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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 pen with a double n and here's the show hello creatives i'm joanna penn and this is episode number 537 of the podcast and it is sunday the 7th of march 2021 as i record this so in today's show i'm talking to the lovely stephen pressfield about being a warrior of the blank page and we talk about all kinds of things actually and uh steve has some always insightful things to say about the creative process about writing through self-doubt about breaking through resistance to write and market your work and in fact steve has some very interesting things to say about book marketing and how much effort he's making this time around and why it's so important and if you go to his site stevenpressfield.com you'll find lots of pre-order bonuses for aman arms which is his latest book and great example a great examples of marketing from all kinds of different angles it's always good to watch a big launch from an author especially an author of the level that steve is and how well respected he is in the industry he also has a whole series a video series on the warrior archetype so really interesting chat that we have today lots about craft and about marketing and about mindset as well so as ever i do love talking to steve so that is coming up in publishing news this week what a few voice tech related things i haven't really been talking too much about this recently but publishing perspectives has an article from richard charkin here in the uk who runs mensch publishing which is a small press and what's interesting is richard sharkin is someone who's been in publishing a long time he unofficially retired and then started another publishing house he could just couldn't help himself but what's interesting is that he has released some books in the google play beta for ai narrated audio books and this is fascinating to me because uh you know first of all you know tarkin's been in publishing a long time he's a he's an older guy and he has essentially embraced this ai narration and this is the google play beta which i've mentioned before but the ones they originally released are public domain books these are new books and he says quoting from the article the technology has surpassed my expectations he did say i struggled to cope with the audio editing but this is interesting to me because i think the audio editing suite of tools is obviously going to improve he says the technology cannot yet cope with multiple voices nor with ironic intonation humor is a problem as is inflection but uh he says basically anyone could convert the typesetting files to an audio file with a choice of speaker male female american british posh not so posh this can be done in an hour at minimal expense and as quickly to market as publishing will ever allow and the technology is evolving all the time he says i see a major role in making available those books whose value is in the information contained not necessarily for some uh he says i can't imagine the harry potter stephen fry audio edition being superseded by auto narration although personally if i was stephen fry i'd be licensing my voice so you never know chalking says these audio books are not perfect yet but publishing has always been about aiming for perfection but accepting the best available all non-fiction and academic publishers should investigate auto narration as a service to their authors and to the listeners worldwide experimentation is at the heart of adapting to new circumstances and this seems to me an experiment well worth testing the more publishers test the faster the technology will improve and i'm like here cheering on richard charkin who is about as far away from me in terms of the publishing industry as you know within the industry but he's you know we're very different people with very different experiences and yet both of us are saying this so i'm really encouraged by this very encouraged by the fact that a uk traditional publisher is going this reach this is i believe the first instance of a traditional publisher talking about a narration of audio books that i have really seen but in in order to take it further so obviously google have a very strong ai component but there are some other things that have come up in the last week that i think also adds to the the forward moving shift that we're seeing the sort of march forward of audio tech first of all uh the potential of ai voices has been demonstrated in the deep fake tom cruise on tick tock which if you haven't seen is well worth watching and very importantly the creator has made this very obviously with deep deep tom cruise i think is the the account but it's it's a deliberate deep fake to show you how good this technology is and it shows what can be achieved in both a good and bad way and you can read a lot about that but essentially these tools are getting easier and easier to use and um as ever with tools and weapons i always quote that a book which that's exactly what technology is it's a tool it's a weapon we have to choose how we're going to use it also venturebeat reports that a company called sonantic has figured out how to use ai to turn written words into spoken dialogue in a script and it can infuse those words with emotion the breakthrough advancement revolutionizes audio engineering capabilities for gaming and film studios culminating in hyper realistic emotionally expressive and controllable artificial voices so this is from venturebeat and this is about gaming and of course gaming is the huge huge huge industry and it is very likely that gaming will solve this problem first because that is where the money is let's face it i mean i always talk about this with ai why would anyone use an ai to write a novel when they can use it to solve the environment or healthcare or any of the other systemic problems that we have as as the human race but this is an example here gaming want to solve this problem and by gaming solving it we will reap the rewards down the track um but yeah people will always solve the problems either where the money is or where the biggest problems really are so yeah i mean i'm encouraged by this though i think we're really not far off uh ai narration of of audio but as i've talked about if you have listened to the episode i put out before christmas and my book on ai and converging the impact of converging technologies i have a whole chapter on voice and i don't think this is a going to destroy things this is an abundance mentality this is a stratification of audio rights where for example you will have i will do a human narration of my audio book as i have for how to make a living with your writing the third edition coming out next week as you're listening to this when this goes out but i've human narrated that but let's say uh you wanted it in an american male voice well maybe i'll create an ai version an ai narrated version with an american male voice and you can listen to it that way so and that that might be if it only takes an hour as richard sharkin has said well i'd probably create lots of different ones and then maybe you could pay a premium price for the human narration you can pay a cheaper price for an ai narration you can pay a certain amount for an e-book you can pay more for a limited edition hardback this is why i'm so excited about the abundance mentality of this futurist stuff we are getting more and more and more opportunities and it is so exciting i'm so excited anyway coming back to other uh voice news also interesting spotify have rolled out into 80 yes eight zero new markets as part of our ongoing commitment to building a truly borderless audio ecosystem so they've rolled up to 80 countries and 36 languages these 80 plus markets represent more than a billion people potential spotify listeners who have yet to tap into the power of our platform and if you're listening to this on spotify welcome to the show and this is interesting because