The Evolving Author And Second Editions. Joanna Penn On The Indy Author Podcast

When is it worth writing a Second Edition of a book that already sells well? How might elements of memoir impact non-fiction self-help books?

What are the challenges and opportunities of a second edition, as well as practical tips? I discuss these things and more with Matty Dalrymple on The Indy Author Podcast, a fantastic show that covers the craft of writing and author business.

You can get How to Write Non-Fiction, Second Edition in all formats, on all stores now.

You can watch the video below, or here on YouTube, or listen to The Indy Author Podcast on your favourite podcast app.

Show notes:

Joanna shares insights into the changes in nonfiction writing, especially the inclusion of personal elements influenced by her memoir writing. The conversation delves into the challenges and benefits of creating a new edition versus updating an existing one, the impact of technology, including AI, on the writing and publishing industry, and the importance of storytelling in nonfiction. Joanna also discusses practical strategies for updating nonfiction books and shares her experiences in podcasting and book marketing.

• 00:00 Introduction and Initial Thoughts on Writing
• 01:06 Joanna Penn’s Background and Achievements
• 01:56 The Evolution of Nonfiction Writing
• 02:40 Personal Elements in Nonfiction
• 04:41 Business Perspective on Writing
• 06:27 Restructuring and Craft Changes
• 07:51 Memoir and Personal Insights
• 10:02 Challenges and Considerations in Updating Books
• 15:49 The Role of AI in Writing and Publishing
• 26:25 Stratification of Audio Rights
• 27:47 Current Audio Platforms and AI Narration
• 29:10 Selling Direct and Revenue Models
• 30:28 Blogging and Alternative Platforms
• 40:20 Podcasting as a Marketing Tool
• 42:31 Second Editions vs. Updates
• 49:20 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Transcript:

Matty: Hello fellow Creative Voyagers. This week on The Indy Author Podcast, I talked with Joanna Penn about the evolving author and second editions, including the release of the second edition of Joanna’s book, How to Write Non-Fiction.

Joanna discusses the changes in her nonfiction writing, including the importance of storytelling, which led her to apply some of the personal elements and insights she’s used in her memoir into this new edition.

We delve into the challenges and benefits of putting out a new edition versus updating an existing one, the evolving landscape of self-publishing and the impact of new technologies on the writing business. And now let’s hear from Joanna Penn about the evolving author and second editions.

Hello and welcome to the Indie Author Podcast today my guest is Joanna Penn. Hey, Joanna, how are you doing?

Joanna: Hi, Matty. I’m great. Lovely to be here.

Matty: It is lovely to have you here and for anyone who’s may be very new to the indie author space. To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Joanna Penn writes Nonfiction for Authors and is an award-winning New York Times and USA today bestselling author of Thrillers, Dark Fantasy, and Memoir as J.F. Penn.

She’s also an award-winning podcaster of the wonderful The Creative Penn Podcast, a creative entrepreneur and an international professional speaker. Joanne was last on the podcast in episode way back in episode 54. Futurist Trends we can prepare for now, and that was in November of 2020. And so I’m gonna go back and re-listen to that, see how that turned out.

The futurist things are always fun to look back on, you know? Yeah. Then sometimes quite embarrassing. Obviously I, I doubt it will be embarrassing. I suspect it will be very prophetic of what we talked about back then. But Joanna came back on the podcast. We’re gonna be talking about sort of two things.

One is writing nonfiction because Joanna’s second edition of the How to Write Nonfiction is going to be out right around the time this airs. And also talking about her thinking behind doing a second edition. So Joanna, the first How to Write nonfiction came out in 2018, I think, right?

Joanna: Yes. I know. It seems like another world at this point.

Matty: Yeah, well it was sort of surprising until, you know, you announced that you were gonna have a second edition and I started thinking about it. But writing nonfiction, I think at a glance would be one of those like, how much can it change? Um, so I’m just, uh, curious to hear from you, what did change —

What changed so much that made you feel like a second edition was something you wanted to put out?

Joanna: Well, this question is so great because I actually think the biggest thing that is important in nonfiction is how much personal stuff we put in it.

Because let’s face it, AI can write generic nonfiction. And so when I was thinking about a second edition, and there’s various reasons, but the main one was I’ve written a memoir since then.

My book Pilgrimage, which is a travel memoir / midlife memoir. And that changed the way I write so much. And memoir of course is a form of nonfiction.

So I wanted to include all my thoughts and experiences of writing memoir into this book. I decided not to change the title to How to Write Nonfiction and or Memoir ’cause that just would’ve been a bit much. So that was one of the biggest changes.

I have changed, and my writing craft has changed.

I wanted to include all this craft stuff I’d learned around writing memoir. So that’s one of the biggest additions and changes to the book, but also to myself. And I could not have written in that before. And I was very struck when I read the first edition, you know, as I was sort of preparing for the second one was like, ‘oh my goodness, my writing has changed so much.’

