Joanna Penn

She is 837 podcast episodes into a conversation she started in March 2009, and she has not missed a Monday yet. Joanna Penn - also J.F. Penn when the lights go low - runs one of the world's most downloaded author-business podcasts from Bath, England. She does not work for a publisher. She does not wait to be chosen. She chose herself in 2006 and has been building the infrastructure ever since.

Penn publishes thriller novels under the darker pen name J.F. Penn - the ARKANE series, psychological crime novels, folk horror, dark fantasy - books where characters dig through catacombs and wrestle with mortality in ancient Jerusalem and modern London. She publishes practical author-business guides under her own name: how to self-publish, how to build an audience, how to use AI tools, how to make a living with your writing. Two brands. One woman. A dual identity she explains with a Plato metaphor: the white horse (outward, helpful, educational) and the dark horse (shadow, fiction, finally running free).

In September 2011, she walked out of her IT consulting job and never went back. That decision now has 14 years of compound interest on it: multi-six-figure annual income, a direct-sales bookstore, a Patreon with 1,400 paying members, and a podcast that has been downloaded in 229 countries. The number on the barbell at a British Powerlifting meet in 2024 was 190 kilograms.

She is not who you expect. She is quieter, more analytical, more strategic. She reads about death culture in her spare time - not as a morbid habit but as serious academic inquiry; she is currently completing a Masters in Death, Religion and Culture at the University of Winchester. She has two British Shorthair cats named Cashew and Noisette. She drinks gin and tonic and photographs cathedrals. When the AI writing debate erupted in 2022-23 and much of the author community chose outrage, she chose transparency: here are the tools I use, here is how I use them, here is what I call myself - an AI-Assisted Artisan Author.

The yellow card is still the origin story she returns to. An IT consultant in Brisbane, deeply unhappy, she wrote the affirmation on a card and put it where she would see it every morning. "I am creative. I am an author." She has published those six words more times than she can count - not as triumphant hindsight but as proof that you can begin from nothing true about yourself and work backwards into making it real.

Penn does not pretend these two sides are in conflict. The white horse built the audience. The dark horse provides the product that gets her out of bed. The fiction side - J.F. Penn - spent years as the quieter, secondary brand. In a pivot she announced publicly in December 2023, she reversed the priority: the dark horse is now leading.

This matters to the way she thinks about the creative economy. She spent her first decade writing about writing because it paid. Teaching and educating funded the time to write fiction. Now, 14 years in, she is restructuring the business around four audience pathways: the Fiction Reader, the Creative, the Author Entrepreneur, and the Future of Books thinker. The business did not shrink during the pivot; it sharpened.

She was earning good money and miserable about it. IT consulting in Brisbane: structured problem-solving for large corporations, eleven years living across Australia and New Zealand, accumulating the kind of professional credentials that are useful at dinner parties and nowhere else. She had spent her twenties optimising for other people's metrics.

The yellow card was a private act. She wrote "I am creative. I am an author" in 2006 and propped it up where she would see it every morning. By her own account, neither statement felt true. That was the point. She had read enough about the psychology of belief formation to know that acting as if can precede being. She was practising.

April 2008: she self-published her first book, How to Enjoy Your Job or Find a New One. It did not set the world on fire. She has described it as "terrible" and later rewrote it as Career Change. But the act itself was irreversible. In December 2008 she launched TheCreativePenn.com. In March 2009 she launched the podcast. In September 2011, she handed in her notice and became, permanently, an author-entrepreneur.

The compounding she describes is not motivational filler. It is structural. Every piece of content she has published since 2008 is still findable. Her podcast back-catalog is a product. Her 1,000+ articles are a searchable resource. She built an asset, not a job. That distinction - asset versus job - is the core of everything she teaches. It is also the thing that most aspiring authors miss.

The books exist in two distinct registers. On the J.F. Penn side: the ARKANE thriller series (13 novels), in which Morgan Sierra, ex-Israeli military psychologist and agent of a secretive British organization, solves supernatural mysteries across Jerusalem, Iceland, New York, Budapest, and Viking Norway. Think Dan Brown with better pacing and a protagonist who does not need rescuing. The series has sold internationally, hit USA Today, and spawned an ongoing Kickstarter ecosystem for limited physical editions.

The Brooke and Daniel psychological crime series (three books) features a British detective and a museum researcher solving London murders - sharper, darker, more personal. The Mapwalker dark fantasy trilogy is set in Bath, where she lives, centering on the Ministry of Maps and a young woman who discovers the world is larger and stranger than the maps allow.

On the Joanna Penn side: the author-business library. Successful Self-Publishing (now in its fourth edition, 2025). How to Make a Living with Your Writing. Business for Authors. Audio for Authors. How to Market a Book. Each one a textbook for the career she built herself and has spent 17 years teaching others to build.