obviously spotify have talked about moving into audio books podcasting also sells books and one of the questions i get a lot is well you know you talk all about selling internationally and i've now sold books through uh various you know online sites including cobo writing life to over 162 countries something like that and the main reason is podcasting podcasting is an international marketing tool and spotify rolling out even further here this means we're going to be able to reach even more people i was i actually asked kobo writing life to give me a list of the countries that i hadn't sold any books in and they're all a challenge but maybe now with spotify rolling out it will be less of a challenge so very excited about um i would i mean i would obviously like to sell books in every single country that i can so that's 190 countries at the moment that is my goal one of my many goals uh anyway so podcasting definitely sells books if you are a good podcast guest and you give great value to the audience and i did actually post a chapter on this topic from my audio for author's book on the blog this week which you can find on the creative pen and i'll link to it in the show notes and of course you can even listen to that chapter in the audiobook of audio for authors which is all about audio books podcasting and voice tech so we shall see will spotify roll out audio books this year in a much bigger way i mean they do have a few audio books but it's at the moment if you go onto your spotify app if you are a member you can you can check it out for free it's got music and then it's got podcasts as their two main areas and that will will they add audio books i think they must do because their goal their stated goal is to sort of be the destination for audio so there we go also on the topic of voice several of you have emailed me about clubhouse which has been discussed in lots of different areas it is a live live audio only real-time social network basically and i've been resisting it because i didn't really want to add anything new to my life i don't have time to listen to everything i want to listen to already let alone more audio but i have now joined because it feels like it's gaining some momentum if you are on clubhouse i'm at the creative pen as usual it's definitely interesting for those of us who prefer audio to video which is obviously me and it does feel like twitter did in 2009 so i first joined twitter in 2009 and you really could network with people who were very big in the industry because there were so few people on twitter that it and it was and they were on twitter all the time and clubhouse feels a bit like that at the moment although i see a real problem with it that most of the people talking about this in the us and the biggest problem it's real time and if you want a global platform and of course my thing is always i want to be global you cannot have a real-time global platform because we're all in different time zones so what i've noticed is that there have been conversations i would love to listen into but they are at 11 p.m my time or 1am my time here in the uk and so the time that i do have a look at clubhouse it's um british european or asian conversations that are going on and i because it's real time only there's no recordings that to me means it cannot ever be international because you just this is the problem with running an international business you can never find a good time zone for everyone you have to say right today i'm going to aim at the american market so i'm going to have a time zone that people in america will will listen in on and then if i want to aim for you know a different market then i'll change my time zone so this is a very significant thing and because it's so beloved right now of american entrepreneurs i think they might have forgotten this i haven't heard anyone else mention this but i i think that is a real issue personally for me that's an issue so i would love for them to add in recording options um but of course they've said the whole point is that it's real time but i've also heard that fireside which is being funded by mark cuban which sounds like it might integrate with podcasts in a much more effective way and for example i obviously spend a lot of time preparing for each of these podcast episodes i obviously do that i prepare for the interviews i do the interviews i edit the interviews i do all of this preparation for the introduction i do all my reading in the week i edit it you know and i do all my own podcast editing and formatting and everything now i'm back to doing it all myself uh because like because uh control frequency let's just call it that also i i've i want it to sort of move up more to real time so i'm recording this on a sunday and it goes out monday morning and when i worked with someone else i had to get it to them on friday so it kind of changed my time timings anyway coming back to voice i think that yes i can see the attraction of this sort of real time but for me i'd love some kind of app where i could talk to you guys in a more casual sense in between sessions if people had specific questions so for example twitter audio might be that but at the moment twitter hasn't rolled that out globally as far as i know and then yeah i was really thinking about well how could i use something like this or how could i talk to you guys more in a less structured manner but it doesn't look as if clubhouse would be that type of thing so i'm very interested in the splintering of the social media into these more audio platforms because i'm definitely an audio person it's funny i do think that these splintering ideas this sort of stratification idea is going to be the thing that underpins as time rolls on i've been reading a lot and i'll be talking about blockchain and nfts and things on friday's ai type show futurist show which will be coming out on friday the 12th of march something like that this week but i've been reading so much at the moment lots of books lots of thinking about things and you know i'm talking about positioning ourselves so we can be ready for 2030 well it feels almost like this shift is speeding up much more than expected that even i expected and that's saying a lot i want to make sure we're well positioned for the changes ahead and at the moment even i'm feeling like whoa okay i can feel the earth moving a little as some of the things we've relied on as the linchpins of what we've done are beginning to change so i'll be talking about all this but the pandemic has really sped up a lot of things that were going to take much longer and the choices we make now are the things that will lead us to continued success in the future and as ever look to be honest creating and controlling your own intellectual property will always be a good idea so writing books and then if you are going to sign contracts like i've talked about this many times the the worst contract clause is essentially signing away all formats existing now and to be invented for basically the life of copyright because what's happening we can see this with these nfts um which again i'll talk about on friday but it's basically a new digital format you get like a digital limited edition that we can create and if you don't have the rights to do things like that with your work then you might well you just won't be able to do that and i feel it feels to me that there are many more exciting things coming that we need to be able to do so i have no issue with people signing publishing contracts but be very clear about what rights you are signing away and yeah don't sign away formats that haven't even been invented yet it just seems crazy um be very specific about what you're agreeing to license so yeah i think coming back to it yes things are speeding up yes there is great technological change ahead but if you focus on writing your intellectual property you know making your books your intellectual property assets and then if you think about uh selective