I think sometimes we have periods, you know, it’s not a linear up and to the right. As we get better over time, if we keep practicing and keep publishing, it’s more that there are these books that sometimes we write that make such a big difference to us, and Pilgrimage did that for me.

And then also Writing the Shadow, which I wrote directly after Pilgrimage. So I actually feel like two of the most significant books in my creative career were written in the last couple of years and the pandemic obviously made a big difference to our mental health. And I put a lot more of that in there.

I feel like the mindset stuff has changed. All that to say that, the writing craft was actually one of the reasons I wanted to address it.

From the business perspective, ’cause you cover both on this show as well, from the business perspective —

How to Write Non-Fiction is one of my top sellers.

How to Write a Novel, How to Write Non-Fiction and How to Make a Living with Your Writing. Those three books, they are my 20% with the 80/20 rule, which I know you know about. It’s like the 20% of books which make 80% of the money.

And so I was looking at my business thinking, hmm, I’m getting to the point where I’m a little bit less happy about promoting it as the first edition because there’s a lot that has changed in our business.

As well, even down to things like I wanted to change the publishing and the marketing tips and thoughts and make them more evergreen, change some of the affiliate links and of course also add in AI.

I have added in AI prompts in different parts of the book to help people use AI tools in an ethical and practical way.

And then finally, is the audiobook. So this is both business and craft, is that in 2018, I paid a narrator to do the audio book. Of course one of our double down on being human and being a voice brand, you are a voice brand as well, is that people do like to hear the voice of the author.

I wanted to record the audio book myself and in looking at it, it was like, okay, no, I need to do a new edition in order to record the audio book.

So that’s like loads of reasons why, I guess.

Matty: You talked specifically about the fact that you wanted to add in memoir. If you look across other differences between the first and second edition, are there areas where the subject matter was the same, but the approach you used had differed based on some of these experiences that you’re describing?

Like where were the biggest changes, do you feel?

Joanna: Yeah, so I guess the first thing is —

I restructured the book.

Just a sort of practical tip for people. I exported the addition from Vellum, so, which is a formatting tool if people don’t know. And then imported that into a new Scrivener project.

So I did start with practically the first edition. I didn’t start from scratch and the first thing I did was reorder things. That was really strange. I was like, Ooh, why is that in that order? And I felt that even my creative process had changed. In that sense, I also, there were I think five parts in the old one.

And now there’s only three parts in terms of before you write and then the actual writing and editing process. And then the business of nonfiction.

It’s interesting ’cause originally I had split kind of publishing marketing business and now I just feel like that’s all one thing. And so I amalgamated some of those things the other.

The other big shift I sort of feel is that —

I don’t wanna write specific how-to things that people can get from other places. It needs to be more personal.

So I kind of mush together a lot of the publishing stuff in order to write a more evergreen approach. And sort of again, the more mindset side, the more emotional side, the more feeling side that people can’t necessarily get from something else.

So that was a big shift, is that reorganization and then . Obviously, as I said, adding in more personal elements, I put more of the personal side around writing memoir. And also I think when I first wrote the book, I was mainly writing more prescriptive self-help. And so it was practical for me to say, this is how you structure a non-fiction book.

And these are, you know, you can use subheadings and you know, you write nonfiction too. It’s some, sometimes it’s like, okay, just write, I’m writing this chapter and you just write it.

Whereas with memoir, it can just take a lot longer. So I think I include a lot more allowance for self-doubt and for experimentation, and I’ve also really embraced being a discovery writer since 2018, being an intuitive writer, things that I was slightly maybe embarrassed about in the past.

My own creative confidence is stronger and that comes through.

I pretty much rewrote almost every single sentence in the book, even though if people have the first edition, the topics, I mean, like you said, how much changes in that way. You still do a lot of the same things. But I do feel like to me it is a very, very different book.

And I’m actually narrating the audio book [as we record this].

[Note from Jo — The audiobook is out now, along with all the other editions, of How to Write Non-Fiction, narrated by me.]

As I’m reading it, I’m like, oh, this sounds a lot more like me than the 2018 version of me. I mean, you have your Writing Short book that’s a few years old now. Do you ever have a sense of I should rewrite anything ’cause you’ve got more experience?

Matty: Yeah, for sure. One of the things is that I’ve spoken on that topic a lot, and so I have a better sense of the things that I can see an audience responds to or the questions they ask. Also there was just a certain amount, like Mark and I tried to keep it fairly evergreen, so we tried to limit references to particular services or particular platforms, but you can’t really write a book on nonfiction without mentioning some of those.

And some of those, like, some of the names of the platforms have changed. I think probably at least one of the platforms has gone away. So yeah, that is definitely, it’s definitely on my list. It’s been on my list to re-look at for a while, but it just hasn’t bubbled to the top because of some other nonfiction work that I’ve been looking at.

Joanna: Yeah. Well, I was gonna say on that because there are other books that are older of mine, like Career Change.

Some people have asked me for new versions of my other books.

The last time I rewrote Career Change, that was 2012, or Business for Authors, which was 2014, even like How to Market a Book. But these are books I don’t want to touch, at least at the moment.

