be an image and there'd be a feeling, rather than, there may be an idea as well, but the image and the feeling are the main thing. If plots start coming in or characters, memory, side stories, anything like that, then it's a bigger thing, much bigger thing. Usually for me, novels and all. But one scene, one beat. That's poetry. Jo: And you mentioned there about the doubling down of being human. And of course this poem about the death of your mother — You can't get much more human than a poem about the death of your mother. I mean, AI could generate something, but that is a human experience, right? Orna: Yes, 100%. And I believe that this is a personal belief of mine as a writer, is one of my sort of writing credo. That the feeling and emotion and experiences that you're having while you're writing a poem that opens you out, that in some way that is conveyed to the reader who then experiences. Not exactly the same. They're going to bring their own stuff to it, but they're going to have a sense of that humanity in the poem. I do feel that is something that can't be replicated. Very hard to describe, very hard to explain where it, where it comes, where you see it in the text, but I believe it's there. But yeah, short stories are similar. You've been writing short stories recently and —  How do you know when an idea is a short story or a longer story or a novel? Jo: I normally have like a story seed and I guess I have story seeds for novels as well. And I want to explore that. But usually there has to be some kind of twist. So when I was growing up, I mean, I still read them sometimes, Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected, which I loved. And if people have an idea of Roald Dahl, I know in some ways he has been critiqued these days, but pretty dark children's writing as well. But the Tales of the Unexpected are adult short stories. So I like having this sort of surprising or disturbing or unexpected sense about it. I do feel like you can explore different subgenres a lot more than novels. So my novels tend to be action adventure or straight thriller or supernatural thriller. And then with my short stories, I get into all kinds of different things. So I've got some techno thrillers. I do a lot of archaeology. I like to research a lot, but my short stories do have these sort of themes and archaeology is certainly one of them. So I think if I don't want to turn it into something bigger, I definitely think every short story could be turned into some kind of novel. But I don't necessarily want to do that. I just finished a short story, it's called Between Two Breaths, and it stems from an experience I had scuba diving in the Poor Knights Islands in New Zealand almost 25 years ago, and I haven't actually written about it. Funnily enough, I had written a poem back then I found, it's dated 2005, so I guess that's 20 years ago. And I'm actually going to put that in the edition in my collection to go with that short story. But it's an experience I had that I wanted to encapsulate in something short that leaves the reader with questions. And actually, as we're talking, I'm wondering if that's the difference because with my novels, as a reader, I hate a cliffhanger at the end of a novel. I want things to be wrapped up. And thrillers are, even if they're in a series, are usually completely wrapped up. So they are, they're not like fantasy where you might have seven books and there's cliffhangers on every one. My short stories leave you with a question and I find that that's really important. A bit like the Roald Dahl stories, you can still be thinking about them later because they haven't necessarily ended. So yeah, I guess that's the difference. And it's interesting because you said that the poem stems from emotion, whereas I feel like the short story, it does start with either a character or a place. So, for example, I went, when I went up to Ely Cathedral, it sort of sparked this idea about the area being drowned and this place called Seahenge, which kind of emerged from the waters, this prehistoric wooden circle. And I was like, I have to write a story about that. So that, I think that's kind of the difference, the emotion versus a place or a character. I don't know. What do you think? Orna: Yeah, I think that speaks to me though. Of course you can have character and place in poetry. You have to have it in story in narrative forms, but in poetry you can have narrative elements as well. Poetry can be everything, and I think it very much depends on what kind of poet you are. Just as you know what you said there about your novels are wrapped up and your short stories can be, have a much more open ending for another writer, might be the other way around. And it's very much, I often feel — The forms that we write in, they choose us. And we've discussed this before in terms of the fact that writing across genre and across the big macro genre of fiction and nonfiction. And then I do poetry as well. I mean, you wouldn't choose that if you were just operating from choice, would you? And in similar ways, I think the forms that we use, they kind of choose us a bit, don't they? Jo: Yeah. And also for me, the short story, I'm a discovery writer. As I've talked about before, I don't necessarily know what the twist is going to be or what ending I will leave with. So, although I say that, that Between Two Breaths, I absolutely knew how it would end. I actually started with the end and then, because that's the experience I had, and I wanted to