Episode 47: Courtney Maum, Author & Writing Coach
Thrilled to be joined by author and publishing expert Courtney Maum! She gives us insight behind her terrific book, Before and After the Book Deal, and talks about the highs and lows of publishing. Tune in for her knowledgable tidbits about marketing, building an online platform, self-publishing, memoir, and more!
Applications are open now until May 1st for Courtney’s writing retreat, Turning Points! Learn more here.
TRANSCRIPT FOR EPISODE 47 WITH COURTNEY MAUM
Mary Kole (00:23):
Hello, everybody. Courtney Maum is here! Friend to writers everywhere, writer herself. Welcome everyone. I have been a huge fan of Courtney's ever since this bad dad showed up on the scene: Before and After the Book Deal, and I love a good subtitle, A Writer's Guide to Finishing, Publishing, Promoting and Surviving Your First Book. And I think that surviving is sort of key there.
Courtney Maum (01:15):
Very key. Hello. Thank you for having me.
Mary Kole (01:18):
Of course. And so this book isn't just, you writing. You actually interviewed a ton of publishing professionals and authors about the various ins and outs of the publishing process. How did you put together that concept?
Courtney Maum (01:44):
Well, basically from starting to publish myself and then having absolutely no idea what I was doing. So I came to the whole publishing thing from a somewhat non-traditional path in that I did go to college, but I studied comparative literature and French translation there. And I didn't really do the writing workshop thing, and MFAs were not on my radar. I lived in France all of my twenties, had no writing friends. So by the time I got my first book deal, I really, I don't want to say I DIY’d it because that wouldn't be giving credit to, I don't know, some amazing teachers who supported me at the high school level, but to a certain extent I was just like, okay, you work really hard, you revise, you revise, you somehow find an agent and you get a book deal and then what? Right? And then nothing. That's your dream and then your dream comes true.
But when it actually happened to me and I got the book deal, literally no one gives you a user manual. They don't do any onboarding. There's no document. They don't present you with a timeline. They just assume that you know what comes next and you know which marks and milestones to hit and to hit with grace and professionalism. And I really had no clue. I had no writing friends and hadn't been kind of raised in the workshop models. So in some ways I was really uncivilized. So Before and After the Book Deal’s my fourth book, but I started gathering material for the book with every consequential publication of my own. And then in the meanwhile, I was making writer friends and we were gabbing over IPAs about all this stuff. And I realized like, oh, I am not alone.
It's not because an uncivilized person, this isn't being taught anywhere. This isn't being taught at the MFA level. This isn't being taught in college. There's only a handful of really good teachers. And in fact, it's sort of taboo. So I thought I'll write the damn manual myself, but obviously it's not going to be a memoir about one white lady's journey to publication. So I interviewed hundreds of people across the literary stratosphere. So not just the original trifecta of like agent, author, publisher, but really I tried to make this as exhaustive as possible. So you'll hear from bookkeepers, you'll hear from people who do voiceovers for audiobooks, you'll hear from audiobook companies, film scouts, book scouts, translators, everyone you could possibly meet in both the high point of your career and then the low points. And you're always going to have both. So it's like an entertaining roller coaster where we have amazing moments and then really dark moments.
Mary Kole (04:46):
Nobody likes to even hear or imagine the dark moments. But actually, so I've started recording a class, I'm calling it Thriving Careers because it's a little aspirational. We want to be thriving. And I'm talking with my agent, John Cusick from Folio Literary, and this is exactly the kind of stuff that we are covering, which is what comes next, how to be an effective client, how to weather those hills and valleys. You say with grace, that is a lovely idea, but he was saying to me during one of the modules that you are partnering with a publisher to try and make money and a product out of your creative work. And it's kind of a weird dissonance because we have the art, we have the commerce, we have a power imbalance with you coming into, in some cases, big multi-national business where you are just one facet, I don't want to say cog in the machine, but sometimes it can feel like that. And so film scouts, most people do not know what a scout is in the publishing ecosystem.