I’m not interested in revisiting those topics, at least at the moment. But also, like I said about the money side, as authors, we have to consider —

Do I spend the time reworking this older book, or do I spend the time writing a new book? There has to be a really valid business reason to do it.

And as you say, if it’s just that Twitter is now X or you know, different sites of changed, you know, Smashwords got bought by Draft2Digital, and you know, these are the types of things that happen that date books.

But as a nonfiction reader, and I know you read a lot as well, it’s like some things make a difference and other things don’t.

And so it’s where’s the balance. But I would say to people listening, if you are feeling like, desperately feeling like it’s not me anymore, that’s kind of what I was feeling. That book doesn’t represent me and it sells enough copies that I need it to. That’s kind of why I made that decision.

Matty: I think that idea of what is your goal for the book is really important because I don’t know that I went into writing, Taking the Short Tack with this goal, but my evolved goal is that it’s really a calling card for me to pitch myself as a speaker on the topic of short fiction, and I’ve definitely made more money from speaking engagements than I have through the book.

And so that book is gonna be out there as my calling card forever. And so I don’t have the same impetus as if I were saying to myself, oh, I really have a whole different perspective on short fiction. I really have a whole different bunch of different things to say about short fiction. So yeah, what the book is doing for you is an important consideration for sure.

When you realized that you wanted to incorporate a memoir as part of your offerings to people in the nonfiction area —

Did you think about doing a book specific to memoir?

I did. And it may come up at some other point in my life. When I did Pilgrimage as part of the Kickstarter for it, I had a stretch goal, which was that I would write a little book on writing memoir, and that was, it’s about 10,000 words, so it was about an hour of audio narration, which I did for backers.

And so I had that material and I had thought I could expand that. So for about a year I sat on that thinking I would expand it into how to write memoir. And then I looked at the other books on memoir and I thought, I don’t have the chops for this. You know, I really did just think, no, there are some already.

You must feel the same way too. Because our books, there are other books on, like both of us have books on public speaking. Right, right. We both have completely valid things to say and neither of us, you know, have any issue with the other one having a book on it. Right. And neither of us feel bad about that.

But when I looked at some of these other memoir books, I was like, I’m not even on the same level as those people because they’ve been doing it for so long. Like professional speaking. Both of us have been doing that for more than a decade, like probably two at this point. And so we know that topic.

And with nonfiction, you know, I’ve written what 15, 17 nonfiction books or whatever it is. So I feel like I can do that with memoir. I’ve only written the one and although it was probably one of the most difficult books I’ve ever done, I don’t feel like I had enough experience.

But it’s such a great question because originally back in the day, if I learn, as soon as I learned something, I would write a book on it, but it’s almost like —

Memoir is this very particular thing that is so emotional and can be so life changing for people that it takes a lot more work

— and I almost feel like it might be something I do later in my life, but I think I need to write some more memoir first. I don’t know. What do you think about memoir? Because you, you know, nonfiction is such a big category.

Matty: I am realizing like memoirs, the kind of thing that when I’m thinking of nonfiction categories, I don’t think of it because I think of memoirs like its own thing. It’s not, it’s not fiction, but I don’t really categorize it as nonfiction either.

And honestly, I’m not a big memoir reader and most of my exposure to memoir has been talking with people to an extent for the podcast, but also I have a video series called What I Learned, where I asked people what they learned from their latest book that they’d like to share with their fellow readers and what they learned that they would like to share with their fellow writers.

And a number of the people I interviewed for that were Memoirists. And I almost felt as if the, the impetus for people writing a memoir was much more personal than either with nonfiction or for fiction.

I mean, I think a lot of people dive into fiction because they think, oh, I really wanna explore this idea of, uh, somebody coming of age in a certain era and they face this certain challenge or whatever it might be, whatever sort of drives the plot or drives the characters or whatever the impetus is.

But I think that all the memoirists that I spoke with were writing from a very personal perspective, like it was triggered by a personal event or triggered by a personal revelation or something like that.

And I thought, man, if I were to try to look for the commonality, like if I were providing advice, I don’t know what I’d provide because that really would be kind of a mindset book and, and it would almost be like a psychology book in a way.

Joanna: Yeah. Well, and that’s why I think there’s a lot more in there, but I also think that’s why I’ve very much emphasized the personal element. But I think it’s also important for us in our more general nonfiction books, as I, as I said —

One of the things that generative AI, ChatGPT etc, are very, very good at is providing generic advice.

That is completely fine. And there’s a sort of rising number of people who are using these tools as coaches, you know, to answer questions about how to live and how to date and how to cook.

I use it quite a lot for that and all these things that, so when I was revisiting this, and also just on your point on memoir, it, it, you are having to face this challenge of how much do I share about my struggles?

How much do I share about my life? So in the book, and this chapter was actually in the first edition. You know, I talk about how a nonfiction book changed my life and it was a memoir, Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. And in the first, in the first edition, I had not written a memoir. And then obviously now I have and I can almost —

I appreciate so much more how important it is to share those personal moments in our nonfiction work.

