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Why do some romance authors build decades-long careers while others vanish after one breakout book? What really separates a throwaway pen name and rapid release strategy from a legacy brand and a body of work you’re proud of? How can you diversify with trad, indie, non-fiction, and Kickstarter without burning out—or selling out your creative freedom? With Jennifer Probst.
In the intro, digital ebook signing [BookFunnel]; how to check terms and conditions; Business for Authors 2026 webinars; Music industry and AI music [BBC; The New Publishing Standard]; The Golden Age of Weird.
This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.
This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn
Jennifer Probst is a New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of over 60 books across different kinds of romance as well as non-fiction for writers. Her latest book is Write Free.
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
- How Jennifer started writing at age 12, fell in love with romance, and persisted through decades of rejection
- A breakout success — and what happened when it moved to a traditional publisher
- Traditional vs indie publishing, diversification, and building a long-term, legacy-focused writing career
- Rapid-release pen names vs slow-burn author brands, and why Jennifer chooses quality and longevity
- Inspirational non-fiction for writers (Write Naked, Write True, Write Free)
- Using Kickstarter for special editions, re-releases, courses, and what she’s learned from both successes and mistakes – plus what “writing free” really means in practice
- How can you ‘write free'?
You can find Jennifer at JenniferProbst.com.
Transcript of interview with Jennifer Probst
Jo: Jennifer Probst is a New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of over 60 books across different kinds of romance as well as non-fiction for writers. Her latest book is Write Free. So welcome, Jennifer.
Jennifer: Thanks so much, Joanna. I am kind of fangirling. I'm really excited to be on The Creative Penn podcast. It's kind of a bucket list.
Jo: Aw, that's exciting. I reached out to you after your recent Kickstarter, and we are going to come back to that in a minute. First up, take us back in time.
Tell us a bit more about how you got into writing and publishing.
Jennifer: This one is easy for me. I am one of those rarities. I think that I knew when I was seven that I was going to write. I just didn't know what I was going to write.
At 12 years old, and now this will kind of date me in dinosaur era here, there was no internet, no information on how to be a writer, no connections out there. The only game in town was Writer’s Digest. I would go to my library and pore over Writer’s Digest to learn how to be a writer.
At 12 years old, all I knew was, “Oh, if I want to be a famous writer, I have to write a book.” So I literally sat down at 12 and wrote my first young adult romance. Of course, I was the star, as we all are when we're young, and I have not stopped since.
I always knew, since my dad came home from a library with a box of romance novels and got in trouble with my mum and said, basically, “She's reading everything anyway, just let her read these,” I was gone. From that moment on, I knew that my entire life was going to be about that.
So for me, it wasn't the writing. I have written non-stop since I was 12 years old. For me, it was more about making this a career where I can make money, because I think there was a good 30 years where I wrote without a penny to my name.
So it was more of a different journey for me. It was more about trying to find my way in the writing world, where everybody said it should be just a hobby, and I believed that it should be something more.
Jo: I was literally just going back in my head there to the library I used to go to on my way home from school. Similar, probably early teens, maybe age 14. Going to that section and… I think it was Shirley Conran. Was that Lace? Yes, Lace books. That's literally how we all learned about sex back in the day.
Jennifer: All from books. You didn't need parents, you didn't need friends. Amazing.
Jo: Oh, those were the days. That must have been the eighties, right?
Jennifer: It was the eighties. Yes. Seventies, eighties, but mostly right around in the eighties. Oh, it was so…
Jo: I got lost about then because I was reminiscing. I was also the same one in the library, and people didn't really see what you were reading in the corner of the library. So I think that's quite funny.
Tell us how you got into being an indie.
Jennifer: What had happened is I had this manuscript and it had been shopped around New York for agents and for a bunch of publishers. I kept getting the same exact thing: “I love your voice.”
I mean, Joanna, when you talk about papering your wall with rejections, I lived that. The only thing I can say is that when I got my first rejection, I looked at it as a rite of passage that created me as a writer, rather than taking the perspective that it meant I failed.
To me, perspective is a really big thing in this career, how you look at things. So that really helped me. But after you get like 75 of them, you're like, “I don't know how much longer I can take of this.”
