Review Of My 2024 Creative And Business Goals With Joanna Penn

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Another year ends, and once more, it's time to reflect on our creative goals.

I hope you can take the time to review your goals and you're welcome to leave a comment below about how the year went. Did you achieve everything you wanted to? Let me know in the comments.

It's always interesting looking back at my goals from a year ago, because I don't even look at them in the months between, so sometimes it's a real surprise how much they've changed! You can read my 2024 goals here, and I go through how things went below.

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Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling thriller author as J.F. Penn. She’s also an award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and international professional speaker.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• Spear of Destiny, the Gothic cathedral project, and short stories
• Award-winning memoir, Pilgrimage
• Blood Vintage, and working with a US agent
• The Creative Penn Podcast and Patreon Community
• Streamline TheCreativePenn website and redo Author Blueprint
• How to Write Non-Fiction, Second Edition
• Travel, speaking, and in-person events
• Financials, health and fitness, and happy cats!

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J.F. Penn — Spear of Destiny, the Gothic Cathedral project, and short stories

I researched, wrote and then did a Kickstarter for Spear of Destiny, ARKANE Thriller #13, before publishing it wide a few months later.

I went to Vienna, Nuremberg, and Cologne in January, which was a chilly trip but inspired much of the story.

The Kickstarter ran in June 2024 and raised £12,536 from 313 Backers. I made a limited edition hardback with silver foil and a ribbon, and a specific cover for the campaign, which I love!

You can buy Spear of Destiny here in all formats on my store, or here everywhere else.

The hardback was available in bundle deals with the rest of the series, and I also bit the bullet over audio and had the first three books in the series re-narrated by Veronica Giguere (they had been withdrawn since my rewrites in 2022), as well as Spear of Destiny.

These kinds of bundles and Add-Ons really help a Kickstarter fund at a higher level, and they are also only possible if you sell direct as you can still make a profit, even with discounts.

I also had a goal in 2024 to produce a non-fiction photo book with essays about English Gothic Cathedrals. I did lots of research trips and read books on stone masonry, which was great fun.

But then I discovered the pain of photography permissions, even for your own photos.

Essentially, if you take photos on private property, you cannot just use those photos in commercial projects. You need photography permissions, which can take time and energy, as well as potential payment for every single one, plus the text that goes with it, and potentially even the layout.

I hate the idea of asking permission in general. It goes against my independent spirit, and when I researched it in more detail, I hated even more how long it would take, and how much to-ing and fro-ing there would probably be.

I am the kind of creative who enjoys wrangling chaos and I can be a whirlwind of creative energy. It doesn't fit well with the structured permissions process.

When I interviewed Leon Mcanally about his Dark Tourism book which was heavy on photos and permissions, I realised I just can't do this kind of book right now. Perhaps sometime in the future I might hire someone to work with, but it doesn't fit me at the moment, so that photo/essay book is not happening.

I still have a lot of research around gothic cathedrals and ideas for what else that could turn into. More to come on that in 2025.

I had a goal to write “at least one or two” short stories, and I managed two, De-Extinction of the Nephilim, and Seahenge, both of which I narrated in audio, and are available on my store, and in all the usual places.

I did the art for all my fiction covers this year, primarily with Midjourney, but also DALLE through ChatGPT. My cover designer, Jane at JD Smith Design, used the images to put the finished covers together.

I also used RunwayML to turn Midjourney images into a book trailer for Blood Vintage.

I also had a goal to get everything in audio, but I am still deciding what to do with Catacomb, so that is outstanding. I did change the cover on it and make a gorgeous sprayed edge hardback.

J.F. Penn — Award-winning memoir author, London Book Fair, 2024

Back in March 2024, I was thrilled to win the Best Non-Fiction at the Selfies Awards for my memoir, Pilgrimage: Lessons Learned from Solo Walking Three Ancient Ways. That was definitely a highlight!

J.F. Penn — Blood Vintage, a folk horror novel

Once I dropped the gothic cathedral project, I had space for ‘the vineyard book,' an idea that's been noodling around for a while.

