Courtney Maum’s latest book, Before and After the Book Deal: A Writer’s Guide to Finishing, Publishing, Promoting and Surviving Your First Book, is the new writer’s bible. Filled with humor, wisdom, and input from some of your favorite writers from across literary genres, Maum created this invaluable resource filled with tips on the writing and publishing trade to help you make a sustainable career as a writer. She discusses literally everything from killing your inner perfectionist to developing your voice, making money as a writer to MFA programs, revisions to prepublication, specifics of book deals to financial planning and even emotional support like dealing with disappointments and jealousy.
I spoke with Courtney over the phone where we had a wonderful conversation on the creation of this book, the publishing industry, and figuring out our own unique definition of success.
Kailey Brennan: I’m so excited about your book, Before and After the Book Deal. It’s going to help so many writers. I’m grateful to have a book like this because the idea of getting published, during and after just seems so elusive.
Courtney Maum: It’s not deemed appropriate to talk about. Writers are sort of socialized and educated both to hope for publication, right? Whether it’s a publication in a notable magazine or getting a book deal, but the buck stops there. A lot of the people I interviewed, especially MFA students, said that they’d never had a teacher talk to them about money. Especially, the lack of money if they were going to try to teach. In my experience and most people’s experience, you get the book deal and then you go from being a writer who is allowed to vent on social media or in a social gathering with friends to complain or express fear and doubt, to becoming part of this sort of PR machine where you’re supposed to be hashtag grateful all the time. And it is a tremendous privilege, but it’s really hard. It’s like really, really hard. It’s incredibly unstable and nobody talks about it.
KB: Did you have one moment that sparked the idea to write this book?
CM: I did have— what are we calling it an “aha moment?” —when I was on tour for my first book. I was really lucky. I had a lot of support from my publisher. They toured me nationally for my debut book—that’s unusual. When you have a publisher who’s footing the bill for your airplane trips and putting you in nice hotels, I just assumed, okay, well I’m going to go to these events, there’ll be pack and I’ll sell a lot of books. And I thought a “lot of books” would be like 40. Instead, I was going to these events that had like five or seven people and selling maybe five books a night. And I just thought, Oh my God, is it me? Am I like the world’s biggest disappointment? This is so embarrassing. Maybe I shouldn’t even express this. Is this normal? I had no idea because what you see on social media is people lead you to believe that it’s packed houses all the time. And so during that tour, I started penning an article that eventually was published on Buzzfeed about the debut author experience, talking about why didn’t anybody tell me this? (Laughs)
It was the feedback from that article, not just from writers, but actually from editors and agents too, a lot of which was being shared with my agent. She was like, wow, agents and editors are telling me nobody has voiced this out loud before and they’re so thankful you did. And writers were saying, Oh my God, I’ve never had more than three people in an event. All of a sudden I realize that there’s this facade, that we’re all sort of participating in. Of course, some writers have successful events and I’ve had very successful events too, but it’s not really the norm, you know? So there was a positive response to that article. And then once I had my second book came out, I had a similar experience —the same editor and a really supportive group. But it was the summer of Trump. No one was reading fiction. The sales were a huge disappointment to my publisher and that’s when I was like, okay, I’m going to write this book. I’m gonna write this book for myself. I’m gonna write it for other people. Anyone who’s getting out there, not knowing what’s ahead, but also making the incorrect assumption that each consecutive book that you publish will do better than the next. I wanted to get into what a completely unpredictable profession this is if you’re lucky enough that it becomes a profession. And how we can better equip ourselves emotionally for that instability.
KB: I like how you talk about money in this book— advances, how writers get paid, etc. On social media, the way people get paid is still so confusing and no one talks about it. Maybe it’s been a little better lately, but I’m curious about your opinion as to why you think talking about money is still so uncomfortable, especially for writers or people in the arts.
CM: Well, I think partly with social media, you have the self-perpetuating thrust to make yourself appear successful. So for some people who aren’t getting a lot [of money], they probably don’t want to admit that, but they also don’t want to shame their publisher. And there are people who don’t even know if they got a lot, but they got a decent amount, so they don’t want to make other people jealous, which is understandable. And then also we’re not unionized. So if I start going around saying what I got from my debut with Simon and Schuster, then another author could come along and say, well, Courtney said she got this much so I want at least that much. It starts to approach a unionized situation, which at this point, the industry is completely unprepared for. Is there a future in which that’s an inappropriate structure? Probably not because unfortunately for better, for worse, each author comes with their individual “platform.” The outreach potential that they have, the CV that they have, the star power —I mean, some debut authors come out of nowhere and they just have this thing. Sometimes you just believe more in one book than another.