Courtney Maum (06:05):
Yep. No, exactly. Yeah. And there's a language, especially if you haven't worked in corporate America. And even at the indie level, most of the independent publishers have corporate backers. So at most publishers you will be engaging in a kind of corporate speak and corporate etiquette, and there's a hierarchy to emailing who you cc, who you bcc, who you don't bother. And if you've been a barista, which I'm not saying lightly, I was a barista, right? For a long time I was a waitress. By the time I got my first book deal, I was engaged in freelancing for corporate America. So I had a little bit of sense of the language, but if it had hit just a couple of years earlier, I would've had no idea. I would've thought like I'll just email the whole company. So yeah, I'm glad that you're having those conversations, making them public. It's so important.
Mary Kole (07:13):
Well, a lot of creatives were called to the creative fields to get away from corporate speak and bcc-ing.
Courtney Maum (07:23):
Well, then don't publish because I don't know if you are going to get published and distributed by a traditional publisher, you will have to kind of brush your hair, clean up a little bit and enter, not all the time, but a little bit. You'll be in and out of the corporate world.
Mary Kole (07:47):
In and out of those spaces and conversations.
Courtney Maum (07:49):
And it's fine. And there's a lot of upsides to this. I want to be clear. The chain of command is quite, once you understand it, you know who to go to with what, and things get done. And it's generally very efficient. It's better than being in an anarchy, but for some people it can be a bit shocking. The preparation for publishing a book is not the most artistic part. It's not the artistic part. It's deadlines, it's spreadsheets, it's plans, it's hitting deliverables and all that stuff.
Mary Kole (08:27):
Deliverables.
Courtney Maum (08:28):
Deliverables. There you go. There's the lingo.
Mary Kole (08:33):
And to your point about practical discussions being sort of anathema in writing workshop, in MFA programs, that's something that really soured me on my own MFA experience because I was interested in the business. I was very, very curious about how the sausage got made and everybody else wanted to be in the creative cocoon.
Courtney Maum (08:59):
Right? And there's a lot of, I think this is starting to change, and one of the reasons it's starting to change is because there's so few jobs post-MFA, actual jobs, and especially in academia that we can't, it's just so classist and elitist for these institutions and teachers to not be educating on the financial literacy and pragmatic tips for making a sustainable life in publishing. But yeah, I do think it's starting to change, but it has been taboo. And I hear a lot of people, I get pushback even from some of my own friends and colleagues, don't you ever feel like you're overburdening your students with too much knowledge about the market? And again, I'm not attached to an institution, I teach under my own name or brand or whatever you want to call it, but I turn it around to them and I say, I don't know. Don't you think you're doing them a disservice?
By, I don't want to say giving them false hope, but you're basically putting a stool together that only has two legs. It's going to collapse. You have to give it the third leg of the financial literacy just so they know what they're getting into. And if they want to choose to ignore it and not get a day job or quit their day job or whatever it is, and believe that a million-dollar book deal’s coming their way, fine, but someone please at least sit them down and let them know that a million-dollar book deal …
Mary Kole (10:32):
And then, nobody tells you, there is no just memo out there that says you should really put 35% of that, 85% aside for taxes.
Courtney Maum (10:45):
And it's not an annual salary, whatever, your one fourth installment that's coming, you're not getting that every year and you're not earning that out. You're just not. You’re not getting royalties on that. And a lot of people haven't been told that they have to follow up the book with another book. So they just sit there buying a yacht or whatever. But most people, these billion dollar book deals, if you're not a celebrity, they are few and far, few and far between. And guess what? Most of them don't work so well. So your next book deal, they might be like, hey, based on sales, it's going to be $200,000 book deal, which is still, that's real money. But this is such a mistake that I see all the time with people because the media coverage in the New York Times or whatever is always about this person got a seven-figure book deal, and then there was a bidding war for the film rights and they got a three book—and that's great. But behind that, extremely fortunate and probably hardworking person, there's 3000 other people who got a $20,000 book deal and they're psyched and their publishers believe in and they're going to have a positive experience, but they're adjunct, doing whatever. They're bartending, they're cobbling their lives together. So it's fine to reach for the stars, but reach for the stars while you have another sustainable income stream. Don't wait for your not yet tangible book deal to pay your bills, please.
Mary Kole (12:32):
Yeah. Don't spend money you don't have. But also …
Courtney Maum (12:35):
Especially at this economy.
Mary Kole (12:38):
Let's not even go there. I know we're going there, but …
Courtney Maum (12:42):
Yeah, I'm fine with that. Disassociation is great.