What happened is, it was an interesting story, because I had gone to an RWA conference and I had shopped this everywhere, this book that I just kept coming back to. I kept saying, “I feel like this book could be big.”
There was an indie publisher there. They had just started out, it was an indie publisher called Entangled. A lot of my friends were like, “What about Entangled? Why don't you try more digital things or more indie publishers coming up rather than the big traditional ones?”
Lo and behold, I sent it out. They loved the book. They decided, in February of 2012, to launch it. It was their big debut. They were kind of competing with Harlequin, but it was going to be a new digital line. It was this new cutting-edge thing.
The book went crazy. It went viral. The book was called The Marriage Bargain, and it put me on the map. All of a sudden I was inundated with agents, and the traditional publishers came knocking and they wanted to buy the series. It was everywhere. Then it hit USA Today, and then it spent 26 weeks on The New York Times.
Everybody was like, “Wow, you're this overnight sensation.” And I'm like, “Not really!” That was kind of my leeway into everything. We ended up selling that series to Simon & Schuster because that was the smart move for then, because it kind of blew up and an indie publisher at that time knew it was a lot to take on.
From then on, my goal was always to do both: to have a traditional contract, to work with indie publishers, and to do my own self-pub. I felt, even back then, the more diversified I am, the more control I have. If one bucket goes bad, I have two other buckets.
Jo: Yes, I mean, I always say multiple streams of income. It's so surprising to me that people think that whatever it is that hits big is going to continue.
So you obviously experienced there a massive high point, but it doesn't continue.
You had all those weeks that were amazing, but then it drops off, right?
Jennifer: Oh my goodness, yes. Great story about what happened. So 26 weeks on The New York Times, and it was selling like hotcakes. Then Simon & Schuster took it over and they bumped the price to their usual ebook price, which was, what, $12.99 or something?
So it's going from $2.99. The day that they did it, I slid off all the bestseller lists. They were gone, and I lost a lot of control too. With indies, you have a little bit more control. But again, that kind of funnels me into a completely different kind of setup. Traditional is very different from indie.
What you touched on, I think, is the biggest thing in the industry right now. When things are hot, it feels like forever. I learned a valuable lesson: it doesn't continue. It just doesn't.
Maybe someone like Danielle Steel or some of the other big ones never had to pivot, but I feel like in romance it's very fluid. You have genres hitting big, you have niches hitting big, authors hitting big.
Yes, I see some of them stay. I see Emily Henry still staying—maybe that will never pause—but I think for the majority, they find themselves saying, “Okay, that's done now. What's next?” It can either hit or not hit. Does that make sense to you? Do you feel the same?
Jo: Yes, and I guess it's not just about the book. It's more about the tactic. You mentioned genres, and they do switch a lot in romance, a lot faster than other genres.
In terms of how we do marketing… Now, as we record this, TikTok is still a thing, and we can see maybe generative AI search coming on the horizon and agentic buying.
A decade ago it might have been different, more Facebook ads or whatever. Then before that it might have been something else.
So there's always things changing along the way.
Jennifer: Yes, there definitely is. It is a very oversaturated market.
They talk about, I don't know, 2010 to 2016 maybe, as the gold rush, because that was where you could make a lot of money as an indie. Then we saw the total fallout of so many different things.
I feel like I've gone through so many ups and downs in the industry. I do love it because the longer you're around, the more you learn how to pivot. If you want this career, you learn how to write differently or do whatever you need to do to keep going, in different aspects, with the changes.
To me, that makes the industry exciting. Again, perspective is a big thing. But I have had to take a year to kind of rebuild when I was out of contract with a lot of things. I've had to say, “Okay, what do you see on the horizon now? Where is the new foundation? Where do you wanna restart?”
Sometimes it takes a year or two of, “Maybe I won't be making big income and I cut back,” but then you're back in it, because it takes a while to write a few new books, or write under a pen name, or however you want to pivot your way back into the industry.
Or, like you were saying, diversifying. I did a lot of non-fiction stuff because that's a big calling for me, so I put that into the primary for a while.
