Librarians love resources. We collect them, catalog them, add them to lists, and enthusiastically share them. I'm no exception and this week I want to share The Creative Penn Podcast by Joanna Penn.
Podcast episodes are posted every Monday and include interviews, inspiration and information on writing and creativity, publishing options, book marketing and creative entrepreneurship.
Why I Dig This Podcast
The Creative Penn is smart, funny, and brings in many other voices for interviews. Joanna Penn's timeline to indie fame covers the past decade of her progress. She shares lessons learned in her podcast. I appreciate her transparency and willingness to share information with the audience. Although she is the author of many successful books, the podcast doesn't feel like a sales pitch for her books. She is (to use one of my son's favorite new words)—genuine. Simply scrolling through the list of episodes, I want to go back and catch up on ones I've missed.
Don't Envy—Learn
I started thinking about indie publishing around the same time as Joanna Penn. I remember seeing her name in various places, but she wasn't someone that I followed. Big mistake. Back in 2009, I started to get serious about my writing career but I wasn't sure about the indie route. I started trying a few things and began publishing much more material in 2010.
I made every mistake possible on the indie publishing side. I like being a librarian (and my son was still a baby at the time), so giving up my day job wasn't going to happen. It'd be easy to look at Joanna's timeline and feel envious. I don't. I find it incredibly inspiring and helpful. I started this blog to share my journey because it hasn't gone the way I wanted and I'm in the process of restarting my writing career while continuing to work a day job. Many of the writers I talk to are in that same place, balancing writing with a career and family.
The Creative Penn podcast offers so much for writers, whatever your goals. I highly recommend it.