Mary Kole (12:48):
Exactly. That's why we write fiction. So I have always believed, yes, would I love a seven figure book deal? Absolutely.
Courtney Maum (12:57):
Sure.
Mary Kole (12:59):
That being said, because of the high hopes for that and the pressure on the publisher and the offer, if anything goes wrong and that book sells, maybe it sells 10,000 copies, which is great if your advance was $20,000, but if your advance was $1 million and the book sells 10,000 copies, you’re never going to work in this town again basically. Right?
Courtney Maum (13:28):
Well, I mean, I wouldn't say that especially we're talking in 2025, and certainly if you got a million dollar book, 10,000 copies, that's a big bummer. But selling 10,000 copies is the new 30,000. That's actually a hard number to reach. I have a lot of friends who got five figure book deals in the last several years who did not break the 2000 unit mark. So I think it's also important to talk about how few units most lead title authors are moving. Now, this is not a reality that's desired by the publishers or something they're excited about, but with the continuing impingement on just media real estate where we can get book coverage or build book buzz, and it's becoming worse and worse under the Trump administration, it's so hard to get people to even know about books that are coming out and then getting them to buy it is a herculean task. I think people really underestimate, it's not their fault that people don't talk, authors don't talk enough about how hard it is to just sell a single book at an event. Even if you have something hot, it's so hard. So moving 10,000 copies is actually really laudable and should be celebrated these days. Now if you get a massive book deal, yeah, the publisher's not going to be psyched with those numbers, but, you know.
Mary Kole (15:06):
Yeah, I do think marketing, and this is definitely something that I wanted to ask you about. So I do think marketing is, it doesn't come naturally to writers, to some writers, and there is that dissonance again between art and commerce. But to your point, people also don't realize how difficult it is to get an online following to concur. I think that's kind of a distortion field where if you have 50,000 Instagram followers, that could make you more attractive to a publisher. But I think it's something like maybe 1% of anyone who has followed you, who has expressed interest in you, actually takes their wallet out.
Courtney Maum (15:58):
Oh my gosh. Yeah. And this is, I'm hoping that bubble will burst too, because the publishers who, first of all, it's so behind the times to demand that authors have a robust following on specifically Twitter and Facebook. So many people are trying to, rightly so in my opinion, move away from Meta because it doesn't align with many people's political values, especially the values of artists. You're going to team up with the very people who are trying to limit your speech. So that's out of step with the times. But also it's rad if you have 20,000 Instagram followers, but just like you said, it's 2% to maybe 6% if you're really killing it and have some wildly engaged platform, that's the amount of people who will actually pre-order your book. And that by the way, is not the amount of people, that percentage of people are not going to show up to your book events, cause they’re not all in one place.
So as impressive as big numbers can be sometimes, and you have to work hard to convince your publisher of this, but sometimes if you're like, I don't know, huge in your church community or I don't know, you're part of a professional association of doctors and you've just written a memoir and it's full of thousands of people who aren't literary but are so psyched for you that they're thrilled to buy your book. Or an example I use really often is I have a friend in my town who's a cookbook author and he's hugely influential in the knitting world, like the online knitting world. And every time he has a book, I mean knitting and cooking kind of goes together, but still, people buy numerous copies of his book because they've helped him so much with a certain, I don't have the lingo, but a certain design in knitting or something. Now, he doesn't have an impressive following online, TikTok, whatever, he's not even there. But his books become New York Times bestsellers because people show up because he helps them in a non-literary way. So the real life connections matter. But unfortunately, authors have been kind of shamed into feeling that the only channels that matter are TikTok, Instagram, Substack, whatever the hell—
Mary Kole (18:31):
Did you call it Insta-cram?
Courtney Maum (18:32):
Did I?
Mary Kole (18:32):
Or was that an accident because I love it accident, but let's call it Insta-cram. I like that Insta-cram because you just need to cram as much content out there.
