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 Pen with a double N. And here's the show.

Hello, creatives. I'm Joanna Penn. And this is episode number 577 of the podcast. And it is Thursday the 30th of September,

2021 as I record this. And of course, it's going out in the first week of October. And we have

three months left of the year. So I hope you're thinking about what you want to achieve in the

next quarter. I'm certainly thinking about that. Anyway, in today's show, I'm talking to Jonah Lera

about how we can use the principles of mystery to hook our readers and keep them reading,

regardless of the genre we write, as it also applies to nonfiction as well as various genres

of fiction. We also talk about how a mistake Jonah made a decade ago essentially ruined his writing career,

but how he eventually came back to writing and how he's changed the way he researches and writes to

avoid such a thing again.

And I really valued Jonah sharing such personal stuff.

It really is important for us as writers to learn from our mistakes.

Plus, we talk about why podcast interviews can be better than mainstream media for book marketing.

So that's coming up in the interview section.

In publishing and book marketing news, so Amazon KDP print is now offering hard

covers as well as paperback through the KDP dashboard. So you should all see that now if

you're self-publishing directly through KDP.amazon.com. And the only annoying thing that I

have discovered is that they don't do the size I usually use,

which is annoying because if I want to use them, I'm going to have to do a new format.

...