I think it's important for authors to maybe not just have one thing. When that one thing goes away, you're scrambling. It's good to have a couple of different things like, “Well, okay, this genre is dead or this thing is dead or this isn't making money. Let me go to this for a little while until I see new things on the horizon.”
Jo: Yes. There's a couple of things I want to come back to. You mentioned a pen name there, and one of the things I'm seeing a lot right now—I mean, it's always gone on, but it seems to be on overdrive—is people doing rapid-release, throwaway pen names.
So there’s a new sub-genre, they write the books really fast, they put them up under whatever pen name, and then when that goes away, they ditch that pen name altogether. Versus growing a name brand more slowly, like I think you and I have done. Under my J.F. Penn fiction brand, I put lots of different sub-genres.
What are your thoughts on this throwaway pen name versus growing a name brand more slowly?
Jennifer: Well, okay, the first thing I'm goign to say is: if that lights people up, if you love the idea of rapid release and just kind of shedding your skin and going on to the next one, I say go for it.
As long as you're not pumping it out with AI so it's a complete AI book, but that's a different topic. I'm not saying using AI tools; I mean a completely AI-written book. That's the difference.
If we're talking about an author going in and, every four weeks, writing a book and stuff like that, I do eventually think that anything in life that disturbs you, you're going to burn out eventually. That is a limited-time kind of thing, I believe.
I don't know how long you can keep doing that and create decent enough books or make a living on it. But again, I really try not to judge, because I am very open to: if that gives you joy and that's working and it brings your family money, go for it.
I have always wanted to be a writer for the long term. I want my work to be my legacy. I don't just pump out books. Every single book is my history. It's a marking of what I thought, what I put out in the world, what my beliefs are, what my story is. It marks different things, and I'm very proud of that. So I want a legacy of quality.
As I got older, in my twenties and thirties, I was able to write books a lot faster. Then I had a family with two kids and I had to slow down a little bit. I also think life sometimes drives your career, and that's okay. If you're taking care of a sick parent or there's illness or whatever, maybe you need to slow down.
I like the idea of a long-term backlist supporting me when I need to take a back seat and not do frontlist things. So that's how I feel.
I will always say: choose a long, organic-growth type of career that will be there for you, where your backlist can support you. I also don't want to trash people who do it differently. If that is how you can do it, if you can write a book in a month and keep doing it and keep it quality, go for it.
Jo: I do have the word “legacy” on my board next to me, but I also have “create a body of work I'm proud of.” I have that next to me, and I have “Have you made art today?” So I think about these things too.
As you say, people feel differently about work, and I will do other work to make faster cash rather than do that with books. But as we said, that's all good.
Interestingly, you mentioned non-fiction there. Write Free is your latest one, but you've got some other writing books. So maybe—
Talk about the difference between non-fiction book income and marketing compared to fiction, and why you added that in.
Jennifer: Yes, it's completely different. I mean, it's two new dinosaurs. I came to writing non-fiction in a very strange way. Literally, I woke up on New Year’s Day and I was on a romance book deadline. I could not do it.
I'll tell you, my brain was filled with passages of teaching writing, of things I wanted to share in my writing career. Because again, I've been writing since I was 12, I've been a non-stop writer for over 30 years.
I got to my computer and I wrote like three chapters of Write Naked (which was the first book). It was just pouring out of me. So I contacted my agent and I said, “Look, I don't know, this is what I want to do. I want to write this non-fiction book.”
She's like, “What are you talking about? You're a romance author. You're on a romance deadline. What do you want me to do with this?” She was so confused.
I said, “Yes, how do you write a non-fiction book proposal?” And she was just like, “This is not good, Jen. What are you doing?”
Anyway, the funny story was, she said, “Just send me chapters.” I mean, God bless her, she's this wonderful agent, but I know she didn't get it.
So I sent her like four chapters of what I was writing and she called me. I'll never forget it. She called me on the phone and she goes, “This is some of the best stuff I have ever read in my life. It's raw and it's truthful, and we've got to find a publisher for this.” And I was like, “Yay.”
What happened was, I believe this was one of the most beautiful full circles in my life: Writer’s Digest actually made me an offer. It was not about the money. I found that non-fiction for me had a much lower advance and a different type of sales.