rights licensing and controlling your ip so that you can take advantage of the te hnology as it emerges that's important and i talk about this a lot in how to make a living with your writing the third edition which is coming out soon and as ever i will continue to share what i learn as we move forward and i hope you're enjoying the extra ai slash futurist episodes that i'm putting out uh every couple of weeks at the moment as i'm thinking about things and talking to people i'm trying to it goes bigger than these futurist segments basically so that's why i'm doing that so in my personal update i'm still in finishing mode i did finish the narration and editing of the audio book of how to make a living with your writing third edition which is now um i do all the editing and then i pass it over to uh dan my audio man for mastering and uploading and i will upload it after he's finished mastering and so i'll be selling the audio direct on monday 15th of march so that will be the best place to get it then and then it will take about a month to get to the other audio platforms if you prefer the audio book but it is coming and yes i am narrating it i'm also still doing finishing tasks on your author business plan in german and the matt walker fantasy trilogy and i've been recording a lot of podca podcast interviews with for both the creative pen and also books and travel and just banking a load because i really feel like really really hope that lockdown will be lifted within the next few weeks here in the uk or at least the first tiny tiny lift which is not exactly lifted but it's a start i might even get to see my parents which will be nice so yes i might even be able to leave the area which would also be amazing i will never please remind me of this i will never ever take it for granted again that i can go and stay somewhere outside my few square kilometers i'm i'm really starting to get a little bit mad now uh anyway this week i was on the wish i'd known then podcast with the lovely sarah rosette and jamie albright and i talk about something i've not really shared before in terms of my fiction name and the choice of jf pen and initials and all of those things and a whole other load of lessons learned on the journey so you can go to wish i'd known then podcast and it's a great show because they talk about lessons learned as writers what you wish you had known as a writer so that's interesting i'm also on the ask ally podcast with honor ross talking about literary prizes awards and competitions why would you even enter a prize or an award how can you tell what is worth entering because there are lots of ones that are not worth entering and tips on how to stand out i also wanted to mention that i'm in terms of listening i'm listening to the land of the giants podcast which i mentioned a while back but they've covered their first season was on amazon second was on netflix now they're on to google and it's fascinating and this is part of why i'm feeling like the ground shifting because the move against big tech the backlash against big tech and the way that these tech companies are both the most incredible useful brilliant amazing things that we can have and also the uh terrible awful crazy bad things that can happen when people use them in other ways tools and weapons again you know these companies help us make a living as creatives but we also worry about what they have unleashed and how much power they have and land of the giants is a very professional production well worth listening to also this week if you like horror dark fantasy dark fiction in general i am in a awesome joint promotion this week 8th to the 15th of march 2021 you can win six signed paperbacks including ink by jonathan mayberry which is worth worth it for the cover design let alone the book and i've read the book it's awesome jonathan maybe is one of my favorite authors uh i'm definitely one of his super fans i actually want to enter this myself but i can't because i'm in it and it has a gorgeous cover strangers by michael brent collings one of again one of my favorite horror writers i love michael brent's books and uh he's also one of the most popular guests on this show his writing his interview on writing with depression continues to be helpful to so many people so yes you can get inc by jonathan mayberry strangers by michael brent collings the ruins by t.w piper brooke the spread by ian rob wright creative spirit by scott nicholson who was on the show ages ago and desecration by me yes you can get six signed paperbacks and there's also an extra prize which is you can be in to win a kindle so just go to bits.lee so b i t dot l y forward slash signed bestsellers so bit dot lee forward slash signed bestsellers between 8th to the 15th of march 2021 to be in to win six signed paperbacks and i'm as i said i'm super excited to be in a promo with these awesome authors links as ever in the show notes so thanks for your emails and tweets and comments this week chris bardell says hi joanna listener for 10 years thanks chris for sticking around that makes me feel good this is one of the very best episodes in all that time with with patrick last week great interview great guest absolute gold level of authority authenticity and knowledge now subscribe to patrick's podcast yay thanks chris glad you enjoyed it monica and julie messaged on twitter to say i love separately monica says i love your idea of stocking up on tinned food if not for your own emergency then for those who will be raiding your home post-apocalypse and julie said your apocalypse cupboard in this week's intro made me laugh yup the apocalypse the popcorn apocalypse cupboard very important and just a couple more oh nc mander said on twitter catching up on the past episodes really needed to hear this chat with sarah painter today as i'm struggling through a slump at the moment i hear you nc i was order sort of all guns blazing heading towards writing day of the martyr and then i was like you know what i'm really tired i am super tired i'm tired of so many things and i need a break so i get you i feel like it's not i'm not officially in a slump i just need a break and a holiday and something and finally mary a schaefer sent a brilliant picture saying listening to the show while installing a roof vent fan in my tv in the middle of the arizona desert and it's a picture on the top of the van there so that's very cool so today's show is sponsored by publisher rocket software which i personally use for category and keyword research and i wanted to mention it because i am really deep into publisher rocket this week as i finalize my categories and keywords for publishing yes how to make a living with your writing basically there are a number of things you can do with the software you can use the category search tool to investigate the amazon subcategories where you could rank more easily if you want to get your orange bestseller badge you can do competitor competitor analysis where you can see where books like yours are in terms of categories which helps you compile your list for when you publish and remember you can have up to 10 categories on your ebooks and print books you just have to email amazon help through author.amazon.com and ask to be added to the various categories you can also use publisher rocket for keyword research to see which are the best keywords to add and what might be useful for your amazon advertising if you're doing that but basically we all need to pick two categories and seven keywords when we self-publish and publisher rocket can help you do that for both ebook and print books and there are lots of helpful tutorials and it really is simple to use and in fact even if you did this a couple of years ago or whenever you do need to revisit the categories and keywords as things change over time so i use rockets regularly and i highly recommend it you can support the show by using my link at the creative pen comm forward slash rocket so this tie for sponsorship