Welcome to the Creative Pen podcast. I'm Joanna Penn, thriller author and creative entrepreneur,

bringing you interviews, inspiration and information on writing, publishing options and marketing ideas for your book.

You can find the episode show notes, your free author blueprint and lots more information at

TheCreativepen.com. And that's Penn with a double N. And here's the show.

Hello, creatives. I'm Joanna Penn. And this is episode number 643 of the podcast, and it is Saturday the 20th of August 22 as I record this.

In today's show, I'm talking about estate planning for authors with Michael Loran,

which is a fascinating talk, really interesting but also very important about how you can put things in place for the future

and also how you can get organised today it will definitely make you think wherever you are in your

career your age or stage michael also wanted me to mention that the author estate handbook

and the author air handbook which we will will discuss. They're both licensed to the

alliance of independent authors and both e-books are free to ally members as part of their membership.

So our discussion is coming up in the interview section.

In publishing and book marketing news, well, the Department of Justice versus penguin random house trial has just finished

and i've been talking about that for the last couple of weeks there is no outcome as yet it's basically trying to stop

the acquisition of simon and schuster and jane friedman in the hot sheet this week picks out some

interesting things so the Sheet is a great

premium newsletter for the publishing industry. You can check it out at hot sheet pub.com links in the show

notes. So some of the things that Jane picked out, there's some quotes. It's just so many great

quotes in this trial. It's like there, as I said last week, there's sort of airing all of this dirty laundry and all of the inside secrets. It's absolutely fascinating. So on hearing

that most big advances don't earn out, the judge asked Hachette CEO Michael Pietch, I think

that's how you say it, does your business rely on some of your books wildly overperforming? Yes. It was also revealed that at Penguin Random House, the top 4% of profitable titles drive 60% of profitability. So 4% of profitable titles. So what they're saying is the business is yes essentially reliant on

some books doing really, really well. And Hachette, CEO, same guy, Michael Pietch says,

...