For me, when I was a kid, that is exactly what I was reading in the library, Writer’s Digest. I would save my allowance to get the magazine. I would say to myself, “One day, maybe I will have a book with Writer’s Digest.”
So for me, it was one of the biggest full-circle moments. I will never forget it. Being published by them was amazing.
Then I thought I was one-and-done, but the book just completely touched so many writers. I have never gotten so many emails: “Thank you for saying the truth,” or “Thank you for being vulnerable.”
Right before it published, I had a panic attack. I told my husband, “Now everybody's going to know that I am a mess and I'm not fabulous and the world is going to know my craziness.”
By being vulnerable about the career, and also that it was specifically for romance authors, it caused a bond. I think it caused some trust. I had been writing about writing for years.
After that, I thought it was one-and-done. Then two or three years later I was like, “No, I have more to say.” So I leaned into my non-fiction. It also gives my fiction brain a rest, because when you're doing non-fiction, you're using a different part of your brain.
It's a way for me to cleanse my palate. I gather more experiences about what I want to share, and then that goes into the next book.
Jo: Yes, I also use the phrase “palate cleanser” for non-fiction versus fiction. I feel like you write one and then you feel like, “Oh, I really need to write the other now.”
Jennifer: Yes! Isn't it wonderful? I love that. I love having the two brains and just giving one a break and totally leaning into it. Again, it's another way of income. It's another way.
I also believe that this industry has given me so much that it is automatic that I want to give back. I just want to give as much as possible back because I'm so passionate about writing and the industry field.
Jo: Well, interestingly though, Writer’s Digest—the publisher who published that magazine and other things—went bankrupt in 2019. You've been in publishing a long time.
It is not uncommon for publishers to go out of business or to get bought. Things happen with publishers, right?
Jennifer: Yes.
Jo: So what then happened?
Jennifer: So Penguin Random House bought it. All the Writer’s Digest authors did not know what they were going to do. Then Penguin Random House bought it and kept Writer’s Digest completely separate, as an imprint under the umbrella.
So Writer’s Digest really hasn't changed. They still have the magazine, they still have books. So it ended up being okay. But what I did do is—because I sold Write Naked and I have no regrets about that, it was the best thing for me to do, to go that route—the second and the third books were self-published.
I decided I'm going to self-publish. That way I have the rights for audio, I have the rights for myself, I can do a whole bunch of different things.
So Write True, the second one, was self-published. Writers Inspiring Writers I paired up with somebody, so we self-published that. And Write Free, my newest one, is self-published. So I've decided to go that route now with my non-fiction.
Jo: Well, as I said, I noticed your Kickstarter. I don't write romance, so I'm not really in that community. I had kind of heard your name before, but then I bought the book and joined the Kickstarter. Then I discovered that you've been doing so much and I was like, “Oh, how, why haven't we connected before?” It's very cool.
So tell us about the Kickstarters you've done and what you know, because you've done, I think, a fiction one as well.
What are your thoughts and tips around Kickstarter?
Jennifer: Yes. When I was taking that year, I found myself kind of… let's just say fired from a lot of different publishers at the time. That was okay because I had contracts that ran out, and when I looked to see, “Okay, do we want to go back?” it just wasn't looking good.
I was like, “Well, I don't want to spend a year if I'm not gonna be making the money anyway.” So I looked at the landscape and I said, “It's time to really pull in and do a lot more things on my own, but I've got to build foundations.” Kickstarter was one of them.
I took a course with Russell Nohelty and Monica Leonelle. They did a big course for Kickstarter, and they were really the ones going around to all the conferences and basically saying, “Hey guys, you're missing out on a lot of publishing opportunities here,” because Kickstarter publishing was getting good.
I took the course because I like to dive into things, but I also want to know the foundation of it. I want to know what I'm doing. I'm not one to just wing it when it comes to tech.
So what happened is, the first one, I had rights coming back from a book. After 10 years, my rights came back. It was an older book and I said, “You know what? I am going to dip my foot in and see what kind of base I can grow there. What can I do?”