pays for the hosting transcription and editing but my time in creating the show is sponsored by my wonderful patrons you guys are amazing and especially these extra ai related interviews they're definitely supported by my patrons who basically fund my brain so thanks to new patrons this week beth wagner alexandra markowski and jen roundel thanks to everyone supporting the show on patreon and especially if you've been listening for years and supporting for years you're amazing i really appreciate your support on patreon it demonstrates you enjoy the show and want it to continue i wanted to mention i always say you can support the show with a few dollars but you can also support it with a few euro gbp or canadian dollars it doesn't have to be us dollars and you can just buy me a coffee a month or a couple of coffees a month if you're feeling generous i do drink a lot of coffee i actually have a black coffee right here right now so you get the extra q a monthly q a audio and you can support the show at patreon.com p-a-t-r-e-o-n dot com forward slash the creative pen right let's get into the interview with steve steven pressfield is the international best-selling author of non-fiction books including the war of art turning pro and the lions gate as well as novels including the legend of bhagavan's gates of fire and killing rommel his latest book is historical thriller a man at arms so welcome back to the show steve it's great to be back joanne it's great to be on the creative pen this is one of my favorite podcasts of all you're definitely one of our most returning guests so i wanted to start with we're going to get into your new book soon but i wanted to start with a question that is we're in a pandemic still as we record this february 2021 many authors are struggling to write so i wondered first of all how have you been staying creative during the pandemic that's a great question first of all i found that the writer's life or at least my writer's life is not that different from the lockdown life basically i'm at home in a room staring at a screen i go out for a coffee once in a while and i come back but i would say like the first half since march to wherever when i was it really didn't affect me at all except maybe to make me more working longer hours but then i had a switch and this may be of even more interest to our listeners i've never been a great marketer of my own stuff a great promoter of my own stuff i go i go on your podcast and that's about it but for my new book coming up a man at arms i decided i'm going all out this time i just can't stand to have another book of mine come out and just vanish without a trace for maybe the last six months i've been just about doing nothing except working on promoting the book one way or another so that's been my sort of creative whatever nemesis and i find that i have tremendous resistance with a capital r against promoting my own stuff i feel like i'm a bad guy flogging my i'm forcing myself i'm inflicting myself on people that kind of thing but i know i shouldn't think that way and i know that's a real amateur way of thinking but in any event that's what i've been doing really for the last six months with my girlfriend diana we've been working together and we've been just working on that on promotion wow it's so interesting you say that about resistance around marketing because of course in the war of art your great book for writers which i'm sure everyone's read listening but you talk about resistance in there and i don't think i've really heard you talk about resistance to marketing before so how did you get over that like you said it's an amateur way of thinking but how did you actually push through that to do all the videos you've been doing yeah i'm still in the throes of pushing through it and i still i've definitely not i haven't mastered this by any means i really have to flog myself each morning to do it but there's a couple things one is my previous the most recent book called 36 righteous men which was a real killer to write took me like three years was really hard i didn't do any promotion it came out and it just died and i think it died not so much because it's not a good book but just nobody knew about it and so i just said to myself like my career is over if i can't solve this because these days if you go with mainstream publishers they really don't do anything for you or they only do the sort of the very expected stuff and and that just doesn't work anymore so i really felt like it was like almost a career question for me i just had to do this you know i had to master this or at least make a shot at it somehow and one of the things i did i don't know if do you know who ryan holliday is yeah he's been on the show a couple of times oh yes uh hey ryan holiday's everywhere but i i'm friendly with him so i and he lives in texas i live in california so i called him up and i said can i come visit you and give me you know a few hours and just teach me what you do and so he did and we spent a day together in texas and a lot of what he told me i was taking notes feverishly and he was sending me stuff on email and i also made a new friend a guy named jack carr who is a thriller writer you may have heard of him former navy seal sniper and he like ryan he is like a great marketer of his own stuff and i watched him and i saw how for two months at a time he was doing nothing but marketing his his most recent book so i've they've been role models for me in in helping me get over the idea that i'm a bad person if i do this and i realize that i still hate to do it i still feel bad about it but i i realize i just have to and i don't even know if this is going to work i've been going blitzing this thing now for months and i have no idea if it's going to work i'd have to have the attitude if it doesn't work so be it but i think by the end of this i'll be sold on this as a way to do it but when all is said and done joanna i will have spent as much time on marketing as i did writing the book so for whatever that's worth and i think i'm also lucky in that i've already got a bunch of books out there and people have heard of me and and i do have a little bit of a fan base so it's i would imagine it's really hard if you're starting from scratch marketing is definitely tough and i'm certainly i'm always encouraged by what you share you always share very honestly and openly and i think you've always done this though your memoir the knowledge the overcoming the problems and getting to the typewriter and so you've overcome these challenges over and over again in your writing career which is and you're still showing us that i i did want to ask you about that because overcoming resistance is also a matter of discipline i think like you said you just you what do you say flog i flog myself to do this in the morning and sometimes it feels like that going to the writing page as well so i wanted to let's get into a man at arms because you use a lot of warrior metaphor a lot of discipline metaphor a lot of strength and you've got video series on this and it underlies the war of art so tell us a bit about how your own military background underlies uh the books you write and how much of you is in telamon the main character in a man of arms i i do think that i didn't have a long military career i was a reservist so i was like at six six months of active duty and five and a half years in the reserves but it did really stick with me and but i i think that in many ways the discipline that i learned came from failing so much as a young writer and running away from doing the work and then going down the terrible rabbit holes in my life having things just go really bad in my life and finally realizing that the discipline of writing was what would save my life will keep me on the right track and if i didn't do it and i know all about this joanna it's really what you talk about over and over i'm not a very nice person to be around if i'm not working i'm and i'm