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 612 of the podcast. And it is Friday the 18th of March, 2022, as I record this.

On today's show, I'm talking to Nikesh Shukla about your story matters.

Now, Nikesh is definitely a list on the literary scene here in the UK,

so it was great to talk to him about how he got into writing,

as well as thoughts on

finding your author voice, avoiding self-censorship, why writing your story matters, and does

social media actually sell any books? So that's coming up in the interview section.

In Publishing and Book Marketing News. Well, an email came through this week presumably to everyone on kdp

that amazon has opened up ads to traditionally published authors so you can now advertise

traditionally published books along with your kdp titles in the u s so you can do this through claiming the titles and pen names

in Author Central. You click the books tab and then access the ads that way. I presume if you are

registered, then you will have got the same email. So this is very interesting and I read this

announcement and I worried, I worried immediately

about all those lovely traditionally published authors who thought that publishers were going

to deal with all the marketing and now this kind of opens it up for them too. Now it's hard enough

to make money as an indie author when ad click costs are

already high. And the royalty rate for indies is obviously much higher per book than it is for

traditionally published authors. So I cannot see how the business model would work for traditionally

...