I was going to get a new cover, add new scenes, re-release it anyway, right? So I said, “Let's do a Kickstarter for it, because then I can get paid for all of that work.”
It worked out so fantastically. It made just enough for my goal. I knew I didn't want to make a killing; I knew I wanted to make a fund. I made my $5,000, which I thought was wonderful, and I was able to re-release it with a new cover, a large print hardback, and I added some scenes.
I did a 10-year anniversary re-release for my fans. So I made it very fan-friendly, grew my audience, and I was like, “This was great.”
The next year, I did something completely different. I was doing Kindle Vella back in the day. That was where you dropped a chapter at a time. I said, “I want to do this completely different kind of thing.”
It was very not my brand at all. It was very reality TV-ish: young college students living in the city, very sexy, very angsty, love triangles, messy—everything I was not known for.
Again, I was like, “I'm not doing a pen name because this is just me,” and I funnelled my audience. I said, “What I'm going to do is I'm going to start doing a chapter a week through Kindle Vella and make money there. Then when it's done, I'm going to bundle it all up and make a book out of it.”
So I did a year of Kindle Vella. It was the best decision I made because I just did two chapters a week, which I was able to do. By one year I had like 180,000 words. I had two to three books in there.
I did it as a hardback deluxe—the only place you could get it in print. Then Vella closed, or at least it went way down. So I was like, “Great, I'm going to do this Kickstarter for this entire new thing.”
I partnered with a company that helps with special editions, because that was a whole other… oh Joanna, that was a whole other thing you have to go into. Getting the books, getting the art, getting the swag. I felt like I needed some help for that.
Again, I went in, I funded. I did not make a killing on that, but that was okay. I learned some things that I would have changed with my Kickstarter and I also built a new audience for that. I had a lot of extra books that I then sold in my store, and it was another place to make money.
The third Kickstarter I used specifically because I had always wanted to do a writing course. I go all over the world, I do keynotes, I do workshops, I've done books, and I wanted to reach new writers, but I don't travel a lot anymore.
So I came up with the concept that I was going to do my very first course, and it was going to be very personal, kind of like me talking to them almost like in a keynote, like you're in a room with me.
I gathered a whole bunch of stuff and I used Kickstarter to help me A) fund it and B) make myself do it, because it was two years in the making and I always had, “Oh, I've got this other thing to do,” you know how we do that, right? We have big projects.
So I used Kickstarter as a deadline and I decided to launch it in the summer. In addition to that, I took years of my posts from all over. I copied and pasted, did new posts, and I created Write Free, which was a very personal, essay-driven book. I took it all together.
I took a couple of months to do this, filmed the course, and the Kickstarter did better than I had ever imagined. I got quadruple what I wanted, and it literally financed all the video editing, the books, everything that I needed, plus extra.
I feel like I'm growing in Kickstarter. I hope I'm not ranting. I'm trying to go over things that can help people.
Jo: Oh no, that is super useful.
Jennifer: So you don't have to go all in and say, “If it doesn't fund it's over,” or “I need to make $20,000.” There are people making so much money, and there are people that will do a project a year or two projects a year and just get enough to fund a new thing that they want to do. So that's how I've done it.
Jo: I've done quite a few now, and my non-fiction ones have been a lot bigger—I have a big audience there—and my fiction have been all over the place.
What I like about Kickstarter is that you can do these different things.
We can do these special editions. I've just done a sprayed-edge short story collection. Short story collections are not the biggest genre.
Jennifer: Yes. I love short stories too. I've always wanted to do an anthology of all my short stories.
Jo: There you go.
Jennifer: Yes, I love that for your Kickstarter. Love it.
Jo: When I turned 50 earlier this year, I realised the thing that isn't in print is my short stories. They are out there digitally, and that's why I wanted to do it. I feel like Kickstarter is a really good way to do these creative projects.
As you say, you don't have to make a ton of money, but at the end of the day, the definition of success for us, I think for both of us, is just being able to continue doing this, right?
Jennifer: Absolutely. This is funding a creative full-time career, and every single thing that you do with your content is like a funnel. The more funnels that you have, the bigger your base. Especially if you love it. It would be different if I was struggling and thinking, “Do I get an editor job?” I would hate being an editor.