not fun for myself to be around whereas if i am working then i am as much fun as i can possibly be but so i think the discipline a lot of the military sort of i i think of myself not to make this sound uh too over the top or anything but i do think of myself as like a warrior of the page of the blank page and i bring the sort of the virtues of a warrior i think are applicable al o to the virtues of a writer or an artist for instance courage for one thing patience really big one selflessness and another big one is the willing embracing of adversity that's a warrior type of thing and i think it's absolutely for a writer or an artist because we all know what the slog what it is yeah i do another thing to go on a little sidetrack here another metaphor that i use sometimes other than warrior is a mother if you think about a mother there's nobody braver or tougher than a mother particularly with a baby with a newborn and if we're a mother will run into a burning building just to save her baby she'll lift a car with two hands to save her baby and i think that we as artists we are pregnant with our work right and we're like a mother we're trying to bring in new life to the world and we set our own ego aside and our own needs aside just like a mother to protect this new life that we're trying to bring forth so that's another kind of metaphor or model that i use in my own in my own mind as i'm trying to overcome my own resistance and self-sabotage and procrastination and all that kind of stuff sometimes we need these metaphors to keep us going and and overcome the challenges yeah the warrior doesn't always win as well sometimes you're on the losing side right right when your book doesn't go so well but i wanted to come come back to you the the character of talamon of arcadia so he's the only returning character in your books so why what makes him stand out for you what is it about this character that you're like yeah you have to go back well i'm talking about uh flogging my new book which is what i'm gonna do right now as opposed to flogging myself in the morning to get down but the new book is called the man at arms and it's about i have this one recurring character only one recurring character in all my books whose telemon of arcadia is his name and he's like a gunslinger of the ancient world he's like a one-man killing machine of the ancient world instead of using like a clint eastwood man with no name character and what's fascinating to me about this character he's definitely an alter ego for me is that he just materialized on the page for me was not he first appeared in a book of mine called tides of war and then he came back in another one called virtues of war a hundred years apart and he hadn't aged a day and i had not planned the character in either one of these books he just appeared full-blown and what was interesting to me was that he had a philosophy he wasn't just a guy that was out there slogging through the mud or anything he was like a thinker and he definitely had a philosophy it was a dark philosophy and it came out fully formed and i didn't even know what it was it wasn't like i sat down and said oh i'm going to create this character and here's what he thinks abcd so it was a fascinating philosophy to me too so i wanted to find out more about it and over the years readers have written in to me and said when are you going to bring back this character telamon we want a book only about him and i thought i'd i want to do that too and for years i tried to come up with a story you know how you're looking for a story and you do an outline you do another outline it doesn't work and doesn't catch fire and finally i just feel like about three years ago i got a story that i liked and i was excited about it i'm still excited about it because it allowed me to explore this character and find out what his philosophy was and how and how it was going to change through this story i wanted to know what happens to this guy and would you say he's a archetype of because again you talk about the warrior archetype the warrior ethos is he your archetypal warrior and you say he's your alter ego in a way but does he represent almost a sort of jungian psychology archetype of a warrior i think he does john i think he does there are there are lots of different warrior archetypes lots of different styles you could have alexander the great would be a certain kind of a warrior or leonidas of sparta would be one but telamon is definitely an arc a warrior archetype that i can relate to in that he has taken this identity of a warrior as far as it can go nobody can beat him he can't seem to die he's uh whatever but he's tormented by this and he's searching for whatever comes next and i feel like i'm in that position too in a way you know what like as a writer i've got it down in terms of my own self-discipline i can do it not completely but pretty much but and i'm searching for what's what am i missing here what's the next is there an element that i'm leaving out and i think the element is actually love when it all comes down to it but i'm probably getting ahead of myself here but yeah he's he is an alter ego for me this character of telamon and then it obviously this is a an ancient world setting and i wonder 55 a.d not long after obviously the crucifixion of jesus and you've written about judaism before in several of your books but how did you research this area and how do you balance the historical truth with what some people you know might consider religious uh or faith truth ah that's another great question and here's another thing joanne of course there's a side part of that question and i know this when you start it on a book a lot of times you're not you don't know right away where it's going to be set or what the time period is it just pops out and for me the date of 55 a.d 20 years after the crucifixion or thereabout i just knew that was when it wanted to be set i don't know why and as i got into it it became really clear to me that this story was in the aftermath of the crucifixion it was in the aftermath it was what's going to happen we've seen what happened with jesus but is this new religion just going to peter out is it just going to go away is rome going to crush it as an empire what's going to happen here and i i hadn't even really thought about that until i was in that moment i put telemann in that moment and without giving i'll give away some of the story i might as well the the gist of the story is there's a letter sent by the apostle paul to corinth and greece to the community the christian community in corinth the letter that would become the book in the bible first corinthians and it's the letter that has when when i was a child i spake as a child i thought as a child etc etc and the thing of faith hope and charity and the greatest of these it's got a lot of great quotes that we remember in it and i wanted the romans to try bad guys to try to stop this letter and that telemon my gunslinger character would be hired to stop this letter and then things would happen from there but getting back to faith i know i'm blathering on here joanna but i'm enjoying it but i will win a character any character in any book or movie if it's humphrey bogart and casablanca if it's any character when they change any hero they have to change or there's no story and when they change that change almost always takes place on the soul level on the spiritual level and if we do if we write a story and it only takes place on the behavioral level the change or the superficial level then the readers it doesn't resonate it doesn't work it has to happen so the idea of it's almost like any story when it comes down to the climax comes down to some concept of faith it might not be something that you would name as religious but the ending of casablanca just is a classic example that we all know where humphrey bogart puts ingrid bergman on the plane to lisbon and he gives her up right for the greater good for the greater