So even with our, with our public speaking, for example, in my book I share the physical things that happen when you’re about to go on stage and you’re like, you know, having to go to the toilet for the 10th time. And, you know, and the real gut stuff that people assume is just them, but is actually, most people have these reactions.

And so being more, talking more about physical sensations, about mental things, I think these are just so important for making our books stand out and for this idea of doubling down on being human and just connecting on a much more personal level. So I’d urge people listening —

Please, if you’re writing nonfiction, even if it is more self-helpy or not memoir, try and include aspects of yourself and your life and your personal thoughts into your books.

And sometimes that can be journal entries.

I often use journal entries, which, you know, I mine my own journals in the past for things that I can put in that helps or doing a survey. And asking for people’s permission to use quotes from real people. It, ’cause then you get more different voices into the book.

So anything we can do to bring all material alive with more human content, I think,

Matty: yeah, I think that that idea of the importance of storytelling in, even in kind of instructional nonfiction, obviously in memoir.

I’m thinking back to some of the advice that Michael and I shared in From Page to Platform, and part of that was definitely the importance of incorporating stories into presentations.

I just got off a call with Mark because he and I are gonna be co-authoring a book on, it’s called The Podcast Guest Playbook, and we were talking about the, yeah, yeah. We could send it to all our podcast guests. We were talking about the importance of story. So it would be cool. Here’s a book idea, just the idea of how best to tell stories.

I mean, I know that this, this won’t be a new book, but a new take on it, especially in the context of ai, the importance of telling stories in all these ways, telling stories and making them personal, and having that be the way we double down on being human.

Joanna: That book on being a podcast guest is great because I spend a lot of time, I’m sure you do, educating people on how to be a good podcast guest, but here is a tip with ai, which I found super, super useful, is you can —

Use AI tools to do research on podcast hosts, and then you can also get ChatGPT or Claude to write you a pitch email directly targeting that particular host.

You can, even, if you are happy to upload your book and say, What are the 20 podcasts I should pitch for this book? Write me a pitch to the host of The Indy Author so this would fit her show. And part of me is like, oh no, that means we’ll get a ton more pitches.

But part of me is like, yes, please, because the number of terrible pitches we get, and I’m sure you do as well. It’s like, I would really like some better pitches. So I’m excited about your book.

Matty: Oh, good. Good. I’ll let you notice it too. And it’s out there. Yeah. I think my, one of my biggest gripes in that area is people who pitch, who should really be pitching a book tour type of podcast, you know, who just wanna come on and talk about their latest book, not a sort of share more give tips, And not give tips.

More general information for, so I’m going to, I wanna use that discussion about AI because I was looking through your, your catalog of books and . Some of them just based on the title and based on me having read them, seem very evergreen. I think in general there’s sort of historically a recommendation that the more evergreen you can make the book, the less often you have to think about revisiting it for factual reasons as opposed to personal mindset reasons.

But one of them, which I imagine is, is the most time-bound one, is Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, and Virtual Worlds. Assuming that you’d have to go back to frequently to update, did you do it just as like a snapshot in time and figured it would, that’s what it would be. What is your thought about future editions of that book?

Joanna: Well, what is classic, because I am usually five years early, so that book, that must have been what I came on last time to talk about in 2020.

That came out in November, 2020, and is only now coming true.

So it’s actually right now it’s incredibly correct. At the time the interviews I were doing, people were saying, you are completely mad and what are you talking about?

But actually it’s, it’s starting to come true. For example, data licensing deals for our work. This is now finally starting to happen. Only a couple of months ago, or even perhaps a month ago, the Author’s Guild said they are gonna work with Created by Humans to do data licensing. And of course we’ve got tons of companies signing data, licensing deals.

I think Harper Collins, As well as some of the other big publishers like Time Magazine and all of this signing deals. News Corp certainly did that. So also in there things like blockchain technology and we don’t need to go into that, but that is now really having a resurgence.

Generative ai, certainly around nonfiction. I talked about AI for voice and that is also now going mainstream. So amusingly, that book is exactly now on time almost. Well, that’s four years later.

People could read that book now and they’d be like, oh, that’s exactly what’s going on. It’s not futurist at all. (But it’s 5 years old)

So I think what’s interesting, the virtual world hasn’t happened so much.

I was, you know, looking at the early days of metaverse, but I think that is gonna come with some of the world building AIs, which are starting to develop now. So we saw in the last week the release of OpenAI’s, sora.com, which is generative video. And there’s a lot of these ones where it will generate a world as you move through it.

That’s what we need for metaverse. A lot of these technologies are only now just starting to happen. So if I was to write another one like that, it would be another sort of futurist look forward into where we might be in another five years. But to be honest, I think that where we are, even just now, we’ve got enough to be working on. I’m not planning on updating that.

I think one of the biggest shifts for authors is going to be audio books with AI voices.