communicate that feeling. Whereas Seahenge, I didn't know how it was going to end. I just knew that I wanted to have the emergence of this prehistoric circle, and it had this upturned tree in the middle and in the roots. Something was there like an ancient sacrifice. I love ancient sacrifice, as you know! So I was like, well, what, what is it? What could that be? And that question of what could that be? I didn't necessarily know. And that's, you know, it eventually came to it. I think there's a lot of fun in the creativity of short stories because it's so much shorter. And actually, I was going to ask you about this. So for me, writing a short story, it is a short process compared to a novel because normally I write between, let's say 5,000 and 10,000 words. I know the word count so you know, it literally just doesn't take so long. It could take a couple of weeks, but it doesn't take forever. Whereas a novel, you know, a lot more words. But how about you? Because I feel like a poem can actually take a lot longer. So tell us about the process for writing a poem. Do you start with loads of words and edit or build up from a line? Like what is the process? Orna: Yeah, so just on the thing of brevity and short. Short is one of the major reasons that I write poetry because novels and nonfiction for me take a very long time and —  Almost all the poems that I have published, I write and publish them pretty quickly. Actually, I have just one big epic I've been writing for a long time, a long poetry sequence about women and writing and a tradition, the writing tradition if you like. So it's a huge theme and that one is taking a long time. But generally speaking, the fact that I can start and finish a poem sometimes in a day is just brilliant for me and it keeps me. I think I can keep on with these big fiction projects and things because I get the satisfaction of putting poetry together in between. So, not every poem is done in a day, not by any means. Sometimes they take weeks and sometimes they take a few months. But that's nothing for me compared to the big books. And in terms of then how I put it together — I only began to produce poetry consistently when I adopted a technique that I learned from the great W.B. Yeats, who always wrote prose outline first. And it might sound really strange, but I never did that for a long time. And now that I do, it's made such a difference to actually finishing, because before I started to do that. I had, I don't know how many hundreds of unfinished poems, but now that I do the prose outline first, if I start the poem, I finish it. And so I free-write that summary by hand and kind of listening as I write more. Then I would, if I was writing fiction or nonfiction and start reading it aloud or take it for a walk and just begin to kind of recite any lines that are. I'm looking for the rhythm and the pulse of it. Again, much more than I would be for fiction or nonfiction. And I'll start thinking about form. Should it be free verse? Should it be, you know, a sonnet or something else. At the moment I'm looking at rondeaux. Lots of, trying to do a few poems in that form because I never did it before until recently. And then when I thought, I kind of realized, okay, that's enough. Now thinking and walking and reciting on that, I'll open a new file and then rewrite the whole thing as poem and then just as much as needed from there. Sometimes it needs lots, sometimes only a little, sometimes I'll take it for a walk again and again. Sometimes it'll just finish up, as I said, in a day. Not very often, but that does happen. I know when it's done. I just know there's a sort of a click and there's nothing else to change, and there's a kind of a silence settles in around the words. So then I know it's finished. Jo: Yeah. Well, it's really interesting. I think, was it Mary Oliver who said like, sometimes she'd be out walking and a poem would come towards her and she knew she had to catch it because if she didn't catch it, it would be gone. Orna: Oh. That's the story that Elizabeth Gilbert tells in her TED Talk, isn't it? Jo: Oh, is it? Orna: It's not at the top of my head, but yeah, it's a brilliant story. She'd run back to the house to write it down and thought before she missed it. What about your process for stories, short stories. Jo: Oh, I need to stay on poetry a minute because you made me, because the poem and people, I really recommend people go listen to you recite this, the poem for your mother. What's it called again? Orna: It's called The Milky Ways. Jo: Yeah, The Milky Ways. And it, I mean some of those images stick in my mind, but of course it was layered. It is a very specific moment. But it's layered with a lot of memory and other emotions other than grief, obviously. And so to me it feels like some poems and I feel like some of our creative works, whatever. They are poetry, short fiction, nonfiction, whatever, memoir take a long, long time to come in some way emerge. I mean like this short story about the diving at the Poor Knights. I don't know why I didn't write that before and it just feels like it took a very long time. So even though some of your poems you are writing quite quickly. Do you feel like some poems, like the one for your mother, have taken a long time to come out? Orna: Yes, definitely. Definitely you can find yourself writing a poem about an experience that you'd forgotten about even, and that is really, really a very long time ago. I feel an awful lot of stuff that turns up in my poetry