cause of the resistance to the nazis so that's happening that's a change that's happening for him on the soul level he might not cite religion or anything like that in fact i'm sure he wouldn't but but the reason that change is so powerful is because it happened on on that level so that was what i was trying to get to in in this book a man at arms and have my character tell them on change on the soul level and coincided with faith in this case which yeah goes really deep on the theme just returning to the research because i know a lot of people love writing historical fiction and you've written a lot of historical fiction as well so do you research by obviously we're in covid times you're not going back but i know you've been to israel and done a lot of research there before but what how are you researching that period of history are you reading a lot of non-fiction or how do you research this is i'm going to ge i'm going to say something that maybe your maybe will surprise you or maybe it will be liberating to to our listeners a lot of the stuff in my books that seems like it's absolute research is i'm just making it up let me go back to an earlier book of mine to gates of fire that was about the ancient spartans and in researching the ancient spartans there's very little about them we only have 24 words that are written by an actual spark their arrest is all from various athenians and stuff like that so one of the things i did in writing gates of fire was i would come up with a term in english let's say for a type of military exercise and i had a friend a greek friend dr hippocrates conscious and i would send them this term in english and i would say give me the greek word for this and and he would and then i would put that in the story and basically i'm making it up but when you read it you go wow that is so real but again i had to because there is no real research for that era like in in your country in the uk let's say you want to write about queen boudicca from if i'm pronouncing that right from wherever that was first century a.d fighting the romans there's not there's i've looked it up there's very little about it if you're going to write about it you're basically going to write like game of thrones you're going to have to invent whatever it is but i did a lot of research in israel i was in israel for nine weeks i i went over the ground i talked to millions of people or lots of people and i imbibed a lot of stuff there but like for instance a man in arms a lot of it takes place in the sinai desert and i knew a fair amount about that from talking with israeli tank commanders and infantrymen and stuff who were there during the six day war but but i wasn't allowed to go in the sinai desert because that was egypt it was a border you couldn't cross in the story a man at arms again one of the characters is a witch is a sorceress and she one of the things she does is she gathers medicinal plants from the desert and and creek makes these teas and these things that help keep people awake and help heal wounds and stuff like that and so i looked up as much of that stuff as i could but then i just invented names i just invented the name of a plant and that it did such and such a thing had such and such an effect and so if you shouldn't give this away but if you read it you think holy cow this guy really studied he knows the whole geography botany of the sinai desert but i really don't i just made a lot of it up i love that i actually think that is very liberating i find i'm i recently went to canterbury and i'm writing a day of the martyr and i have the thomas a beckett murder and as you say and that's a thousand years 850 years ago and of course there are accounts but they're very biased so even if there are accounts so for example paul's letter to the corinthians obviously we can read that but then the church obviously got rid of any thing that criticized christianity later on and got rid of the gnostic gospels and all that so much of even if we think we're researching from a biased point of view so almost by making it up you're adding a bit of balance i think to the bias that's how i look at it definitely joanna because it's like if you're researching alexander the great there's no document that was written close less than 400 years after his death and just like you say the bias either they hated alexander or they painted him as really a bad guy or they loved him and they cut out all the bad stuff about him so the historical fiction writer it's our job i think to enter that unknown territory via the imagination and just ask ourselves what would it really have been like a lot of times i find when i'm doing research i'm reading between the lines i'm trying to say yeah this guy's saying this but what was really going on there and i think when you do that those are the scenes and the elements that readers really respond to and really feel like oh that really brought me back there but i think you do have to take you have to be brave and be willing to to state things that you don't know for sure um and i wonder there because you i think you're really also talking about subtext where you're you might be saying one thing but you actually mean something else and you've talked about the levels that a reader will you know want to connect with on a soul level so it's not telemon had a sword fight yeah that's great but also telamon is experiencing something on a deeper level yeah so when you mentioned also that you do an outline and then you work from that when you're planning your outline are you thinking about the conflict on the higher level and the conflict on the lower level at that early stage or is that the type of thing that emerges as you write ah that's a great question joanna i think it's a little bit of both a lot of times i think i've had this experience with my great editor sean coyne numerous times where i'll finish a book completely i'll write 10 drafts and give it to him and then he'll tell me what it's about i don't know he'll explain to me the deeper story almost always he'll do that and i'll go wow i really write that and then i'll go over it again with that in mind but having had that experience with him a bunch of times i've learned to to jump ahead of him a little bit and now i ask myself i was reading a story about steve jobs the guy who founded apple and supposedly he used to go around the the workplace and stop at people's offices and cubicles and he'd ask him what business are we in and then he would ask him what business are we really in and what i took from that as a writer is asking what is this story about and then what is it really about and that really about is the deep level is the soul level and i will at the start of a story like with the character of telamon in this story i definitely did a kind of an outline that i called the understory and i started with where is he at the start of the story and where do i want him to be on the soul level at the end of the story and then i would go back and look at the various beats where he would change does he change slightly here in act one then he changes a little more at this scene and i really wanted to make it absolutely clear in my mind and then there would be a big moment when he really changed but yeah so i definitely and i highly recommend that to myself going forward in anything else i do is asking that question what is it about and then what is it really about it's a very i was just thinking then about the question you said what business are we in what business are we really in and i want to come back to you on that with that question about us as writers because i feel like on the one level like you're wanting we want to please ourselves when we write but that's not the business we're in right the business is not pleasing ourselves yeah that's a great another great question joanne before i even plunge into that let me just talk about the uk for a second you could very much say what is brexit about and then say