But if you look at something else like, “Oh yes, I could do this and that would light me up, like doing a course—wow, that sounds amazing,” then that's different. It's kind of finding your alternates that also light you up.
Jo: Hmm.
So were there any mistakes in your Kickstarters that you think are worth sharing?
In case people are thinking about it.
Jennifer: Oh my God, yes. So many.
One big thing was that I felt like I was a failure if I didn't make a certain amount of money because my name is pretty well known. It's not like I'm brand new and looking.
One of the big things was that I could not understand and I felt like I was banging my head against the wall about why my newsletter subscribers wouldn't support the Kickstarter. I'm like, “Why aren't you doing this? I'm supposed to have thousands of people that just back.” Your expectations can really mess with you.
Then I started to learn, “Oh my God, my newsletter audience wants nothing to do with my Kickstarter.” Maybe I had a handful. So then I learned that I needed longer tails, like putting it up for pre-order way ahead of time, and also that you can't just announce it in your newsletter and feel like everybody's going to go there.
You need to find your streams, your Kickstarter audience, which includes ads. I had never done ads either and I didn't know how to do that, so I did that all wrong.
I joined the Facebook group for Kickstarter authors. I didn't do that for the first one and then I learned about it. You share backer updates, so every time you go into your audience with a backer update, there's this whole community where you can share with like-minded people with their projects, and you post it under your updates.
It does cross-networking and sharing with a lot of authors in their newsletters. For the Write Free one, I leaned into my networking a lot, using my connections. I used other authors' newsletters and people in the industry to share my Kickstarter. That was better for me than just relying on my own fanbase.
So definitely more networking, more sharing, getting it out on different platforms rather than just doing your own narrow channel. Because a lot of the time, you think your audience will follow you into certain things and they don't, and that needs to be okay.
The other thing was the time and the backend. I think a lot of authors can get super excited about swag. I love that, but I learned that I could have pulled back a little bit and been smarter with my financials. I did things I was passionate about, but I probably spent much more money on swag than I needed to.
So looking at different aspects to make it more efficient. I think each time you do one, you learn what works best.
As usual, I try to be patient with myself. I don't get mad at myself for trying things and failing. I think failing is spectacular because I learn something. I know: do I want to do this again? Do I want to do it differently?
If we weren't so afraid of failingqu “in public”, I think we would do more things. I'm not saying I never think, “Oh my God, that was so embarrassing, I barely funded and this person is getting a hundred thousand.” We're human. We compare.
I have my own reset that I do, but I really try to say, “But no, for me, maybe I'll do this, and if it doesn't work, that's okay.”
Jo: I really like that you shared about the email list there because I feel like too many people have spent years driving people to Kindle or KU, and they have built an email list of readers who like a particular format at a particular price.
Then we are saying, “Oh, now come over here and buy a beautiful hardback that's like ten times the price.”
And we're surprised when nobody does it. Is that what happened?
Jennifer: Exactly.
Also, that list was for a non-fiction project. So I had to funnel where my writers were in my newsletter, and I have mostly readers. So I was like, “Okay…” But I think you're exactly right.
First of all, it's the platform. When you ask anybody to go off a platform, whether it's buy direct at your Shopify store or go to Kickstarter, you are going to lose the majority right there. People are like, “No, I want to click a button from your newsletter and go to a site that I know.”
So you've got that, and you've got to train them. That can take some time. Then you've got this project where people are like, “I don't understand.” Even my mum was like, “I would love to support you, honey, but what the heck is this? Where's the buy button and where's my book?”
My women's fiction books tend to have some older readers who are like, “Hell no, I don't know what this is.” So you have to know your audience. If it's not translating, train them.
I did a couple of videos where I said, “Look, I want to show you how easy this is,” and I showed them directly how to go in and how to back. I did that with Kindle Vella too. I did a video from my newsletter and on social: “Hey, do you not know how to read this chapter? Here's how.” Sometimes there's a barrier.