I visited Limeburn Hill near me, one of the few biodynamic vineyards in the UK in the summer and really loved the foray into folk horror, a genre I enjoy reading.

I also loved designing the special edition cover with Midjourney.

The process also led to a connection with a US agent, who suggested we take it out for submission, so I went ahead with the Kickstarter for the Limited Edition hardback only, and retained the other editions for licensing.

The Kickstarter for Blood Vintage back in October 2024 was fantastic and I love having the gorgeous limited edition hardback out in the world. But it was a truly limited edition. There were only 200 hardback copies printed and I didn't sell it in any other formats. It's not for sale at all right now.

My US agent took it out on submission in September and we are still waiting for the final batch of responses. Apparently Frankfurt Book Fair, the US Election, and then Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year etc all tend to get in the way of business.

I am finally experiencing what I've heard about for many years in terms of the slow pace of traditional publishing, but I'm committed to the process now. We will see what 2025 brings for that book …

The Creative Penn Podcast and Patreon Community

Another year of podcasting completed — and we hit 10 million downloads, which is kind of incredible!

I changed the podcast logo and the theme tune, and thanks to corporate sponsors, Kobo Writing Life, Draft2Digital, ProWritingAid, FindawayVoices by Spotify, Publisher Rocket and Atticus, Ingram Spark, and Written Word Media — all companies I continue to use and recommend.

One big change was how much more I am doing inside of my community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn. I've done tutorials on using aspects of AI tools and general topics around author business, as well as the monthly solo Q&A audio, and occasional live office hours. Thanks to all the Patrons who support the show! We now have over 1200 in the Community.

Joanna Penn — Streamline The Creative Penn website, redo my Author Blueprint

I needed to do a bit of clean up in order to move forward. I started out the year by entirely rewriting my Author Blueprint, which is a free ebook if you sign up for my email list, and you can also get the paperback on my store.

I archived a lot of posts and pages on TheCreativePenn.com and did a bulk cleanup of categories and tags. When you have a site as old as mine (started 2008), there's always backlist content to update or archive. Not a fun job, but necessary!

How to Write Non-Fiction, Second Edition

I also had a goal to update my backlist books for Joanna Penn, and How to Write Non-Fiction was the one that needed doing the most.

The first edition was from 2018, and since then my writing craft has improved a great deal, and I wanted to include aspects of memoir, as well as updating the business side of things, affiliate links, plus I wanted to narrate the audiobook.

It's all finished and on pre-order as I write this.

You can get it on my store, CreativePennBooks.com on 1 Jan 2025 in the usual ebook, audio, and paperback editions, and also in gorgeous foiled hardback (I'm still waiting for the proof as this goes out but it will be up soon). There are also bundle deals.

It will be out on all the usual stores on 31 Jan, 2025.

Travel, speaking, and in-person events

One of my goals when I became an author entrepreneur was to travel more, and while it's not been a bumper year (since my husband Jonathan has been busy with his MBA), I've still managed some trips for speaking and book research.

• Vienna, Austria plus Nuremberg and Cologne in Germany. Book research trip for Spear of Destiny
• Speaking in Seville for 20Books, Spain (the last 20Books conference)
• London Book Fair panels
• Corfu, Greek Islands, for beach holiday
• English gothic cathedrals trips — Salisbury, Winchester, Wells, Ely,
• Stone carving weekend, Somerset
• Death Valley, California, USA. I did a day trip for book research just before Author Nation, which was excellent.
• Author Nation, Las Vegas, USA. Fantastic conference and a great way for an inspiring (almost) end to the year.

Other goals

“Learn how to make beautiful books.”

I'm taking this goal as a win because I love both the special editions of Spear of Destiny and Blood Vintage, and now we can do sprayed edges with BookVault, we can do premium products more easily. Some indies are doing print runs with all kinds of special add-ons, so it really is possible to do anything now — if you have the time and the budget.

“Optimise my Shopify stores and Meta ads.”