what is it really about it's re i don't know what the answer to that is but it's at some on a really deep level it's some sort of reclaiming of the identity that goes back to when you guys used to paint your faces blue and fight the romans it's probably something like that but anyway let me pass beyond that and get back to your question when people ask me what is my job description what do i do and my answer that i've come to over the years is i'm a servant of the muse and that's my answer to what is it really about and what it's really about is i'm i believe that we're put on this earth with a bit of a destiny and that just as your books you have books that are like you we e born to write and that are on the bookshelf behind you and you have books and potential on the bookshelf ahead of you i do too and so do all of us and i think i'm just asking the question of the goddess what do you want me to do next and i'm not and i just try to believe that she has some kind of plan that there's some if you think about bob dylan's albums as a total through line or bruce springsteen's or the beatles or anybody like that there is the body of work is saying something right and i think a lot of times the artist herself or himself doesn't even know we don't even really know what this is really about but all we can do is try to follow that i think there are a lot of writers that don't work like that a lot of writers write for hire or they try to second guess the market they say oh the market wants this let me give it to him or i can get a job working for wants me to do this so i'll do that and i understand that i respect that but my own style is i feel like i was put on this planet to write something i don't know what but book by book i i want to let it unfold and and that's what it's really about for me i love that books of potential that you said there because i feel that too i feel like there are so many ideas like at the moment in fact today i was just writing out like this paragraph is this book this paragraph is this and which one should i do you that because you've written lots of fiction and non-fiction and your audience of people in the military to historical fiction readers to writers to artists and i wonder how do you know or how do you decide which book to write next whether it will be a non-fiction to help writers will it be another historical fiction how do you know what is your next potential i still don't have a real absolute answer for this usually the way i go for it is i ask myself what am i most afraid of what upcoming project scares the crap out of me and i say that's the one i i gotta do but again resistance with a capital r is so and diabolical fooling that it can fool you but yeah i usually try to a lot of times i will know for sure because i get seized by something and i just have to do it and usually in that case it's usually an idea that i think is really stupid and i usually think this is never going to sell this is the lamest idea this is not commercial at all but i'm seized by it and i almost always have to make a decision of okay i don't care i'm going to put in two years and if it totally flames out so be it and usually those are the ideas that actually work the best don't ask me why i have no clue so that's easy when you're seized by something but other times it's a lot tougher and there's that early period where you're maybe the first few months where you're pushing through something and you just have and i'm in the case like that right now with another book that i'm thinking about where you just each day you finish and you go is this any good am i getting anywhere is it was this just the dumbest idea i don't even like it why am i doing this and but a lot of times after three months or four months or something you'll start to get traction on it you'll go ah that was just a period of doubt that's all it is and i just had that was just resistance and i just had to push through it and again i think that's really encouraging and in fact i went to your blog and i think this is the one you're talking about you said you had a you're having a hell of a time even conceiving it and i'm not even sure what to include in this damn thing and i was like wow it's so great to hear that you suffer from this and the doubt because people think that it goes away that maybe once they've written one novel that it will just go away but do you know any writer who has got over that kind of thing yeah i don't actually and and there does just seem to be that period of self-doubt at the beginning of a project i mean like this one i'm working on now is basically it's diana my girlfriend is encouraging me oh this is going to be wonderful you got to do it you got to do it and i'm just saying to myself i don't know i just don't know and it's it's an autobiographical thing i'm going to be telling about certain things that happened in my real life and of course i'm thinking who cares about this steve who wants to hear about these dumb things that happen to you and write a novel do something don't do that but i think i'm oh here's one thing i did i want to say maybe this will help our listeners who might be going through the same thing the thing that has really helped me in here is listening to my dreams i've had a couple of kind of those dreams that wake you up and you just know their important dreams and both of them have encouraged me to have faith and to keep going after i finished analyzing them i take that really seriously because i think that's our soul communicating with us are unconscious communicating with us so that's one thing that keeps me going on this thing although i've had to set it aside like i say because of promoting a man at arms but i'm now anxious to get back to it it'd be so great to get back to just writing yeah i understand that just on giving up is something that someone actually asked me about this just yesterday how do you know when a project is worth continuing with and when do you give it up and i haven't given up a story i've started writing but i wondered if you because you said you have these different outlines do you give something up before you start or do you ever give up a project when you actually put time into it i'm like you joanna i think once i've gotten into it i almost always finish it i don't know if that's a bad idea or not i usually drop projects in the early stages and they're just i'm just asking myself is this a good idea and it just if it just doesn't i just i if i just can't get enthusiasm going forward i'll just put it aside but i've also found sometimes at those projects if you come back to them a year later suddenly you go oh that's a pretty good idea i don't know why i threw that away maybe sometimes it just takes a few iterations for something to gain traction with us but i think basically once i start on something i'm like a terrier and i just won't let it go yeah me too and i think it's one of those hindline rules isn't it you finish what you start oh is that right i like that yeah i do think if you put too much time if you put a lot of time into something and you do quit it's a bad thing it's bad karmically in some way i'd rather finish it and have it fail than assuming i've put in a lot of time not just a little time yeah no absolutely and then you mentioned about doing some more autobiographical work and you've put a lot of your personal life in a lot of your books i've read most of your books and you really get that sense of your history in that as well but how difficult is that for you to be really honest about yourself and your failures in some sense and your triumph it's much easier to do it through a character but why do you do that what do you think drives you to share those personal things i i think like in the war of art or in other books that are about writing almost every story that's about me is a failure there's practically no stories of success and the reason that i do that is is i want to help the reader i want to encourage