Now, you and I have practiced, you know, obviously professional speaking, but also we’ve both been podcasting for a long time, and so we are more happy with voice and we’ve had a lot of practice and I’ve done voice training for narration and all of this.

I also want to narrate my books, but most people are not in our situation. And so most people want to get their book into audio. I would love to have my books in lots of different voices as well, accents and languages. And that is only possible with AI.

No one can afford to have their audio books in every language, in every accent, in every country in the world. It’s impossible without AI.

And yet what we have is in the West, in English, we have this total dominant world, whereas in some countries, they have nothing because there’s no audiobook market.

So if we want people to be able to listen to audiobooks in their own language or their own dialect, then we need AI to help us leverage that with translation and with AI narration. So I think all of those things are super exciting.

I actually think that even just using our, the existing AI technologies we have today, we have a lot more to do over the next five years.

Matty: I think AI audio is such an interesting topic and I am just waiting. I keep checking in with, you know, platforms like ElevenLabs and things like that, and seeing how things are going there because I would love to be able to make AI generated, audio trained on my own voice.

And as for my co-authored books with Michael LaRonn and Mark Leslie Lefebvre, we all have plenty of audio that an AI could be trained on to, you know, it would be fun for short t There were certainly chapters that Mark contribute to more, and some that I contributed to more.

It would be super cool to have each of us read the chapters that we were more driving. And even for like my dream scenario for my fiction, I also just keep checking in and seeing how it’s doing on fiction. I’m like, yeah, I’m still not there yet.

We actually have, like Michael and I have AI generated audio, Google Play generated audio for From Page to Platform, but I keep checking back in on fiction and it’s not quite there yet, but the woman who narrates my fiction, which who I love, she doesn’t really do this as a full-time gig anymore.

She’s just kind of fitting me in as a favor. And so there’s often many months between the time and ebook and a print book go become available and when the audio becomes available.

I think the dream scenario for all of us would be she trains AI on her voice and we do some kind of royalty split — 

or I pay her some amount for the benefit of using a voice that sounds consistent with my other books and brings all the things that I love about her.

And so, uh, that’s another thing I’m waiting for.

Joanna: Yeah. Well, just on that audio again, in that 2020 book, one of the things I said is —

We need stratification of audio rights — 

for the reason you just said is that, um, at the moment when people license their audio, they’re licensing the whole book. It’s just like audiobook rights, It’s just one thing and that’s designed for an old world now where there’s one voice or multicast reading one book, so it might be audio book in English or whatever.

But what we need is like you said, you might pay your human narrator a particular thing, and we might sell that at a higher price, human narrated audio.

Then we might have AI generated audio where we can license that separately, maybe to an auto translation narration app for different languages and then maybe we have multicast.

And what I also think is a kind of hybrid model where on a multicast audio, let’s say there are two main characters, Matty and Jo, and we are human, but there are 20 minor characters that we can then use AI for.

And then we stitch those together into a multicast human AI audio experience, which I think is very, very, very cool and will save time and money and enable more production to go ahead. So that’s, that’s just on one thing on the platforms.

Where we are right now with AI audio is —

— and you are in the US and you always get the best things. So what we do have is Amazon actually do have their own audio, and that’s still in a private beta. It’s in the US only. It’s invitation only.

So there are quite a lot of mainly romance authors doing AI audio through Amazon, not through ACX, but through Amazon audio. Then we’ve got Google Play Audio, which you can do if you have an ebook wide. You can then do Google narration.

And then we’ve got ElevenLabs. I mean, there’s a whole load of them, but ElevenLabs really is the sort of best in class, and a number of traditional publishers are now doing deals with them to do the different translation and narration type ideas With Spotify and FindawayVoices.

At the moment, they still only allow Google, but there are rumors that they will allow something like ElevenLabs files in the future if they can sort out the verification of the ownership of the IP. That’s the main issue.

It’s not the quality of the AI narration that is the issue, it’s the ownership of the IP.

So I think where we are in 2025 is we’re going to see — the dams will be broken and this will all start happening and be much more open.

But for authors, what we have to remember, and this is why this stratification thing I think is important, the revenue model of audio has shifted dramatically and one of the very good things now with selling direct, which is another thing that’s really kind of come of age over the last five years is that — 

Selling audio direct is much more profitable.

If somebody listening decides to buy How to Write Non-Fiction, second edition from me at CreativePennBooks.com, with me narrating, I get a much higher profit than I do if you get it on your Audible subscription or on Spotify or whatever.

Now I’m happy for people to get it wherever, but for authors to have revenue and for narrators to have revenue, we need these different stratification of rights and the different ways of selling.

So that’s just to encourage people to think wide is not just not Amazon. It’s also things like selling audio, selling bundle deals.

People pay decent money for an audio bundle because, you know, nonfiction, particularly people love audio. I listened to tons of audio nonfiction, so there’s a few things to consider.

Matty: Yeah, I’m definitely someone who likes to read words on a page when I’m reading fiction, but I like to hear it when I’m absorbing nonfiction.

