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 714 of the podcast, and it is Sunday the 17th of

September, 2023 as I record this. In today's show, I'm sharing my lessons learned from 12 years

as an author entrepreneur, which I've done every year, sometimes just an article and sometimes audio since 2008 when I left

my consulting job. You can find my timeline at thecreativepen.com forward slash timeline with my lessons

learned from each year as well as various other things along the way. And if you do want to go full time at some point,

it might help since our challenges often follow similar paths. So the challenges I faced in

year one are often the challenges that other people face in year one. So as an overview of today's

show, I'm going to talk about why memoir is one of the hardest

and most rewarding genres to write, how disruption is inevitable, and if you don't disrupt

yourself, you will be disrupted.

And how this year has been pretty disruptive for me, as I have firstly disrupted my creative process with

generative AI tools and I've also disrupted my publishing and marketing processes with Kickstarter

and Shopify. I'll also share some percentages around my various income streams and how much

of my income comes from Amazon, as well as

...