Summer Rewind: The True Meaning of Success with Courtney Maum

Lisa [00.00]

Welcome to the Writing Your Resilience podcast.

Courtney [00:02]

I’m so happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Lisa [00:04]

Well, I have been a huge fan for quite a while. I follow your Substack. I have a copy of your book here, but this is just one of the many books that you have written. You have written fiction; you have written memoir. This is, you know, your signature book that also goes with your Substack. What would you like us to know about you as an author and all the work that you’ve done?

Courtney [00:29]

Oh, well, thank you so much for that lovely and generous introduction. I guess, to put things into context, it might be important for listeners to know that I’m someone who does hop around a lot in genres. Not only do I sort of embrace all genres, I have done literary fiction, experimental historical fiction, reported nonfiction, hybrid memoir, but also chapbooks. I’ve self-published. I tried thriller. I’m not good at it. I definitely want to try erotica, like I really am very excited about not just all genres, but I really am a big believer in storytelling in all formats. And so, for my own students and writing clients, I really like to tell them I completely understand the drive and the attraction toward the traditional path in America that would be an agent and a book deal.

Absolutely I understand that. My ego was drawn to that as well. But there is, I mean, one good thing about social media and digital media is we have so many channels open to us as storytellers these days. You can have a one-woman or one-person show, a little stand up, a one-night play. It can be YouTube. It can be a web series on Instagram, and then it could still eventually be a book. But I definitely think it would be important to couch this discussion in a value that’s very important to me, which is that you can and will get your story out to the world and find your readers. It’s probably healthy to embrace or just respect alternative paths to getting there.

And I would also add that for me, mental health is something, especially now, I struggled with severe depression myself about seven or six years ago, and it’s basically all I think about now. It’s what I write about in my Substack—how to pretty much prioritize, put the mental health piece first, and to do that, whether it’s in my classes or I run a destination writing workshop called Turning Points, my approach is always, always, we must help the writer first before we can help the writer’s writing. And I don’t think that that’s been the traditional approach.

You know, I’ve been very frustrated as both the student and a teacher of the traditional writing workshops in the past, where, you know, it’s your day to workshop, and everyone’s read 15 pages that are probably your best 15 pages, because most people want to put their best foot forward and impress the teacher. But then what are the students there for? They’re not there to give you compliments for 45 minutes, right? They’re there to tear it up. So, you come in maybe feeling pretty good, you leave shattered. Usually, most people feel kind of shattered. And how the hell has that helped anybody? Let’s say that you’re beautiful on the line level, but you have absolutely no accountability, no time management, petrified of speaking in public, don’t know how to pitch essays, right? Unfortunately, we are in a world where beautiful writing and talent on the line level is not really going to get you there in North America.

I work with all kinds of writers, people who are super excited to self-publish, the people who want the million-dollar book deal, the people who want the micro press. But we always start from, what are your challenges as a person. Is it hard for you to get to the desk? What’s your financial life like? If you’re coming into this because you need money from a book deal, you must immediately go and find another income source. You can’t put that kind of pressure on yourself until you have repeatedly earned book deals.

Yes, once you start, I would say, if you have two books or more, you can start thinking, okay, maybe I can quit my day job. I totally support arranging your finances to try to take a year to work on a book, but you shouldn’t be writing toward some amount of money that you think is going to fix your finances. So, I, I think generally, across the board with my work and my Substack, I like to really tackle these taboos, which are talking about the writer first and not the writing, not hiding behind this curtain where the writing is all that matters. The writing didn’t come out of nowhere. It came from this person sitting in front of you who has wants and needs and fears.

And then I talk a lot, a lot about socioeconomics, because it’s just one of the cruelest things you can do with artists, is not talk about finances, right? I think those are kind of the big, big-picture, valued takeaways with me.

