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 687 of the podcast.

And it is Sunday the 16th of April 2023 as I record this. In today's show I'm talking about the challenges of small press

publishing with John Barton from Vertebrut, a British publisher of adventure books and his

lessons learned have a lot of parallels with the indie

author business, especially at this mature point in the market when many authors are considering

publishing others. So we talk about sticking to a niche, the need to change the types of products

we sell as the market shifts, dealing with contractual terms, the importance of marketing,

and how best to pitch a publisher if that's something you want to do. It's a great conversation

and I think you'll find it useful however you want to publish. So that's coming up in the

interview section.

Right, I'm doing another big introduction this week in publishing book marketing,

futurist and personal news all rolled into one because the big news this week in AI is that Amazon, AWS, which is their web services business, has launched Bedrock, its new suite of

large language model options, including generative AI for text images and more. Yes, Amazon now has

generative AI tools available. Now, this is important because many authors and people in the publishing industry

...