I dunno why my brain works in different ways in that way, but for people who do like nonfiction, reading words on a page, nonfiction, I’m wondering about other platforms like, blog sounds so old fashioned, but, you know, sharing, especially mindset driven nonfiction on things like Medium or Substack or something like that.

Is blogging on SubStack or Medium something you considered as an outlet for what you’re sharing for nonfiction?

Joanna: It’s interesting. I used to blog as in, I used to put articles on my own website and I used to do guest articles for other people’s websites. Then what happened probably about five years ago, maybe, maybe a bit longer.

The Alliance of Independent Authors, of which we are both members and advisors. And your campaign manager I think. Yeah. So the Alliance of Independent Authors SelfPublishingAdvice.org blog started I think around then, anyway, that was one of the reasons I stopped blogging. Also, Kindlepreneur and a whole load of other sites where there were more than one writer involved.

And so I just felt like I cannot compete with article writing in a world where there are multiple people writing very good articles, I guess Medium and Substack maybe came around the same time, and I felt like, how do I compete in this space for a long time?

I started so early in self-publishing. I started in 2008. My website was one of the very first.

I didn’t have to compete then because there were very few people doing that, and then things started to change. So then I went really hard into audio-first.

So mainly the only articles now on my website is the transcription of the podcasts. I’ll sometimes do extra ones, but I do share articles in my Patreon, which is behind a paywall.

So that is something I do still do articles on. But in terms of Substack and Medium and all that, I also felt like I didn’t want to be part of the kind of mass article making machine that I felt almost was a big thing between 2008 to 2018 maybe.

So it was like a decade there of blogging, like you said, we called it blogging and people did blog tours and redid all this, and now I feel like things have shifted. That’s how I feel. I don’t know. I mean, how do you feel about this?

Matty: Well, it’s not something that I pursued because I do sort of feel as if I have a certain number of words in my head to share. And if I’m gonna expend them, I’m gonna expend them on my own books. Certainly not on other people’s blogs.

But I just don’t think in a way that I think would lend itself to platforms like Substack and Medium, I don’t read those things myself. And so I always think venturing into something that you don’t enjoy as a consumer is tricky. You know —

Trying to create things that are in a style you don’t consume yourself is tricky.

And it is interesting because I think all those informational sort of, you know, do I need an ISBN kind of questions, those are becoming so easy to answer with ai. And I have started just always tacking on at the end of my ChatGPT questions, please give me links to all your source material to make sure that that it’s right.

But those things that are just sharing information, I’ve gotta believe, are eventually gonna start going away. Because if people can get it easily through something like Chat, GPT or Claude or whatever, then there’s gonna be less impetus for that. But then I think it goes back to what you were saying before about leaning into our humanity and sharing stories and being personal because.

Those are the things that people are gonna be going to an individual person for. And I kind of feel like the people I’ve spoken to on the podcast who ha, who are active on Substack or Medium or outlets like that are doing it because they feel like they themselves have a particular perspective that they want to share with people.

Not that they’re sort of educating people, they’re like connecting with people through those platforms.

Jo: And in that sense, if it’s personal, then that’s great. And I do read a few of them. I guess. I also come from the old school of — 

Don’t build your platform on rented land.

And so when I saw Medium that’s just blogging on someone else’s platform, and Substack is building an email newsletter on someone else’s platform.

And so why would I do that when I already have my own website and I already have my own email list? So I think that’s the other thing. And I know that’s, people have changed their minds a lot on that, but I certainly haven’t, I’ve been paying for hosting since day one for the podcast and for the website.

And I mean, when I came into this, it was when there was still, friends reunited and you know, there was still these really early social media things, MySpace. People forget that these things disappear.

Let’s say you build and build and build on one of these platforms and then it goes away, how does that affect your backlist?

I guess so, yeah. I mean, it is, it’s very, it is an interesting situation. Some people will say, oh yeah, but you can download your list from Substack or whatever. So you still own it. To me, I guess I have this old school view that if you are not paying for something, then you are the product .

Matty: Yeah, I guess it would depend, and this is totally a question ’cause I have no opinion to the extent that people go on those kinds of platforms saying, oh, I’m going to, I’m gonna use this as a discovery method for finding everybody who’s writing about authoring nonfiction, or everybody who’s writing poetry or everybody who’s whatever.

If they’re doing that, then that could be a benefit to going to a platform rather than on your own website. But the comparable thing I’m thinking of is that —

I wouldn’t ever have thought of Kickstarter as being a book discovery platform, but it’s clearly becoming that.

And so, I always just thought of Kickstarter as being, it’s a way of tapping into your existing pool of, uh, fans in a different, more direct way.

I’ve spoken to a number of people who say, no. People go on Kickstarter and they’re just like looking for a book to read, and that’s how they’re finding their books now. I was like, well, that’s pretty cool. I would’ve never seen that coming.

Jo: Oh, yeah. I buy a lot of things on Kickstarter. I mean, you and I both write short stories.