image wise goes back to childhood. So they take, they've taken half a century to get to get here and come out. And I didn't start writing poetry at all until I was in my forties. I did as a teen, but I didn't then and a friend died. And so it just started at me again and I didn't really start writing it seriously until about, I was in my fifties really. So I do think poetry, I mean there are so many different kinds of poems. It's macro genre, which has millions of genre within, but the kind of poems that I write definitely there, there's a maturing and maturing of the ideas and things are necessary to them, I think. Yeah, definitely. Jo: Well, I've, as you know, turned 50, so maybe I'm coming into my next poetry period! But if people, so if people listening, if they want to start writing. Because it also, it feels to me very, even though I have written some and I've taken some classes and I do buy and read poetry, but it feels so daunting compared to writing fiction or nonfiction. For me, even memoir, writing a poem just seems so much weightier, I think because perhaps I mainly read poems that are quite serious and I love your poem, as I mentioned, and they, it feels so big. So if people listening, they want to write poems, but they don't really know how to start. You mentioned there's a prose outline, so what even is that? Just explain like how someone might start. How might someone start writing poetry? Orna: So in terms of the outline, it would just say what the poem is going to contain. In the poem that you were talking about, literally just a moment standing at the window, looking out at the night sky a while behind me knowing, you know, my mother is in her bed and I can hear her breath, which is being artificially fed to her. And knowing that, we have been told that she doesn't have a long time. So the outline is just the content, what's going to go in there. So it's, and it's best done, as I said, with free writing. Writing fast, raw, let it all out, just kind of pour it down onto the page. And what you're looking for then is some words have energy in them. Free writing, some words in there, have more energy than others. And so you kind of pull them out and start to. You know, if it's a sentence, repeat that sentence in your mind and see what else calls and you're looking for, I mean, for me, what's very important, what makes a poem and why I don't agree that, you know, a lot of poetry that's called poetry for me, if it doesn't have an image. In it then. It's not really a poem to me. It has to have emotion and image. And after that, then the best, the best possible words and the best possible order. I forget who said that as a description of good poetry, but yeah. Image and emotion to me are the heart of poetry. Otherwise, you might as well write prose. To me, that's what makes a difference. So maybe that's where some people feel the challenge is to get the right image to encompass the emotion. Jo: Yes. Because of course some poems have a certain, as you said like, like a meter or they're a certain type like my scuba diving one is a pantoum, so it has a certain rhythm to it and certain lines repeat and all of this kind of thing. And that feels very like overly structured. And then of course we've got a lot of Insta poets who, it might just be an emotional, like, it might even read like an affirmation. It feels like there's a lot of freedom in poetry, but you can make it quite structured if you want to, right? If you feel like you need structure, there are structures you can go to. Orna: Hundred percent. And then there can be the opposite of that, where the structure becomes a complete confinement. And that's not poetry either. So again, if it's playful and you're enjoying it, then it's poetic, but there's nothing poetic about trying to beat yourself into some form that's, you know, your English teacher taught you 30 years ago and you think you should write or whatever. Poetry can be anything. And that freedom. Can be, you know, that can stop us. So if structure helps use structure, if structure doesn't help let it go. Jo: Well, I guess — For my short stories, it's the structure of a novel in that there's a character in a setting, something happens, other things happen, and then it ends somehow. I mean, I also feel like some people think that a short story has to be only one character in one setting and only one thing happens. But I actually, some of my short stories, so one in particular, De-extinction of the Nephilim, so it was based on, there's a company called Colossal and they're de-extincting things. So they just did the dire wolf and they want to do the woolly mammoth and all this. And obviously Jurassic Park is the classic de-extinction story. This one's about the Nephilim and it has three point of view characters, an archaeologist and a geneticist, and a maternity nurse. And so it was like, when that came to me, I knew the archaeologist had to find something underground, and that would then spark the rest of the story. And I didn't know that the other characters would come in and that story ended up being, I think it's about 8000 to 10,000. So it's a bit of a longer one. But I feel like if people feel like it can only be one character in one place and all that, that can hem you in as well. So I do tend, obviously a short story does have a certain word count. I don't submit to magazines or anything, I just publish them myself. I have been in a few anthologies. I've had a few stories commissioned — but generally I write in