Courtney Maum (18:42):
But I would counsel people like you should be putting your energy into one of these places. For me, it’s Substack. You're not going to get very far in today's publishing marketplace if you're not quite active in building your, I don't know, content or whatever in one kind of social media place. But it's totally fine to meanwhile have a life. Maybe you run a tremendously influential book club or reading series or speaker series, or you work at a book shop. Don't let them tell you that your real life self doesn't matter and just your online self matters because that's not true. And in fact, if you're only popular online and you're just terrible in person and can't speak in person and have never been to a bookshop and none of the bookstores know you …
Your book tour is not going to go very well and no one will come out to see you and actually purchase the book. So it really is a holistic thing. It takes time. It takes so long and it's so upsetting and silly and impossible for the advice that so many gatekeepers are giving at conferences, whatever writer's conference or AWP panels, put your memoir down and build your Substack. Don’t start querying until you have 20,000 followers on whatever the hell on Instagram. It takes time. I mean, it's taken me like 15 years of solid, solid, solid work to get it at what I do think I have now, which is a platform, but I am about to have a sixth book.
This was not an overnight thing. And the reason it's real and working and that I'm lucky enough to be invited on podcasts like this one is because I've just been at it for so long and organically building it, and I know that the time thing's not encouraging news for people who are being told on submission, you have two weeks, make this happen. But I hope that there's some solace in knowing that you could try to do whatever you're trying to do quickly, but also have a separate lane where you're just kind of keeping your head down and working hard, eyes on the prize, marathon, not a sprint. And then you can sprint, you can divide yourself into two and sprint somewhere else. I don't know.
Mary Kole (21:33):
So what are some of the things that writers find themselves doing maybe on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, whatever that are sort these generative activities that are not writing? There’s marketing, writing a newsletter? What are just some of the options and what tends to have better ROI, corporate speak, meaning return on investment, in what you found?
Courtney Maum (22:05):
Well, I mean that answer would be completely specific to what each person's doing and what they're trying to build, but basically in no particular order, things that I think have ROI are working on your literary citizenship. So to me that would mean making sure, let's start with IRL literary citizenship, in-person efforts to build your literary citizenship. So to me, that would mean making sure that you're actually getting out to in-person book events, which the turnout is always so low and it's really an act of investment in your own future as an author. Go out to events. It doesn't have to be a friend, just whether it's your library, local bookshop, get out there, sit at the events, buy a book, make sure that you are spending money every month on books, preferably not from Amazon, but from an indie bookstore, Bookshop.org. If you live in the middle of nowhere is better than giving money to Jeff Bezos who does not need it.
And try to subscribe to at least one or two literary magazines per year. You can switch them up. And again, I understand not everyone has these resources, but it is kind of a good faith investment because way down the road, or perhaps not very far down the road, you're going to ask people to buy your $40 hardcover. So you kind of got to put your money where you want other people to put their money. And then the online literary citizenship would be participating in Zooms, maybe signing up for some classes or accountability groups, and then engaging with people online. If you've read a book that you love, make sure you're always leaving it five star reviews on Goodreads and Amazon, I know I just cursed Amazon, but giving positive reviews—
Mary Kole (23:58)
Really, it's a necessary evil.
Courtney Maum (24:01)
If you have nothing nice to say, please do not say it because you don't want to be in a situation where later you're asked for a blurb or something from someone's book that you desecrated.
And then moving on from literary citizenship. Oh yeah. And then engaging with people's social media, leaving them nice comments, keeping things positive. Frankly, you might as well keep, you should really be keeping things positive. And then beyond that, if you're doing memoir, if you're writing memoir and nonfiction, I think it does make sense to consider whether a newsletter is a good vehicle for you because you can start to build out the messages and kind of beats like journalistic beats that really matter to you. And if you're nowhere near having a book deal, then you're in such a good place to start the newsletter and build it over time so that hopefully by the time you do have a book deal, one of the reasons you have the book deal is because you have this really robust newsletter.
For fiction writers, make sure that you're using hashtags in your post to highlight the things and the themes you care about and the communities you want to be a part of. It's always a good idea to be involved in online chat communities or online communities like there's binders of YA writers, binders of romance writers, all those things. And then what else can you be doing? I mean, making a goal once a month or something to send a fan letter to, not a shady one with cut outs of your face, but just a nice letter to an author you really like is good. And then once a quarter, that might be a bit ambitious for some people that you might have to move it to once or twice a year, try to place something somewhere. So it's a short story. It's flash if you're in fiction land, but especially if you're in memoir and nonfiction, you really should be trying to hit one published piece per quarter because you're just not going to have a chance in hell if you're trying to get an agent for a memoir or a nonfiction book and you have no bylines to support the book.