The book that surprised her most is Pilgrimage: Lessons Learned from Solo Walking Three Ancient Ways (2024). A travel memoir about walking the Camino Frances, the Via Francigena, and the Via de la Plata alone. It won the Selfie Award for Best Non-Fiction/Memoir at the London Book Fair 2024. She wrote it partly as the "white horse" and partly as something else - a document of a woman in her late forties renegotiating what she wants from the second half of her life. It sold well and it won things, but what it revealed to her, she has said, was that the dark horse has always had more to say than the white horse let it.

She identifies as a chronic introvert. This is not a performance of relatability; it is a structural fact about how she has built her entire business. She prefers writing in cafes alone to attending conferences. She prefers a podcast (she controls the mic) to a networking dinner. She ran the first 13 years of her online community largely through email and podcast, both of which allowed her to engage with readers without being in the same room as them.

She took up powerlifting at 49 and competed in the M2 63kg category at British Powerlifting in 2024, totaling 190kg. She achieved unassisted pull-ups for the first time at 49. She mentions this not to be inspirational but because it is true and because it changed how she understands her own body after years of treating it primarily as a vehicle for sitting and typing.

She is currently completing a Masters in Death, Religion and Culture at the University of Winchester (full-time, online). She enrolled partly to deepen the thanatological research behind J.F. Penn's fiction - her books have always moved in proximity to mortality, ancient relics, burial rites, the afterlife in a dozen different theological traditions. But she is also genuinely interested in how people think about death and what they do with that knowledge. She plans gothic/death merchandise, memento mori imagery, and at least one novel that she says will be unlike anything she has written before.

She lives in Bath, England, with her husband Jonathan (who runs the business side) and two British Shorthair cats: Cashew and Noisette. Cashew and Noisette are named after nuts in English and French respectively. This is exactly the kind of detail that belongs in a footnote to a much larger story, which is why it matters.

Her 50th birthday was spent in Iceland in March 2025. She adopted a new mantra there: "Pilgrim, pass by that which you do not love." She has described it as a license to stop optimising for scale and start optimising for quality - of life, of work, of books. The phrase is borrowed from walking traditions she documented in her memoir. She is using it to make fewer but more deliberate decisions about what the next 50 years look like.

The business model she built is the one she teaches. Book sales across Amazon and direct Shopify stores (CreativePennBooks.com and JFPennBooks.com, both launched after 2022 specifically to reduce Amazon dependence). Podcast sponsorships. Patreon at roughly 1,400 members. Affiliate revenue from tools she actually uses. Speaking fees that require travel plus premium rates. Online courses. Kickstarter campaigns for special editions and limited print runs.

She crossed six figures in 2015. She crossed multi-six-figures in 2016. She has publicly described her annual income as "approximately half fiction, half teaching and blog." SimilarWeb estimates the total business generates $1-5 million annually. She does not disclose precise figures, which is consistent with how she thinks about privacy and with the business reality that her numbers are instructive but not relevant to what someone else should expect.

The current strategic shift (announced in December 2023) is real and visible in what she publishes. She is moving away from the Amazon-centric, algorithmically-optimised mass market toward direct-to-reader relationships, premium physical editions, AI translation (to reach non-English markets without the traditional translation gatekeepers), and what she calls the "Transformation Economy" - people paying for genuine change, not just information. The podcast, the Patreon, the Kickstarters: all of it is being rebuilt around depth rather than breadth.

She hired her husband Jonathan in October 2015 after the business hit six figures. He handles the business management side while she handles the creative work. In her 2026 goals post she wrote about the personal dimension of this partnership: Jonathan was undergoing radiation treatment for throat cancer. She wrote about it matter-of-factly, in the same post where she listed her writing goals for the year. This is her register: clear-eyed, practical, unadorned, carrying on.

The 2026 Kickstarter is for Bones of the Deep, a tall-ship thriller that she describes as unlike anything in her back-catalog. The Masters thesis is in progress. She is revamping TheCreativePenn.com around the "Transformation Economy" model. She is working on a second novel in the Love Unearthed series. She is considering ARKANE #14, which would be titled Crown of Thorns.

She publishes her goals publicly every January and reviews them publicly every December. This practice - stating what you intend to do, then accounting for it - is both a business strategy and a form of accountability she has maintained for over a decade. The 2025 review included a frank accounting of goals not met, goals exceeded, and goals that changed shape mid-year because life changed shape mid-year. It is the kind of document that is useful precisely because it is honest.

The business she built is now old enough to have a history. The content she published in 2009 still ranks in search. The books she published in 2011 still sell. The podcast she started before podcasting was a mainstream concept now reaches countries she has never visited. She has never had a traditional publishing deal. She has never needed one. She chose herself in Brisbane in 2006 and has been collecting the evidence ever since.