Like you said, Joanna, if I have a majority that just want sexy contemporary, and I'm dropping angsty, cheating, forbidden love, they're like, “Oh no, that's not for me.” So you have to know whether there's a crossover.
I go into my business with that already baked into my expectations. I don't go in thinking I'm going to make a killing. Then I'm more surprised when it does well, and then I can build it.
Jo: Yes, exactly. Also if you are, like both of us, writing across genres, then you are always going to split your audience. People do not necessarily buy everything because they have their preferences. So I think that's great.
Now we are almost out of time, but this latest book is Write Free. I wondered if you would maybe say—
What does Write Free mean to you, and what might it help the listeners with?
Jennifer: Write Free is an extremely personal book for me, and the title was really important because it goes with Write Naked, Write True, and Write Free. These are the ways that I believe a writer should always show up to the page. Freedom is being able to write your truth in whatever day that is.
You're going to be a different writer when you're young and maybe hormonal and passionate and having love affairs. You're going to write differently when you're a mum with kids in nappies. You're going to write differently when you are maybe in your forties and you're killing your career. Your perspective changes, your life changes.
Write Free is literally a collection of essays all through my 30 years of life. It's very personal. There are essays like, “I'm writing my 53rd book right now,” and essays like, “My kids are in front of SpongeBob and I'm trying to write right now,” and “I got another rejection letter and I don't know how to survive.”
It is literally an imprint of essays that you can dip in and dip out of. It's easy, short, inspirational, and it's just me showing up for my writing life. That's what I wish for everybody: that they can show up for their writing life in the best way that they can at the time, because that changes all the time.
Jo: We can say “write free” because we've got a lot of experience at writing. I feel like when I started writing—I was an IT consultant—I literally couldn't write anything creative. I didn't believe I could.
There'll be people listening who are just like, “Well, Jennifer, I can't write free. I'm not free. My mind is shackled by all these expectations and everything.”
How can they release that and aim for more freedom?
Jennifer: I love that question so much. The thing is, I've spent so many years working on that part. That doesn't come overnight. I think sometimes when you have more clarification of, “Okay, this is really limiting me,” then when you can see where something is limiting you, at least you can look for answers.
My answers came in the form of meditation. Meditation is a very big thing in my life. Changing my perspective. Learning life mottos to help me deal with those kinds of limitations.
Learning that when I write a sex scene, I can't care about my elderly aunt who tells my mother, “Dear God, she ruined the family name.” It is your responsibility to figure out where these limitations are, and then slowly see how you can remove them.
I've been in therapy. I have read hundreds of self-help books. I take meditation courses. I take workshop courses.
I've done CliftonStrengths with Becca Syme. I don't even know if that's therapy, but it feels like therapy to me as a writer. Knowing my personality traits. I've done Enneagram work with Claire Taylor, which has been huge. The more you know yourself and how your brain is showing up for yourself, the more you can grab tools to use.
I wish I could say, “Yes, if everybody meditates 30 minutes a day, you're going to have all blocks removed,” but it's so personal that it's a trick question.
If everybody started today and said, “Where is my biggest limitation?” and be real with yourself, there are answers out there. You just have to go slowly and find them, and then the writing more free will come. I hope that wasn't one of those woo-woo answers, but I really do believe it.
Jo: I agree. It just takes time. Like our writing career, it just takes time. Keep working on it, keep writing.
Jennifer: Yes. And bravery, right? A lot of bravery. Just show up for yourself however you can. If “write free” feels too big, journal for yourself and put it in a locked drawer. Any kind of writing, I think, is therapeutic too.
Jo: Brilliant.
So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online?
Jennifer: The best place to go is my website. I treat it like my home. It's www.JenniferProbst.com.
There is so much on it. Not just books, not just free content and free stories. There's an entire section just for writers. There are videos on there. There are a lot of resources. I keep it up to date and it is the place where you can find me.
Of course I'm everywhere on social media as Author Jennifer Probst. You can find me anywhere. I always tell everybody: I answer my messages, I answer my emails. That is really important to me. So if you heard this podcast and you want to reach out on anything, please do. I will answer.
Jo: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for your time, Jennifer. That was great.
Jennifer: Thanks for having me, Joanna.