They have to see in nonfiction land that you've successfully started placing pieces about this topic in outlets online or in print, whatever. So make sure you're building up your byline. You don't want to abandon byline building to the exclusion of working on your manuscripts. And then just if you want to be out there in the world, I know big conferences like AWP can be expensive. They're quite difficult to get to for people who have mobility issues and stuff, but there's lots of other conferences all around the country if you're in the United States. Try to push yourself slightly out of your comfort zone and actually meet people in person and support them in person. And little by little you get there, maybe you subscribe to a couple Substacks that are really helpful and educational about where you're trying to go. And little by little you build your world. And this stuff is fun, by the way. Most of this stuff I've mentioned, I think it's fun. Even going to bad readings is satisfying and will teach you how to not give a bad reading.
Mary Kole (27:54):
Yeah, I really want to ask about memoir. So I think let's just do it because in addition to nonfiction, you have novels, you have a memoir. And it can be, especially when we're talking about platform and numbers and all of that. So let's say you're not a celebrity, right? Because they tend to get memoirs pretty easily.
Courtney Maum (28:22):
No problemo.
Mary Kole (28:23):
No problem. Ghostwrite it, it'll be out in a flash.
Courtney Maum (28:28):
Yep. And you'll have sales built in.
Mary Kole (28:29):
And you'll have sales. So that kind of, so barring celebrity status, we have maybe only a couple of ways to sort of justify selling a memoir project. And of course, everybody lives a life, they care about it. But you're asking somebody to pay $40 to read a very tightly focused thematic take of your life story, not the entire cradle to the present moment. And that tends to either happen if you have some amazing Eat, Pray, Love, like high concept, global scale life experience. Hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, I think we all know what I'm talking about. Or you are bringing so much reflection or insight or voice or something to your experiences that they go, while they are very specific, they almost balloon into something universal that readers will take something from. But when a lot of people set out to write a memoir, they have the source material, they don't yet know that when they go knocking on publishing's door, it's going to be kind of a, well, who the hell are you?
Courtney Maum (29:52):
Yeah, well, who the hell are you and why should strangers care? So the problem that a lot of memoirists are blind to or people who are writing memoirs are blind to is that their catharsis is not going to get them a book deal. A lot of the mistakes that, I don't know, I want to say beginning memoirists encounter, especially if it's their first book, my memoir was my fifth book, they don't know yet how to write a book for a reader. They're writing it first for themselves …
Mary Kole (30:39):
To metabolize.
Courtney Maum (30:42):
Maybe for family—metabolize. And then it takes a tremendous amount of not just craft, but experience in publishing, to understand how to meet a reader halfway. So the problem—I’ll push back a little bit on something you said about memoirs being kind of not an autobiography, not cradle to grave obviously, but a tight narrative experience. And in fact, there's so many different kind of narratives, hybrid, memoir-plus, braided essays, micro novella length on and on.
But the biggest mistake I see totally irrelevant of the format and structure that one has chosen, and also partner like whether you're aiming for big five or indie or micro-press or self-publishing or hybrid, whatever the heck, a lot of the people I work with have only written their personal tale. The thing that gives you a chance in hell of getting published is when you combine the personal and the universal. So the personal is honestly, in the books that perform super well right now is maybe 30% and the rest will be some larger universal thing that has an educational component. So for example, if we look at a bestseller that wasn't too too long ago Crying in H Mart, that was such a big hit, and maybe that's not the best example because she is kind of a rockstar, but whatever. I've mentioned it—by rockstar, I mean literally a performing musician who had kind of a built-in audience. But let's just run with that example anyway.
So that's a book where the personal narrative is already out the gate, something that a lot of people can relate to because it involves grief. So you have a young woman whose Korean mother is dying of breast cancer, and it's pretty clear early on in the book that this is fatal. But what's interesting about the book is when it opens, the mother's still alive. OK. So the narrator trying to grapple with how am I going to be processing this while my mother's alive but dying, decides that what she'll do with her mom is learn however many of her favorite Korean recipes and learn to make them herself, and that will carry on her mother's legacy.
So here we have a perfect example of what I call the AB timeline. The A is the personal, and then the B is this educational universal component where we get all these behind the scenes, we're shopping at H Mart, which is this Korean market. We're getting hard to find ingredients. We're kind of messing up in the kitchen, we're making things, we're having friends over. So we almost get a narrative and a cookbook all in one.