Scrivener exactly the same as I write my novels. Then I print it out and hand edit. There are different scenes sometimes like mini chapters, so that De-extinction of the Nephilim, it's got like different chapters based on the different characters. And I still use ProWritingAid. I still work with my editor, Kristen. She edits my short stories as well. So I have exactly the same process, I guess for short stories as I do for fiction. And the only difference is, I guess the lens, but also the leaving it with a question. Orna: And do you ever put short stories up on your blog or anything? Jo: No, but I sell them individually, so they are on all the usual stores. They're on my JFPennBooks.com Shopify store. And we are going to talk in a bit about the first print collection, but I find that actually, I mean, I've had people on my podcast, on The Creative Penn podcast talk about you should always try and license short stories to magazines and anthologies and submit them to competitions first because the contracts for short stories are some of the best in the business in that the rights revert usually very quickly, and the contracts are often either for first print rights and they expire quite quickly, or subsequent print rights. And they're usually fine in terms of the people pay per word and all this. But I'm just so impatient that I normally, once I have an idea, I'm like, no, I need to write that story. And then I publish it and I send it out to my email list and you can actually make some decent money even selling them at 99 cents, which I feel, or $2.99. But you can't price an individual short story too high. I also narrate them myself, the audio books as human me. So that can kind of add in that human element as well. Orna: And value. And the people who say, you know. Send them out. I think underestimate how much creative energy that whole submission process takes, backwards and forwards. So I'm the same with poetry. I mean — People assume that you must submit poetry to journals and stuff. And I just never do, never have, never will. And if somebody approaches me or, I might, and I'm not saying never, never say never. I might decide I'd like to be in such and such a thing, but I need another reason to do it. So I have contributed to, at the moment, an anthology here in my new hometown of Hastings called Poet Town being put together. And I have one in there. And also there's Washing Windows, which is a kind of a well-known series of Irish poets anthology in Ireland. I've got one in that, but generally speaking, I'm not going out there in the whole submission thing because it takes a lot of time and effort and energy to do that. And I'd rather write another poem actually. So I just put, I just put them on my blog, at least two a month. The, the whatever my favorite two of the most recent kind of thing. One is for my patrons only and my best one of the month. And then when I have enough for a collection, I eventually publish it in book form, but that can take a long time. So I have different poems sitting in different collections that won't be published until there are enough in them. But I am now beginning to bundle and looking at special editions through Kickstarter, that is something I would like to do, probably for this book. And so the poem that you heard me read on the podcast is part of a collection of poems for bereavement, 12 Poems to Inspire series. And these are the grief and bereavement ones. So, yeah, I'm going to bring a few of those books together and create a special edition through Kickstarter in time for once again, once there's enough. Jo: Do you teach writing poetry as part of your Patreon, or do you do classes at all? Or is that just not something you are… Orna: No, I did in the past. Not anymore. Not anymore. Again, I'd rather just be doing it. Jo: Oh, well, we might have to demand like a stretch goal for your Kickstarter, where you will do a special webinar or something for those of us who want to… Orna: That sounds okay. Jo: Yeah, I think that would be great because I feel like those of us who buy and read poetry often want to do more poetry. It's just that it feels, as I said, it feels. It feels important to me. It's really funny. Whereas I feel like my short stories, I write them and I'm really happy with them and they often, they encapsulate this moment but I don't feel that they're heavy in any way. I don't know. Do you think that people have got the wrong impression of poetry by making it too serious? Orna: Yeah. I think that's a bad place to start. It can be anything you want it to be. And I do think that's school, isn't it? Where they sat us down and chopped it up, like they dissected it like it was a rabbit in science class or something. And that's not how poems are written, and it's not how they're read when you're reading for pleasure yourself. So, I would say just start with the poems you love. And just start to write. I mean, you're a very experienced writer, so you can write poetry, no problem. It just depends then on what kind of poetry it is that you want to try, but definitely take away all the, it's got to be heavy and brilliant and all of that because that's the stopper for all writing, isn't it? I appreciate you feel that way about it. And I know you're exaggerating a bit, but, yeah, it can be really playful poetry and if you look at all the, in inverted commas, great poets, and you read, once you read deeply into what they, or sorry, widely into what they've written, you'll find that they've