I didn't do this, so it's a fail on this goal. My Shopify stores — CreativePennBooks.com and JFPennBooks.com — continue to tick along just fine and I sell books direct in different formats every day. I did outsource Meta ads for the first few months of 2024 but once that ended, I just never picked it up again. I much prefer creating new things that optimising the old!

“Experiment more with AI tools.”

I certainly did this, and as ever, I consider myself an AI-assisted artisan author. As noted above, I've been using Midjourney for book cover images and social media, as well as a book trailer for Blood Vintage, where I also used RunwayML. I use Descript and Otter.ai for my podcast. I use ChatGPT and Claude for brainstorming, help with organising ideas, and also for writing sales descriptions. I am also now using GoogleNotebookLM for surfacing new ideas from my own content, and Google Gemini Advanced with Deep Research to help with book research, both are new use cases in the last few months. If you'd like more detail on how I use all these tools, I do tutorials and demos within my community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Financials

While I won't be giving specifics, The Creative Penn Limited is still a multi-six-figure (GBP), one person business, but income was down by about 20% this year — which is pretty significant. There are a few reasons why.

• I spent several months on things that needed doing but didn't earn any money — redoing the Author Blueprint, and updating the site and the podcast
• I wrote two books which haven't launched or earned much as the year finishes — How to Write Non-Fiction, Second Edition, and also Blood Vintage. The Blood Vintage Kickstarter was only for the limited edition hardback, which is the least selling format, so most of the money is still to be earned for that book, whether I license it to a publisher or release it myself.
• I didn't do any significant paid live events or paid webinars or affiliate partnerships
• I also didn't do as much paid marketing, and I really slowed down on social media, so my book marketing in general was reduced. This is partly because I have felt pretty jaded by the grind of both paid ads and social, so taking time away from both helped me create more and continue at a sustainable pace.

I'm also at a point in my career and my life where I have met a lot of my financial goals, and so I'm making creative decisions for different reasons.

For example, there is no doubt that I could have made more money from Blood Vintage in 2024 if I had released it myself in all editions. But I have a goal to get a book deal at some point, so it's with my agent, and even writing stand-alones over series books (generally) means less income for indie authors.

I'm happy with the choices I've made, but I also intend to have more releases in 2025, and reinvigorate my paid marketing, with the intention of making up that revenue.

It will also be interesting to review this at my tax year end after April 2025, as I will have made up at least the income on How to Write Non-Fiction by then.

Health and fitness

While writing and podcasting are my job, health and fitness is pretty much now my major hobby, and I spend time on it every day. Remember, we are not just brains! We need a healthy, happy body in order to keep creating in a sustainable manner. This is also part of my ‘more digital, more physical' mentality where I combine my use of technology with aspects of ‘doubling down on being human.'

I've been powerlifting consistently twice a week pretty much all year, as well as walking most days, and while I had decided to do my first competition in 2025, I went ahead and did one anyway!

I chose not to push myself that day but selected weights where I could achieve every lift, so I had a perfect 9 of 9 lifts. Squat 50 kgs, bench press, 40 kgs, dead lift 100 kgs. Here's me with my medal! (and no, I won't be sharing the action shots as no one needs to see me in a powerlifting singlet and long socks! The required kit for British Powerlifting is not flattering!)

I ended the year with PBs of squat 70kgs, bench press 42.5kg, dead lift 105kg, which I'm really pleased with.

I also started calisthenics mid-year, which has been a very different kind of movement — handstands, ring work and going upside down a lot, as well as hanging from the bar and various other things that I am only now starting to get used to. It's a fun challenge and certainly pushes my comfort zone and gives me a new perspective!

Happy + cats!

Most importantly, I'm still happily married to Jonathan, living in Bath, England, with our two lovely British shorthair cats, Cashew (brown one) and Noisette (black one). My baseline happiness is sorted, so everything else is a bonus!

How did your 2024 go?

I hope your 2024 had some wonderful times as well as no doubt some challenges — and that you have time for reflection as the year turns once more. 

Let me know in the comments whether you achieved your creative goals and any other reflections you'd like to share.