With my memoir, The Year of the Horses, it started out as only personal, and then this happened, and then this happened, then this happened. But I was smart enough to realize like, oh, well, this is a diary. This won't interest anyone. So then when it was published, it had morphed into the AB. So the A was my literal journey out of depression on horseback, how turning to horses as a last-ditch attempt to get me out of a really severe depression worked. But then the rest, the 70%, 60% is a historical overview of women's relationship with horses since the dawn of time and how in the last few centuries, the patriarchy has really tried to tame both parties, both horses and women. And so there's tons of interesting factoids, not just peppered throughout, but entire chapters devoted to looking at the invention of the side saddle, which was to protect women’s hymens when they were delivered to their husbands. There weren't trains, there were no cars. And the ladies back in the middle ages were arriving with their hymens not intact, which the husband-to-be, the old man was like, no, thank you. This woman's not a virgin. But in fact, it was just she'd been traveling for hundreds of miles on this horrible wooden saddle. I actually have, you can go to my website under classes, and I have a class through Domestika that teaches, straight up teaches the AB timeline to give people a chance in hell of not just getting representation, but also building out a convincing memoir proposal. Because most nonfiction and memoirs now, they are requesting proposals. So yeah.
Mary Kole (35:43):
I've heard a lot of debut memoirs selling as complete manuscripts.
Courtney Maum (35:50):
Oh yeah. I mean, this is the delight of our industry right now is that they want both. With memoir, especially if it's more narrative kind of straight up, not an anthology or whatever, they will want to see a completed manuscript, especially if you are a debut. Cause they’re like can you write? What proof do I have that you can write? But they're also going to ask for a proposal. Now you can say no, you can say, what kind of unpaid labor hell is this? But just know that a lot of people are preparing both and prepared to send both. Again, you can push back on that, and I invite people to do so. This is ludicrous that we need to have both. But the proposal has become, and I understand it's become a useful tool to give the agent and later the editor, architectural plans for what the book will be like without getting in the weeds, and it allows them to kind of weigh in in a manner that's quicker and more expedient than editing at the line level, which will happen later. But yeah, so yeah, you might be asked for both.
Mary Kole (37:07):
Yeah, I really like the AB method because my thinking about any kind of nonfiction, including memoir, which is creative nonfiction, narrative nonfiction, those are terms that we use, is that when somebody shows up to a nonfiction book, the implied question, even if the audience member, the reader isn't aware of it, is what's in this for me?
Courtney Maum (37:35):
Yes, exactly.
Mary Kole (37:36):
What am I going to get out of this? Sure, I may not have treated depression with horses, but maybe I'm either really into horses or I'm looking for some kind of human triumph to kind of kickstart my own.
Courtney Maum (37:54):
Yeah. In my book, what I was aiming for was for the readers to prioritize joy in middle age, whatever that looked like for them, and kind of do a call to arms to people to reclaim childhood passions and bring them back into their adult life. So that was sort of my quest. That was my answer to what's in this for me was like, okay, cool. Some cool knowledge and factoids about horses that many, many people wouldn't have been aware of before. But mostly just a sisterhood thing of especially for people who are mothers or caretakers, like, hey, maybe let's take care of ourselves a little bit and prioritize our own joy so that we can show up for other people, not as an empty, exhausted vessel, but as someone who is reignited—
Mary Kole (38:52):
Hey, I’m offended. I feel very called out right now. So given all of this and given the sobering reality that we're talking about, I mean, what gets you going? What gases up your writing and publishing tank?
Courtney Maum (39:07):
Well, I mean, in terms of my own work, I can speak to that. But more importantly, in terms of other people, what I think is really awesome is that there's so many cons to the digital culture, but for writers, so many pros, and what I think is incredible is that if you're hearing all these no’s from agents and editors about whatever, oh, your subject's too niche, we can't possibly imagine a path to market. I don't know who would buy this or whatever, or you don't have a platform, call us back or email us again when you have 40,000 people on the trash dumpster fire that is Twitter.
Mary Kole (39:53):
I have people in the comments that are saying maybe Bluesky is viable.