all written light, playful pieces, you know, poems that aren't very good really, that don't really quite work. And they have their favorite kind of ways of going on and all of those, in inverted commas less than good, you know, poems are part of what actually produces one that does shine and reach a lot more people. So, yeah, playful, I think is, I would think is the key word when it comes to poetry. Tell us about your short story collection. Have you had challenges? Jo: It's certainly a challenge. Like, first of all, I do think that I thought a bit like maybe how I feel about poetry, which is maybe I'm not worthy and I feel I'm not really exaggerating. I do feel like because maybe I studied English literature and I can be too serious about all these things. I feel like Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected, it's like a canon work in my mind, and to do a short story collection? Well, in the sort of literary world, doing a short story collection published by a traditional publishing house is a really big deal because let's face it, they don't make a ton of money. Orna: So they're for super fans, you know? Yeah. Short story collections are for super fans, which means an author can do really well with them, but publishers don't tend to do so well with them. Jo: So it does mean that the famous short story collections are sort of by big name authors. So I feel like that was the first challenge was, oh well I couldn't do that. And then I was like, no, I really want to do, I really want to have my own collection in print because it's easy enough to do a short ebook and a short audiobook digitally, but none of these are in print. I do have a trilogy, which is in print, which is A Thousand Fiendish Angels, which is three short stories inspired by Dante's Inferno. So that is in print, but the rest of them are not. And so I really wanted to do that. And so that was one challenge. I was like, should I do it now? I really want to do it. And then it was, okay, what do you call it? And this kind of titling of a short story collection, that I haven't written to be related to each other was really hard. But this is where ChatGPT and Claude, I used both of them, uploaded all the eBooks that I'd written, all the short stories. Asked for titles for the themes, asked it to really examine the themes across the whole thing. And people could use Notebook LM, Google's Notebook LM as well. Anything where you can get it to really look at your work and kind of analyze it. And we can't see these things ourselves, but there were loads and loads of titles, but the one I love is called The Buried and the Drowned, which, some people, if anyone's read my fiction, that does say a lot about me. That is true. Super dark, dark little soul. But yeah, and I mean, for example, of the ones I've talked about here, Seahenge is very much about the drowned and De-extinction of the Nephilim is very much buried and it's the sort of dangers of messing with what has been buried for so long and what has been drowned will be drowned again and all that kind of thing. So, so the sort of coming up with the title, but it's one of these occasions where I think AI tools can really help and I love the title. And then I asked it, okay, well I need a cover image. So let's brainstorm that. And I've worked with Jane Dixon-Smith, who's been my cover designer for more than a decade now. And so we've got that going. I'm writing a couple of extra stories, which I won't publish separately, so people who have already read the other stories hopefully will want it because there'll be two exclusives. One of which will be that Between Two Breaths and a story called The Black Church, which is where I spent my 50th birthday. I woke up next to the Black Church in Iceland. So writing that, my editor Kristen, is going to read the whole collection because another challenge is what order do you put these in? So I'm going to try and figure it out myself, and then I'm going to give it to Kristen, who has edited some of those stories already, but she will read it as a first reader. I'm also expanding the author's note, so — All my short stories have very personal author's notes, about where these stories come from. Like another one, it's about having an eye operation. When I had, after I had laser surgery. A few years ago it's called With a Demon's Eye, but it's things like that. I've written these sort of super personal authors notes, which again, coming back to the being human in an age of AI, I feel like that's so important and, and putting in the special edition, I'm going to put like that poem I mentioned, which is really about my divorce and my first marriage, and also photos. There's even a photo, a really old photo of me scuba diving during that time, back in the days when there wasn't digital cameras and stuff. So I want to make this collection, as you say, it is for super fans. I'm going to have a really low number on my Kickstarter, but it feels personally very important as part of my 50th year to do something that means so much. But boy, I definitely feel it's been a challenge. Orna: That's great. That sounds fantastic. When do you think it'll all come together? Do you have a date for the Kickstarter yet? Jo: I'm aiming for 1st of September. We're recording this in July. So, if people are interested, it is up JFPenn.com/buried. The Buried and the Drowned. So JFPenn.com/buried and yeah, I think it will. I've bought a lot of short story collections off Kickstarter from people I don't