I buy a lot of short story anthologies on Kickstarter. I think it’s actually a great discovery platform for these kind of weird end of the niches. And let’s face it, short story anthologies and collections. They’re not super, super mainstream in in anybody’s book, but just just on the kind of subset. I don’t want anyone to think that I’m kind of saying it’s a bad idea.

I think in, in a way, it’s similar to social media in that you are putting stuff out on someone else’s platform.

The most important thing is that you’re bringing people back to somewhere. Whether that is to sign up for your email newsletter, or to buy a book.

At the end of the day, we’re authors, we want people to buy a book.

So Kickstarter people discover you, and they buy a book. So it is a very short journey from being interested. Are you interested? Yes or no? And then there’s a button to press and you spend some money.

And, TikTok, for example, is done this very well. It’s very much a shopping channel, basically. A shopping channel, which is why people do so well.

They’re selling books. Selling all kinds of things. Whereas some of the other platforms haven’t got a real direct link between chatting and social and selling. It’s like that wasn’t the culture. And I feel like Substack and, Medium and some of those platforms, they’re not really designed to sell books.

They do have this subscription model where you can, you know, subscribe to someone’s SubStack. But I think like many of these things like books in general, or we said the 80:20 rule, most people in most areas are not gonna make a ton of money from subscriptions on these email platforms. So I think the main thing for authors to feel is —

You can’t do everything.

You and I have chosen not to do Medium or Substack. We have chosen to podcast, and both of us know that this is, this takes time, this takes investment. This is our chosen platform that we spend time on and effort on. I have stuck with X.

I don’t do TikTok, I rarely do any other social media, but —

We’ve got this splintering.

It used to be that there was a pathway to being an author and doing marketing, and now there’s so many options that authors have to decide —

okay, what am I going to do? You have to do something. But it could be Substack, it could be TikTok. It could be podcasting, but probably not all three.

Matty: Oh, yes. Yeah, for sure. I always like the, for everything you pick, you choose to do, you’re defacto choosing something you’re not going to do.

And also the idea that don’t do things that you, you don’t like as a consumer. So when TikTok came out, I spent like 35 seconds on TikTok just looking at it, and I was like, I, I just can’t even stand looking at this as a user. So never gonna be good at providing content to this as a creator.

Jo: That’s exactly right. And hence both of us listen to podcasts, listen to audio books. We’re kind of audio, almost audio first.

And again, I guess with this book. For my book for book marketing, you know, I said, can I come on people’s podcasts?

Hence I’m on your show and yeah, so I’m doing maybe —

In the old days people did a blog tour and now those of us who like doing podcasts to do more like a podcast tour

— or not so much a tour, but just try and talk about books and podcasts certainly sell books. So for people listening, you don’t have to have your own podcast, but you can certainly pitch to be on podcasts and you can buy Matty and Mark’s new book when it comes out.

Matty: And another idea specific to podcasts that I actually didn’t think about until I was co-presenting a presentation at International Thriller Writers Craft Fest with Jerry Williams, who’s the host of the FBI Retired Case File Review podcast.

We were doing a presentation on podcasting as content marketing, and we were working on the slides and we were talking about the pros and cons.

Like if people were thinking of starting a podcast, you know what, what would be a sign that they should, what might be a sign that they shouldn’t? Uh, jury said, well, of course it doesn’t have to be forever. Like maybe you just go out there with a six episode podcast around the topic of your book, for example, your nonfiction book.

You know, another alternative would be you just decide to do a six episode thing on writing nonfiction. And for people who are writing nonfiction, I think that would be a pretty cool, uh, way to sell some books and make a short-term commitment.

Jo: Yeah, I absolutely agree. And I keep thinking of ideas for other podcasts, but I’m just like, oh, how, like you said about the number of words we have and how much energy you have in a week.

I do sometimes think about that, about how could I do a short podcast series. I did have another podcast called Books and Travel, which is still there. It’s about 90 episodes. I love that show and I think about it all the time and I’m like, oh, I would love to pick that up again.

Books and Travel is coming back!

I think there’s a lot to weigh up, but as we said, definitely go with what you enjoy consuming as as a person rather than kind of faking it.

Matty: Well, I had one quick question, and this was specific to the second edition of How to Write Non-Fiction.

And I think it’s a good tie into that idea of you only have so many hours in the day, what are you gonna spend them on? And can you just talk a little bit about —

What are the pros and cons of putting out a second edition of a book versus just continuing to update the book you already have out there?

Jo: To me, it has to be that under 10% thing.

So for example, back matter is something that people update. I have gone back in and removed. You know, in their long career as an author, things happen and you think, oh, I’m not sure I want that quote by that person anymore. So you go back in and you might remove something small like that. So updating.

I am thinking, so for example, Audio for Authors, part of me knows that it could, it could use a new edition, but I’m not going to do that. I will. Uh, but what I definitely want to add is Hindenburg narrator. Here’s a tip for everyone listening. The software,

Hindenburg Narrator has a one click button to master the files for ACX. It’s going to save you hundreds of dollars per book.