Courtney Maum (39:59):
Sure, Bluesky. But publishing hasn't moved there yet. Yeah, they're very behind the times, but whatever it is, what's awesome is that you can just say yes to yourself. Now, often you'll need some resources like some cold hard cash, but I have these amazing women, especially women in my life, like Alle Mudrick, who wrote this astonishingly beautiful memoir, I just blurbed called The Blue Hour about extreme birth trauma and infant mortality. And so all the publishers were kind of like, this is a bummer. And she's like, cool, I'm in all these forums with hundreds and thousands of women around the world and they want to read it. So I'm going to form my own damn publishing company and with someone else, and it's called Third Rail Press, and they are specifically looking for the stories of women coming out of trauma, the kind of stories that all the publishers are saying they don't want and they're not looking for.
And then I think they're so exciting that self-publishing does not really have a taboo anymore because especially with the low amount of units, my friends that I mentioned who are getting, let's say 160,000 bucks as an advance. So that's rad. That's really rad. That's real money. And then they have a lead title and they're moving 2000 units. Okay, well, they're never going to earn out and get royalties. Their publisher's probably going to not be super psyched to partner with them on their next book. They kind of feel like crap. And I get there's an ego component to being traditionally published, but especially for people in memoir and nonfiction who might not even get that traditional book deal. Well, why the hell not? If the big five for a lot of people, they're only moving 2-3000 copies, well, why the hell not self-publish and move 5,000? And you get to keep almost 100%?
Mary Kole (41:54):
70% versus 12 and a half, let’s say!
Courtney Maum (41: 57):
If you're lucky, not by the time you've paid the IRS and shipping costs, you're more at six or 7%, frankly, and you're doing all the work. You're doing all the work. I mean, I love all of my publishers, but it's me. The hustle is me, my Substack, no one else is writing my Substack. No one else is writing my emails. No one else is going to the parties and talking to people. I'm giving the lectures and I'm making 7% off of the copies sold. And for the moment, like, okay, I'm going to keep in this game, but I don't have the power of a Stephen King, but I am really starting to loudly say that royalty rates need to be changed for traditionally published book authors and/or give us health insurance, at least for the two year journey that we are partnering with Penguin Random House or whoever to get our books out. Give us something. If you're not going to change the royalty rate, this is just not, it's quite exploitative.
Mary Kole (43:09):
I don't disagree with you, and I've been in the publishing industry also like 15 years, right? It’s been a slog, and I see a lot of opportunity for growth in the publishing business model. For example, maybe we don't do such blockbuster advances, but if we acquire less and pour more resources on those books, I have a feeling publishing is going to get more white and male, but are we really uplifting the voices that we do acquire if we're spread so thin in terms of marketing and publicity resources, all of this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I do think that today's authors are publishing in periodicals. Maybe they partner with a small press for a specific project, maybe they self-publish a specific project. And to go back to the image of the stool, if you just count on your publisher to be like the old GE where you work there for 35 years and then you retire and you get a nice pension, that sort of job security, if you will, is not available anymore except for the select few. And so it's up to you to put more legs on your stool, and not every project will have the same path to market. And that could change even between one book and the next.
Courtney Maum (44:40):
Totally. And I'm a good model of that because my first two books, my first two novels were with Big Five, and then I pivoted and I worked with indies for three books, and then my next novel is back with the Big Five. But the irony of having gatekeepers say build a platform, build a platform, is that now that I have a platform, which I actually just did, my publishers have been amazing, and they never forced anything on me, but I have it now. So guess what? If I write another craft book, I will be self-publishing it.
Craft book, not a novel, but a craft book because I have a big following on Before and After the Book Deal. I don't need the publisher to connect my craft book to my audience anymore. I can do it myself. So I think you really will start to see, especially the people who have big newsletters, big Instagram followings, big on Bluesky, whatever the heck it is, a YouTube cooking channel, whatever the heck … at a certain, they'll start to be savvy. Like this book, I really need traditional publishing distribution help with the media and all that stuff. But this one I'm going to take on a lecture circuit with me and I'm going to self-publish it, and who gives a hoot? My readers, as long as they're getting the book from somewhere, do they really care who it's published with? Most people aren't aware of who a book is published with. Right?