So should everyone be paid the same for the same book? No, probably not. But the scale should be less radically different than it is right now. What I got for my third and fourth books, which were with independent presses versus what I got with the big five was so vastly different. It’s a bit of a joke. I mean, it’s not a joke, but it absolutely boggles the mind. I talk about this in the book, but I have author friends at small presses who are getting $5,000 book deals for two books. And then friends who are getting $1 million for a two-page outline of what they think their second book is going to be.
Now listen, I understand the difference between commercial projects and more artistic projects. But again, writers have to know that these dichotomies exist. And I don’t know that people know this because all we hear about are the giant, giant advances. You don’t see these articles in entertainment weekly about the author who wrote a beautiful book and got $7,000 for it. And that’s a really interesting story. How are they making ends meet? They are not quitting their day jobs. So how are they finding the time to write? Those are more interesting stories than the person who got the million-dollar advance, quit their day job and are now allowed to just write. Well great, but that seems pretty easy, you know?
I’m rambling because this is a very difficult question and the publishers have no answer for it. And I think it’s a deep cause of shame throughout the industry.
KB: In terms of creating this book, did you write it over a long period of time? And what was the author interview process like? Could you take me through the creation of the book?
CM: While I was writing this, I had just finished Costalegre, my third book. I wrote Before and After the Book Deal fairly quickly. I have a pretty good hold on my anxieties and I know how everything played out, so I had the skeleton of the book sort of in me, just from being a writer in the world. Then I more or less sketched out the table of contents and then put these placeholders in the word doc. I’d put something like, Mira Jacob would be a perfect contributor for this section. I would drop in the names of actual living writers I wanted to talk to. And then in sections where I lacked contacts, like for the section on academia where I am not affiliated with, I would write in something like find someone who’s on a tenure track, find someone who left a tenure track.
So I did the outline first and then I went and sought out that content. And of course, it wasn’t forcing people to say one thing or another. But if I was looking for a quote I needed, say about someone who’s dissatisfied, I would do the legwork to find out who’s dissatisfied. (Laughs) With the lengthy quotes, I did phone interviews, which were usually pretty long— about an hour with most people. For some of the more crowdsourced or polling questions, like for example, what number agent are people on, I would post on social media, and say very clearly that I’m writing this book, does anyone want to share what number agent they’re on? Once the book was in a near final draft, I contacted everyone and said, this is how your contribution is going to appear. Are you okay with it? Do you want to tweak anything? And a lot of people didn’t want any changes, which was nice because I do think that people were quite candid.
This part was so lovely because I was talking to people, all the time. I met some agents and editors who I didn’t know of and now I feel in a better position to recommend them to friends, or they have become friends. It was a very community building.
KB: Since there is so much that goes into writing beside the actual writing itself, what would you say to people who maybe are afraid to tell their story or are feeling held back in some way?
CM: I think I would say to modify what their idea of success means and drop it down a bunch of notches. If their idea of success is getting an agent or a book deal or getting published in The New Yorker or something, scale it back and focus on something that you can control. Maybe your goal or your idea of success was actually to get invited to read at one of your favorite reading series. Or to publish an essay in an online magazine that you really admire or to publish an interview with your favorite author.
Start with goals that you can control because you can’t control getting agents. You can’t control getting a book deal. I mean, for my first book there was an editor at Little Brown who loved it and wanted to buy it and his colleagues didn’t agree. So you just can’t control the agent thing. You can’t control getting a book deal. It’s very hard to pin your idea of what success is and what would make you feel good about yourself to something that you can’t control.
Re-envisioning success is something that you can aim for and achieve yourself without relying on outside forces. Then once you start controlling your own career a little bit, you can start dreaming about the bigger things. I didn’t get a book deal until I gave up on the idea that I would ever have a book. I always wanted to have a book. That was my dream. It wasn’t until I was like, well, I think I just misunderstood what my career is going to be about. It’ll be about like making chapbooks and doing a lot of reading series, which is something I love, or humor pieces. And then I kind of committed to that and felt okay about it.
And then, a year later I had a book deal. (Laughs) This happens in relationships too, right? Where you’re like, I’m truly done with this ex of mine. I am not thinking about them anymore. I’ve moved on and then they come back. (Laughs)
Courtney Maum is the author of the novels Costalegre (a GOOP book club pick and one of Glamour Magazine’s top books of the decade), I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You and Touch (a New York Times Editor’s Choice and NPR Best Book of the Year selection), and the handbook Before and After the Book Deal: A writer’s guide to finishing, publishing, promoting, and surviving your first book, forthcoming from Catapult. Her writing has been widely published in such outlets as the New York Times, O, the Oprah Magazine, and Poets & Writers. She is the founder of the collaborative retreat program, The Cabins (currently accepting applications), and she also runs a service called “The Query Doula” where she helps writers prepare their manuscripts and query letters for an agent’s eyes. You can sign up for her writing-advice newsletter, Maumalog, at CourtneyMaum.com