Episode Details

Sunday Times bestselling author Emma Gannon on healing burnout through play and joy, trusting your creative intuition over people-pleasing, and what she's learned from self-publishing alongside traditional publishing.

You'll learn

• Why burnout might be healed through play and joy rather than by pushing harder.
• How some books arrive in a month while others take years, and why there's no single right way to write one.
• The case against selling a book before it's written.
• A squirrel-inspired method for gathering raw material and letting a book's themes reveal themselves.
• What to remember when you're tempted to talk yourself out of writing a book.
• When people-pleasing quietly drowns out your creative intuition, and how to hear it again.
• How small, everyday acts of creativity keep the spark alive between big projects.
• What to do on bleak days, and why your younger self might hold the answer.
• Self-publishing from the inside, including the numbers behind one book.
• How judging a major literary prize can stretch you as a reader.

Resources & Links

• 📄 Interview Transcript (unedited)
• Emma's Substack, The Hyphen
• Emma Gannon's website
• Our previous podcast episode with Emma: #089: Emma Gannon — The Success Myth, Substack, Self-Publishing, Productivity Dysmorphia, The Arrival Fallacy, Being A Happy Creative
• A Creative Compass by Emma Gannon
• A Year of Nothing by Emma Gannon
• Table for One by Emma Gannon
• Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert
• City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert
• Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
• How to be Hopeful by Caitlin Moran
• The Pound Project
• Writing in Community — LWS Community Anthology

About Lulu

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