Mary Kole (46:12):
Yeah. I have one traditionally published writing reference guide, and since 2023, I’ve self-published 7 others just by myself, because Writer’s Digest books got gobbled up by Penguin Random House. And when the watering hole dries up, you just stand there hoping it'll —
Courtney Maum (46:35):
Yeah. And again, I just think that's really exciting. How many people now, and again, you do need, I would say if you have up to $10,000, you're going to be golden. I think you could do a lot with $2,000. You can band together with other people. You can start a fundraiser. There's so many ways down to get your dream off the ground, and frankly, the traditional publishing path is not for everyone. A lot of people think that everyone wants it, but when you really go through it, especially at the big five level, it takes an amount of stamina, organization, time management, event management skills, and perpetual presence and activity on social media that some people, number one, just don't want to do this or don't have it in them, or they're at a time of life where they're taking care of a sick parent and can't show up in that way. So how wonderful that there's all these other paths and we don't have to stay on them forever. We can kind of bounce back and forth. I think that's really, really empowering. And that was not the case when I started publishing. When I started publishing, self-publishing was the kiss of death. It was the most embarrassing thing you could admit. And I’ve self-published, I should mention that. I self-published a collection of short stories when I was in my twenties, and I thought it was awesome thing to do, not an awesome book.
Mary Kole (48:07):
It was a moment in time.
Courtney Maum (48:10):
It was rad. I just think it's great. If everyone says no to you, find a way to say yes to yourself and move on toward your dream. It's fine.
Mary Kole (48:22):
I have been telling people for a very long time that you can only control what you can control.
Courtney Maum (48:31):
Which is not very much.
Mary Kole (48:32):
Which means your output, the marketing activity that you can sort of hold your nose and do if you're not naturally marketing minded, you cannot control what the market does. You cannot control how your books will sell despite your best efforts. You cannot control what gatekeepers think is trendy right now. One day you might get an email, your editor took a promotion and left for another house.
Courtney Maum (49:00):
Totally.
Mary Kole (49:01):
So really, when I talk to writers about developing a career, I'm talking to them not about an individual project. You are the project, right, and you have so many things that you could be doing and so many different avenues that are open to you. So exactly. Somebody's going to say no to me. I'm going to go over here.
Courtney Maum (49:28):
Yeah, I think it's great. I think it's exciting. People should be proud of all these channels we have to make our dreams come true without a gatekeeper. It's really wonderful. We should take advantage of that.
Mary Kole (49:46):
But it is hard. There are highs and lows. And again, I will just shout this out. [Before and After the Book Deal] is just the amount of conversation and insight that has clearly gone into this book and that if you haven't read it, or even if you have, it's probably worth a reread because they're just little nuggets, little golden nuggets on every page. Such an amazing resource. And you teach, you have classes?
Courtney Maum (50:17):
Well thank you very much. Yeah, I created a Substack newsletter based on Before and After the Book Deal called Before and After the Book Deal and have a really big, we have 40,000 people strong community of writers. We're just having really candid conversations about writing and making a financial living every week. Tons of craft advice, really. I love it. It's very active. And through my website, I have developed online classes. And then every year in the third week of October, I run a in-person writing workshop called Turning Points. The applications are open until May 1st, and that's a very specific form of programming I developed, which is directly a reaction against the traditional writing workshop model, which I have a lot of problems with. So it's totally different from the way that most writing workshops are run in that it's positive and optimistic and solutions-focused, and it's all based around the writer's goals instead of the participant's desires for what the writer's goal should be.
So we're having a really good time at Turning Points, and it's on a gorgeous, massive ranch in the middle of nowhere New Mexico. It's pretty magical.
Mary Kole (51:45):
I'm going to apply. May 1st.
Courtney Maum (51:47):
Yeah, it's coming up. It is an elevated price point, which that is what it is. We have two partial scholarships this year, but it's worth it. We have a private chef for every single meal. It’s fancy, but you get a lot for your money. I do coaching with the participants leading up to it, and then you become part of an alumni community with a Slack channel and monthly Zooms, meetups, and we offer tons of community support for everyone that comes through the workshop. So it's pretty rad. I'm really proud of it and just honored by the amazing people that come through. Yeah.
Mary Kole (52:28):
Courtney Maum, you are keeping it real and a delight. Thank you so much for talking to us.
Courtney Maum (52:33):
Thank you for having me.
Mary Kole (52:35):
Of course. Our absolute pleasure.
Courtney Maum (52:37):
Good luck everyone out there. Keep the faith, keep writing.
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