Joanna (J.F.) Penn

My last post explained how having 9010 ebooks downloaded in October left me $80 poorer than when I began. So, this post will cover my event sales. I did two shows, Animate Philly and Nightmare Weekend Raleigh. Six days of total floor time. This resulted in $2781 in sales. My table costs were roughly $1000 since I had parters sharing costs. I sold 95 books. That's about $800 in stock costs. One show was local, no hotel, but the other had about $500 for hotels. I don't worry about meals, figuring I'd be buying food even if I stayed home, and mileage costs get written off at a rate far greater than actual fuel or wear and tear costs, so I don't worry about that either. Still, I only made about $500 more than I spent. Obviously, I'd go broke if this was a typical month. Fortunately, it wasn't. The table costs were higher than average, and while the Animate show was at least mediocre, the Nightmare Weekend show was a train wreck. My table costs for October were greater than the 6 events I've got left on the calendar this year combined! Even if the economy continues to drag, the rest of the year should be fairly profitable. October was a pretty good explanation of why I stopped sweating online sales and transitioned to a schedule heavy with travel and events. You can move a lot of copies online, thousands, tens of thousands, and wind up with almost nothing in your bank account to show for it. Or, you can move a few dozen or a few hundred events at shows every month and actually come out ahead, at least a little. Your mileage may vary based on genre and productivity. If you're cranking out rapid releases in romance, mystery, or litRPG you might be looking at very different numbers than I'm seeing with releasing only one new book each year.

My husband has used AI agents to revive old fonts, ornaments, & cuts from 19th century newspapers. The agents even built an editor where you can create your own invitations/pamphlets/cards using old cuts & fonts. Have been using it for @Quillette invitations already font-revival.com/

My new book, Co-Existence, is out today. It is a guide to how to live & work in a world where AI is sometimes, but not always, better than you. (And, for the release, I worked with Opus 5.5 to make a quite interesting experience for the book's website: co-existence.ai/)

OMG. this is catnip for authors like me! thegalobart.us/products/code… The Codas Gigas inspired my thriller, Crypt of Bone, so this is very cool. Does that make it a valid business expense?

I wrote about the exponential curve of the last 30 months of AI development: oneusefulthing.org/p/30-mont… And I asked Opus 5.5 to create the ultimate response to the test I use for all AI image generation models (make a picture of "an otter on a plane using wifi"), it made this video

There are a lot of things I'm eager to offload to AI because they are useless gruntwork. (I do not want to waste time setting up mailing list landing pages or adding tags to all my books.) That leaves me more time to write posts on X, edit completely indescribable books like my next one that can't be easily categorized and ask too much of readers, and draw with a pencil because I like drawing with pencils. I don't care how you make art, I'm just doing my own thing here. But to the extent that AI will release me from stupid chores so I can do more of that idiosyncratic weird artist stuff, I will use it to the point of squeezing all my usage credits dry every week. >.>

Here in LA with my Moonshot mates! You can watch the Moonshots live event for free tomorrow on this link. Register here: moonshots.com/livestream

I just got the first copies of my new book, Co-Existence (out October 20) & they look great! Also, there is a fun pre-order bonus: if you pre-order, you get a code to an AI interview that will help you figure out how to use your human advantages with AI. co-existence.ai/

I’m listening to The Creative Penn podcast while in Prague, Czech Republic. I’m exploring the Jewish Cemetery in Old Town Prague. Being here has me remembering some of the stories in JF Penn’s Arkane Book series. She tells a great action adventure story with wonderful characters. I was in Budapest exploring old cemeteries last week and felt like I was living in one of her books “A Day in Budapest”. Her writing got me interested in visiting these places. The photo was taken by Andreas Praefcke is shared under CC BY 3.0</a>, via Wikimedia Commons -commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/F… . This link is to her series. jfpennbooks.com/collections/… @thecreativepenn #Prague

AI Native eBook + Audiobook are live today ainativebook.com/ If you’re thinking about how AI will reshape your company, your work, and the future, I hope you’ll give it a read/listen.