the reader i want the reader to feel like because most of us when we're reading a book like that we're thinking about our own failures all right not even stuff we finished that failed but stuff we never even got started or stuff we procrastinated stuff we sabotaged ourselves on and i think it's encouraging to read somebody like me telling you the same thing happens to me over and over it's like one of the things about social media facebook and instagram and stuff like that is people only put out their best selves you see the picture they are on the beach at san tropez or whatever toasting with champagne and everybody the rest of us who are watching it we go oh i hate them or my life is meaningless i'm not do but i think it's more it's really empowering when you tell a story about a failure be empowering to other people because they can say okay if it happened to him then it's okay if it happened to me and most of life i think is failure and just getting up and trying again yeah and certainly the writing life as you say you put in your effort on your books and am i right saying the war of art for example was not a success out the gate it took a long time before it took a long time i would say between 10 and 15 years before it finally it just started it just was a word of mouth thing very slowly then i have to encourage you about a man arms if all your promotional stuff means the first couple of months are slow it may take some time yeah that's true in fact it's it's happened gates of fire which was one which is probably my biggest success quote unquote that took forever it took another 10 years before it finally little by little could have found an audience i think that's works unfortunately a lot of times people go out for 10 years and they don't find anything this month is actually my 10th anniversary of my first novel coming out so i feel like yeah i've put in a decade it's the beginning that's great congratulations joanna that is great it's a start uh so i just before we finish i did want to return to marketing we did start that way now you've been blogging for at least a decade i actually i think you've been vlogging a long time and you've obviously been learning so much and you've been doing this video series on the warrior archetype which is great and people should definitely go look at that it's got the practical stuff but also the more psychological spiritual angle so how have you seen this kind of content marketing the blogging the video play into your book marketing do you see any direct results or is it something that you do for your own creativity as well another great question joanna i say it's maybe 50 50 that i've certainly learned more than i've taught from my blog that's about writing but at the same time i do think it really does help to have something out there that or to establish relationships with people who who who will come to your blog or come to whatever it is it's a really fine line for me because i hate to just be selling it's and a lot of what i do on social media and stuff like that i hope is i feel like i'm giving you know that i'm putting something out there that i hope will either encourage other writers or artists or entrepreneurs or will give them a little insight into the craft just like what you're doing ninety percent of what you do is helping people here's how to do this here's how to do that here's how to deal with this issue how to deal with that issue let me ask you joanna how do you feel for the stuff that you do how does it let me ask that same question to you yeah i make a living because 90 as you say 90 even 95 percent of what i do is given away for free and then a certain number of people support the podcast they buy the books they buy courses they support our fiction and i i'm absolutely a supporter of content marketing because i feel like we can express ourselves creatively and i love talking to you and we're getting something from this but also the listeners are too so it's a win-win to me that's why i love content marketing ah i've never even heard that that's what it's called content marketing huh yeah yeah did you define how would you define that it's giving away something for free so that you attract your target audience who then a tiny percentage of them might actually go on and buy something but enough of them do to support your book launch or your whole business which is it's it's the foundation of my business wow i guess it's really the foundation of mine in that sense and i never even heard that it's a great term huh i got to think about this a little bit more there you go that's fantastic so tell people where they can find a man at arms and all of your books and everything you do online first if you just go to my website stevenpressfield.com we've actually i've learned this thing i never knew what a splash page is do you know what a splash page is joanna it's like a like a landing page your site looks great now you've had it redone it looks brilliant yes that was diana who did that actually if anybody goes to stevenpressfield.com or www.amandarms.com it'll take you to this landing page splash page that's really all about the book and the bonuses that we have in the pre-order bonuses and it's got all anything anybody would need and then underlying the splash page i never knew that this worked before is my regular website that's you would have to click the big x up in the upper right hand corner and it takes you to the underlying website and that's about my normal war of art type of stuff but stevenpressfield.com or a man at arms.com will take you to everything or follow me on instagram i'm doing a lot of stuff on instagram and a lot of it is about giveaways that we're going to do in a little contest that we're going to have fantastic thanks so much for your time steve that was great hey joanna it's always great to talk to you anytime you want me on i love to do it's great to talk to you and thank thanks for the great questions i hope it helped everybody and thank you so much it's great to be with you so i hope you enjoyed the interview with steve today his comment early on shocked me to be honest and when he said i just can't stand to have another book of mine come out and just vanish without a trace which implies that this is what has happened perhaps more than once and he also said my career is over if i can't solve this and i guess personally i'm encouraged i know it's terrible but i'm actually encouraged that someone of his experience and longevity and writing skill in the writing life and you know he still has challenges around writing and book marketing and his example that to keep learning and to keep changing it up whatever stage of the writing life you are at is so important the world keeps changing and we have to adapt along with it as you know this is why i'm doing these extra shows and talking of change and extra shows this week i will be talking about blockchain for books and i'll also be talking about nfts which are all over the news right now in the music and art industries and given that those industries certainly in the music industry um are usually a few head a few years ahead of us i will be sharing my thoughts on the opportunities there might be for authors and the things we can possibly do uh as ways to expand our work into even more exciting areas then on the usual show on monday next week i'll be talking about how to be successful publishing on kobo writing life with the super helpful tara kremen and we talk about international publishing book marketing tips and more so that is all coming up happy writing and i'll see you next time thanks for listening today i hope you found it helpful you might also like the backlist episodes and show notes available at thecreativepen.com forward slash podcast you can also get your free author blueprint at thecreativepen.com forward blueprint if you'd like to connect you can tweet me at the creative pen or find me on facebook at the creative pen see you next time