know. I do actually think Kickstarter is a great place for short story collections. I think there is an audience there who are looking for them, and if you've bought one before, other ones come up in your recommendation algorithm. So I'm kind of hoping that maybe some new people will find them, because again, people who read poetry, read poetry, people who read short stories as well as other things. But it's like if you like short stories, then maybe you find other ones by other authors. Yeah, I mean, well what about your collection? Because you actually have quite a lot of poetry collections, so tell us about the process for that. What's the process for a poetry collection? Orna: Yeah, it takes a while, as I said earlier, because I don't, I never sit down and say right, now I'm going to create a collection, you know? Or create a poetry book apart from that epic one, that's going to be one big, long poem. So I have to wait until there are more than enough, on a linked theme. So I have ideas about what that might look like, and I have pinboards on the studio wall. And so I'd be looking for thematic overlaps between different poems or recurring symbols or something like that. And then when they feel like they go together, I have a sense, almost like I'm writing a musical piece with them, you know, and of a rise and fall kind of thing. I like to feel that the reader will go in and begin to gather together, kind of what I'm saying, and then move more deeply into it and then kind of ascend out. But, so I usually break them into sections as well. And I have never really, you know, on the publishing business side for a long time I didn't really think about poetry in that way. So it was, I put stuff out there, but I didn't go out doing ad campaigns or anything like that with poetry. So I've been quite unbusiness-like around it really and perfectly happy to do that and to see them as something that I write and people come to, people to know me, or as you say, who like reading poetry can find them. But then I did start to put together this new most recent series, which is 12 Poems to Inspire, and this is a bit more commercial because they're written around a particular occasion or event. So there are 12 about Christmas or that end of year time, new beginnings, for Mother's Day, 12 poems about love for Valentine's Day, that kind of thing. And so these are the ones that I'm going to now begin to bundle together and I'll do a Kickstarter and put together three of them I think, into a collection called Poetry of Light. And then I am going to start, when the season comes round, actually actively promoting them. And so I think these are my most accessible poems, if you like. And the ones that are most likely to, it's worth treating them in that way. Jo: Just on the number there, so you said, so you, because I've got some of your slim volumes, so those have 12 in, so when you say there's going to be three lots, so you're going to have a collection with 36 poems in, or — How do people know when it's enough to do something like a printed edition? Orna: Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? So yeah, in this case, yes. I specifically decided these short books, they were to really be almost like an expensive gift card in a situation where you'd buy somebody a sympathy card instead. Buy this slim volume and give them this instead to be more meaningful. They hopefully won't put it in the bin afterward. It will last, they can come back to it and read it again and again. So that was the idea of them. They were deliberately slim and in fact, and they are illustrated as well. I forgot to say that my daughter, has done the illustrations. I had my own efforts at illustration, but I am updating them all now. My daughter has done the illustrations for them. So, they're an experience specifically around a particular thing. So that wouldn't be your typical collection. I have, you know, they will be bigger. For example, I have Allowing Flow is a collection of mindfulness poetry. I'm not sure how many poems are there, but probably 50. So I think the general consideration for a collection is 50 to 60 poems, makes a collection depending, again, on length of poems. So it's difficult to generalize, but that will be, you know, that will be the average, shall we say, for a collection. Jo: And just on the poetry editing side, because as I mentioned, I work with my editor Kristen on the individual stories and then also for the whole collection. And obviously for fiction, I work with editors as I know you do. What do you think about editors for poetry, whether an individual poem or for a collection and kind of understanding the structure of a collection? Orna: Oh, yes. Contrary to what people think. Editing is just as important for poems as it is for fiction and nonfiction, and editors make poems immeasurably better. So, at every level, at the developmental level, in the individual poem, obviously, and copy editing and punctuation choices can make a huge difference to a poem's meaning actually. So punctuation becomes super important. The shorter the form, the more important it is. So, yes. And you need an editor who writes and edits poetry. You can't just have your usual editor for poetry. I think it has to be somebody who understands and understands both when to step in and when to stay away. So, yeah, I think it's really important. Jo: And then I guess the other thing, one of the reasons we do Kickstarters is because we want to produce gorgeous print books. So