London Writers' Salon

#214: Emma Gannon — Finding Your Creative Compass, Letting Go of People-Pleasing, Redefining Success, and Owning Your Work Through Self-Publishing

Episode Summary

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.

Episode Notes

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

If you're self-publishing a book, Lulu now offers a Direct Buy Button that enables you to sell direct to your reader through a simple code. There's no cost to using it and it makes it easier to sell books directly from anywhere: your newsletter, social profile, website or podcast - and you don't have to worry about shipping or taxes. For more information head to lulu.com.

In Partnership with Discoveries 2027

This episode was recorded in partnership with Discoveries 2027, the Women's Prize Trust's writer development programme for unagented and unpublished women writers. Discoveries is designed to empower new voices, unlock potential, build confidence, and increase writers' skills and knowledge.

Submissions for Discoveries 2027 opened Tuesday, September 15. Submit here.

About Emma Gannon

Emma Gannon is the Sunday Times bestselling author of nine books, including A Year of Nothing and OLIVE, which was nominated for the Dublin Literary Award. Her second novel, Table for One (2025), was selected as People magazine's 'Fiction of the Week.'

Emma also writes one of the UK's most popular Substack newsletters, The Hyphen, which has thousands of paid subscribers. In addition to her writing, she hosts creativity retreats around the world and served as a judge for the 2025 Women's Prize for Non-Fiction. Her latest book is A Creative Compass: Finding Your Way to a Creative Life.