Just the one button for mastering for ACX, and it’s like, okay, that has to go in there. But that’s an update. That’s like a paragraph that I need to put in the book and it’s on my list. But to, so it’s really, in terms of updating it, updating versus a whole new edition, it really has to be how much is going to change.

And sometimes you might not know, ’cause you might remember things in a certain way. I do think also if people have got their rights back from a traditional publisher, this is happening quite a lot. You know, people are like, they’ve got a book back and people, people say, I get these emails.

People are like, oh, I wrote it 15 years ago. It was published 10 years ago. And I’m like, you need to reread that. So for example, gender is something that in 15 years, the terms around gender have changed a lot. Right. If you read a book from 15 years ago, it’s something that can really date the the book.

So I think that’s an interesting, and I’m not saying that’s everything, I’m just saying that’s one example of things that change and you might find whatever your topic, that your examples are dated or that kind of thing. And also, of course, as I mentioned, you have changed. So I think the main thing is how much needs to change.

How can you market it in a way that people are going to be interested in the next edition?

So like I’ve said, for me the big edition is memoir, which I didn’t, I don’t think I even mentioned it in the first edition, or I might have mentioned it as a type of nonfiction. But until you write, sometimes, until you write something, you don’t really know what you don’t know.

I suppose so those would be a few tips. Also, I feel like just sometimes you just get this overwhelming sense that it needs to be done. And in that case, have a listen, listen to that intuition.

Matty: And it is like putting out a new book. I mean, the, the pro is that you can, you know, do a, do a podcast tour. Talk about it in the same way you would talk about a first edition book.

I guess that the downsides to me have always felt like having to change, ISBNs, having to lose your reviews, and I guess in some cases you can sort of appeal and have them brought forward if you work with the platform manually. I don’t think so.

Jo: No. Okay. Not, not for a new edition. In my mind, the new edition is a completely new book. Yeah. So it must have new ISBNs, a new Kindle page, no reviews because it is a new book. It can’t be both. It’s either one or the other, and so a second edition, or I’ve got third editions of some of my books. This is a new, completely new book.

So yeah, with updates, as you say, you don’t need to change anything. You can upload a new file and there’s not even a problem. The keeping your reviews, I just think is not necessary. And also on the podcast tour type thing. I think it is harder to get press on a second edition, so that would probably be a challenge.

This is an evergreen book in my business and it gets marketed all the time.

I do Amazon auto ads on it, so I know that it’s not about a launch, it’s about the kind of maybe the next 6, 8, 10 years before I might decide it needs another go.

Matty: Well, I also think, especially after having this conversation about the importance of how important mindset was, this was not just an update of factoids.

In fact in, in the books I’m working on with Michael and Mark, the things that seem really time bound, we usually put in a publicly available appendix, which is kind of a nice giveaway too.

You know, we’ll have the page up on our websites for the book. And then we’ll have a downloadable attachment saying, you know, these are the, these, this is the podcast technology we would recommend today.

And it might not be the podcast technology that we would recommend tomorrow, but what I like about that mindset thing is that, it’s beyond just the facts. It is a new look. And then I think ultimately it’s, would people who got the first edition benefit from getting the second edition? And based on all the things that we’ve talked about.

I own the first edition. I will be happy to sign up for the second edition too, because I recognize that the changes that have been made make it a valid addition to my library.

Jo: Thank you. Well, on that and on that, I obviously agree, I think it is useful, but what I am doing, and I certainly, this doesn’t have to be done, but for people who have bought direct from me in the last six months, the old edition, I am happy to, you know, I’m gonna email them and say, would you like a free ebook or audiobook of the new edition?

Because I feel slightly guilty. But we all know that people put out new editions and the timing of the day that you withdraw the old edition is really hard, so you obviously have to unpublish the old editions and that, that you can do that quite quickly with eBooks. Well, for some platforms, with audiobooks, with print, but with print books never go away.

Right? There’s always secondhand editions out there. What I have done is change the color of the, the title, so it’s above me there on the video. It’s, it is now a teal. Color as opposed to a red color. So I’ve tried, you know, and it’s got second edition on, so I’ve tried to make it really obvious, but I think communicating with people is important.

Like you say, you want people to want another edition. You don’t want them to feel like, oh, well, you know, I thought I could get everything from the first. So yeah, this is one of the challenges I think, of doing second editions. But again, I feel like it’s been a real worthwhile thing. And yeah, I hope it’s useful for people.

Matty: Great. Well Joe, it was always lovely to talk to you. Let’s not let four years go by until our next conversation. But thank you so much for coming back to the podcast and please let everyone know where you, they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.

Jo: Yeah, sure. So TheCreativePenn.com with the double n.com and my podcast is The Creative Penn Podcast and you can get books everywhere.

And my store is CreativePennBooks.com. Great. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me, Matty.

The post The Evolving Author And Second Editions. Joanna Penn On The Indy Author Podcast first appeared on The Creative Penn.