again, I'm doing green foil for The Buried and the Drowned, which on the cover is going to look awesome. And there'll be a ribbon and sprayed edges. And the photos and the paper will be heavier and it will just be all the cool things that we can do once we get the Kickstarter money. And you can't really do it otherwise. But also — With your collection, are you thinking about beautiful design elements? Because of course, poetry and page layout is so important. Orna: Yeah, definitely. And I think if you're writing poetry is one thing, and producing poetry books is great. But if you want to start to think about selling poetry, then you have to think about beautiful packaging, I think. Because that's essentially what people are looking for when they buy poems and they want, it can be very subtly beautiful, but the layout of the words on the page becomes all important and how that page feels. And as you say, if you can make your poetry book look and feel gift worthy, then it has a much better chance of some commercial success. And it should also, I feel. The coherent emotional experience, the collection. So rather than, you know, here's the first 20 poems I ever wrote, all put together. There needs to be some sense of it working together as a whole, as a collection. And the editor can help with that as well. And I mean, I have had, as I come to, you know, as I begin to bring a collection together, I would then realize I need more poetry for this collection and I would start to write specifically to finish off that collection, but is definitely something that happens. Jo: Then the other thing for the Kickstarter, and in fact in general, I mentioned audio and audio narration. Now you have actually been quite resistant, I think, to publishing audio of you reading. So what are your thoughts? And of course you read this poem for your mother and The Milky Ways poem on your Go Creative podcast and it was fantastic. Are you moving into doing more audio for your poetry? Orna: That's why I'm doing it on the podcast. It's to warm myself up. I'm not drawn to doing it, but you and a few other people have said, and I can see myself how it, you know, it's, I would think it's becoming essential now too. As part of that human thing that we were talking about to read yourself. So yes, I am, I'm going to do, now I do have a little short sampler of my poems out there in audio form, but I did that a very long time ago. At First Flush it's called, just a sample. But yes, I am going to do these myself and to audio. So when I do this collection and bundle everything, I'll have the audio as well. Jo: Well, I mean, you mentioned that. Is it essential? I mean, I probably would've read the poem when you had put it somewhere, but because I'm an audio sort of reader in so many ways, hearing you read that poem, I think has a lot more impact. And again, as the human element. Hearing you read it is so important. So for people who are listening who might be feeling as uncomfortable about it as you have, any tips for getting over that, I guess? Orna: Feel the pain and then do it anyway? I don't really know that I'm the right person to give tips about this because as you say, I have been so. I've kept procrastinating it. I just think for me, not listening back is kind of key. So getting it off to the producer and I don't want to do my own production, for example, on them. So yeah, I don't, but I'll go through the experience maybe, and then I'll share the tips at the far side. How's that? Jo: I think that's good. And I mean, again, talking about the Kickstarter, which I think is a great way to do the poetry collection and the short story collection is that some, a lot of people buy audio through Kickstarter. It is one of the best ways to sell audio direct. So for example, I'd be very interested in buying the beautiful hardback if you're going to do one and plus the audio as an add-on. That's how I would want your poetry would be those two editions. So that I would have the nice print book on my shelf. Like I've got Your Secret Rose beautiful edition on my shelf. And I would, but I would prefer to listen than I would to read. So I don't know. I mean, that's how I feel as a consumer and what I see on my Kickstarters. With fiction and nonfiction so far is that people want the bundle with the audio. So even the print book with the ebook and the audio book as the bundle that they buy. I don't know, is that something you'll offer? Orna: Yes. And I do think that's a great offer for poetry in particular actually, and short form for, you know, we're talking about short stories as well. I think, having that combination is, is a really good thing for short form. Jo: Then I guess, before we finish up, we should, because we also talk about business and I guess the Kickstarter side is business, but marketing. I mean, what do you think about marketing for poetry? I mean, I guess doing the audio is one way and you can put those out. What else do you see poets doing for marketing? Orna: Well, short form video is huge for poets and if you can do that well, I'm not going to ever do that, but if you can do that well, that is probably the easiest, best way. And of course, in doing your video that you can then harvest your audio for your audio book so you're both producing and marketing at the same time, which is my favorite form of marketing content marketing. You don't have to show your face necessarily if you don't want to. But you can still produce videos, so you, I see some poets doing, you