My 2025 Creative And Business Goals With Joanna Penn [Video]

Happy New Year 2025!

I love January and the opportunity to start afresh. I know it’s arbitrary in some ways, but I measure my life by what I create, and I also measure it in years.

At the beginning of each year, I publish an article (and podcast episode) here, which helps keep me accountable. If you’d like to share your goals, please add them in the comments below. 

2024 was a year of consolidation (https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2024/12/30/review-of-my-2024-creative-and-business-goals-with-joanna-penn/) as I got my creative house in order and began to shift my creative and business processes. 2025 is going to be a year of personal and business changes as I turn 50 and focus on expanding the J.F. Penn side of things using Leverage as an over-arching theme. More details below.

Joanna Penn (https://www.thecreativepenn.com/books/)  writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of memoir, thrillers, dark fantasy, and horror as J.F. Penn (https://www.jfpennbooks.com/) . She’s also an award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and international professional speaker.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app (https://www.thecreativepenn.com/podcasts/)  or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• Leverage: Make more of what I have

• Launch of How to Write Non-Fiction, Second Edition

• My 50th year

• J.F. Penn bucket list and books: Blood Vintage, the ‘desert book,’ ‘ the tallship book,’ ‘the gothic cathedral book.’

• J.F. Penn short story collection — Kickstarter

• Joanna Penn — The Creative Penn Podcast and Patreon Community

Leverage: Make more of what I have

My over-arching theme for 2025 is Leverage, which can be defined as utilising available resources, assets, tools, and relationships to achieve more.

The famous quote by Greek mathematician Archimedes goes: “Give me a place to stand and a lever long enough and I will move the world.” The idea is that you can achieve a lot as an individual — if you use leverage.

Here’s an overview of some aspects and I go into more detail in the following sections.

(a) Leverage the books I’ve written but not made the most of yet.

• Launch How to Write Non-Fiction Second Edition (https://www.thecreativepenn.com/writenonfiction2) everywhere by end of January 2025

• Work with my US agent, Renee Fountain, to get a book deal for Blood Vintage — or self-publish by the end of 2025

• Get my existing short stories into print. Write an extra two exclusive stories and launch as a Kickstarter Collection and then publish wide.

• Get Catacomb (https://jfpennbooks.com/collections/catacomb) in audiobook format

(b) Leverage my existing available assets to bring in more income

• Do a monthly book marketing plan and organise paid ad campaigns per month for revolving first books in series and my main earners. I have been pretty scatter-gun at this recently, so I just need to get organised, and AI tools are good at helping with this!

• Organise my Shopify stores, CreativePennBooks.com (https://creativepennbooks.com/) and JFPennBooks.com (https://jfpennbooks.com/) into more collections to make it easier for readers to find things they might want to buy.

• Reinvigorate my content marketing for JFPenn (https://jfpenn.com/) — make more of BooksAndTravel.page (https://www.booksandtravel.page/blog/) with links back to my stores, and do fiction specific content marketing with the aim of surfacing more in the LLMs as generative search expands.

(c) Leverage AI tools to achieve more as a one-person business

I already use a lot of AI tools as part of my creative and business processes, but everything is quite disjointed as I create in different places and bring it all together myself.

2025 brings the promise of AI agents — where you give the AI agent a goal and it will plan a multi-step process and then execute that plan on your behalf after your approval, with as much interaction as you like along the way.

AI tools helping author achieve leverage. image by joanna penn on midjourney

I’ve glimpsed this step by step planning process as part of Google Gemini Deep Research (https://blog.google/