know, stock footage or AI illustration or indeed just if they're that way inclined their own illustrations and music and putting it all together as beautiful sort of piece. And that obviously is almost a form in itself. Film poetry is actually an emerging genre and there's some beautiful examples out there if people are attracted to that, but obviously that's very time consuming. So it's much more than just a way of marketing your poetry. But video in poetry, like in every other aspect of publishing is definitely big right now. I think the main thing for poets is to get the poetry out on Substack, on social, on a blog, and I think your email list is super important. It's always important for everybody, but you are depending on that relationship with your readers, in a big way as a poet, I think. I think one thing that I would say to people is don't target general poetry magazines or bloggers, or worse again, general book bloggers and people forget that poetry is a macro genre, like fiction and nonfiction. It divides up into genres, so there's no point in sending your inspirational poems to the dark goth collection, you know it's not going to work. So you have to research your comparable poets like you would with fiction or nonfiction. And then you find out who's working in that arena and you send them a tailored pitch or you can swap reading with other poets. I mean, there's a very thriving poetry scene on all of the platforms. I think Instagram is the one that I'm most familiar with, though I'm not there anymore. I was part of that for a few years and I really loved it. And then there are the magazines and the literary journals and stuff, which as I said, I don't do, but if you want to do those. And they are hungry for content always. And they like dealing directly with the poet and they're not inclined to deal with mainstream PR as much. And then I think the other big thing is to build a reader team who will go out and do your early reviews, but also share your favorite lines and talk about the poems. I think that's really important and I would say don't do ads or any direct promotion until you've seen something work and you know, if you have a reading you do on TikTok or whatever and it goes down well, that's the point at which to invest. But it would be very easy to waste a lot of money and get nowhere. Jo: And I think for me, a lot of the short story ideas and poems, we are not looking at the massive spike on launch. Like, I'm not expecting to do a six figure Kickstarter on a short story collection. You know, it's, I will probably have my lowest goal of any of my Kickstarters. But the point is that — Over the years, these sell. People buy my short stories every day. You know, some of them I wrote a decade ago. Same with your poems, right? They don't age ,these things. They really don't. So I feel like we launch them, we do the Kickstarter, which is a short launch, in only a couple of weeks in the end. But the point is that we will keep writing and people will find them over time. So I just, I feel like that might take the pressure off some people is, look, just think about this as primarily poetry and short stories are creative things. I mean, you could say all books are creative, but these are very creative. You know, there are very few people who aim to make tons of money with these types of writing. It is very much a creative drive and a piece of your body of work that you want to get into a beautiful print edition. That's kind of how I feel. And then I will do my best, but as you say, I'm not going to spend any money on marketing it. I'm going to put it out there and, yeah, see what happens. Orna: Exactly, and I think it is important for us to understand a bit about what is commercial, what is creative in our work when you're building up a body of work, you don't have to give the same marketing treatment to everything you produce. You can go out knowing that something is, you're doing it largely for yourself and for those, for the super fans who kind of like everything you do or for people who particularly like a particular thing. And there is absolutely no shame in aiming small sometimes. And keep the big guns for the things that are most likely to succeed with a wider audience. Jo: Absolutely. And I guess that brings us back to definition of success and why. Why we write these things. And it really is, as we both said, I think these ideas just come to us and we know that we want to write them as a poem or as a short story. So I guess any finishing thoughts Orna? Orna: Just that it's brilliant to be indie. You know, with this stuff, because it can be heartbreaking. I remember back in the day when indie wasn't a thing and trying to get somebody to be interested to say, yeah, it's just great to be able to just put it together, put it out there, see what happens, and not mind too much how it goes, that there is a great freedom in that, that I think is really, really precious. Jo: Fantastic. So, yes, you can find mine at JFPenn.com/buried. And if people want to find your collection Orna? Orna: OrnaRoss.com/nightlight. Jo: Fantastic. Well, thanks for being with us today, everyone. We really hope that you have found this useful and all the best with writing your own poems and short stories. Orna: Happy writing everyone and happy publishing. The post Writing And Publishing Short Stories And Poetry With J.F. Penn And Orna Ross first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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