Lisa: [05:10]

And I love that you shared all of that, because I share those values. I think one of the things that Athena Dixon, who is a friend of mine, I love Athena and all her work, and she talks a lot about how we need to really think about what success is for you. It’s going to look different for different people. I always say, take care of yourself first, because, as you know, and I think a lot of memoirists especially, find out later on, though, this can happen in fiction—I had a couple of fiction writers tell me this, A lot of people will bank on the publication being the thing that makes them worthy, or the thing that brings them money, or the thing that brings them whatever it is that’s lacking in life, and then it happens, and either they don’t get the success that they imagined, or there are responses that don’t feel great, or just the fact that they have exposed themselves in a way that they didn’t anticipate they would.

Courtney [06:17]

Or they feel bad about suddenly being successful and they have no more time to actually write, which is what they went into the whole thing for.

Lisa [06:45]

So, you can have all these other experiences. So, if you’re not taking care of yourself throughout the process, it’s not going to bring you the success internally that you want. And that’s what I think is more important, like, how do you feel inside about your work? How settled is it?

Courtney [07:01]

This is such an important topic, and it’s really one of the reasons I wrote Before and After the Book Deal. I don’t have a professional background in creative writing. I don’t have an MFA. I did go to college, but I studied Comparative Literature and translation. I did not start participating in workshops until I was 30 years old. I had a summer of workshops where I did three in a row, and then I did not like the traditional workshop method, so I stopped. I took online writing classes and whatnot. But I don’t come from some formal MFA background. And so, my first book deal I was living in Europe. I mean, it felt I had no writer friends when it happened. I had nobody to show me the ropes. I assumed my agent and publisher would show me the ropes and I love them. I’m not trying to throw them under the bus. But it was certainly with my first book, and even more, with a second where I thought, my God, it’s not just me. Nobody gets a user manual, right? We need a user manual because I’m now entering a job that I trained for on the line level, and luckily, I’ve worked as a copywriter, so editing and writing succinctly, things like that, I had thankfully learned. But the PR, the etiquette, the things you’re just supposed to know that you don’t know until you make the mistake, I just couldn’t believe how we were all flailing. Oh, that nobody talks about money. You know, we don’t know how to read a royalty statement. So, I had certainly, from publishing my first book, the seeds in mind to write Before and After the Book Deal.

But I got some pushback when I started pitching it, because my publishing team was like, but you’re going to get so much blowback. You can’t write about success critically. And I said, but we have to, because nobody feels like a success. It’s rare. Success—we think it looks like one thing. It has one number. It means one thing. But in fact, attaching feelings or equivocations of success toward especially a financial number, or a number of sales, or anything you can’t control. So even like hitting the best seller list, you can’t control that. None of us writers know what that feels like until it happens. And it’s extremely dark and brutal, you know?

I’ve been very lucky, but I’ve never hit The New York Times bestseller list or anything like that. But, you know, and I had to say to me it was, it was very telling, because my agent and other publishers I was talking to, they were like, I don’t think writers need this book. They know this stuff. And I thought, you guys actually don’t know. You have no clue, and they were very surprised. My agent had actually wanted me to, and I’m sharing this because we laugh about it at panels. We go on panels together a lot. She said you should probably self-publish this, because I think there is going to be blowback. And now she’s like, this is the best thing you’ve ever done for your career. I was wrong. I was 100% wrong. You know you had some great foresight, but I’m always reminding her that that all might be true, but also you overestimated how much we know when, in fact, we know nothing. It’s like being an apprentice to a shipbuilder, but you’re not an apprentice. You must go build the ship. What wood are you using? Nobody tells us anything, and it was amazing because, Before and After the Book Deal is not a memoir of like a white woman’s path to the publication. There are over 200 contributions of other people from all over the literary stratosphere. And what was incredible is, with one exception, everyone, I reached out to—Anthony Doerr, Roxane Gay, huge successes to smaller indie micro presses, academic presses—everybody I talked to, they were falling all over themselves to talk about what had been hard about their success, or what continued to be. They really wanted to talk about it. I think they just wanted to talk about it under someone else’s umbrella.

But I was like, oh, that’s fine. Take one for the team. I’m just proud of myself, that I stuck to my guns and really advocated for this book that needed to be out in the world and that people are still finding their way to it is meaningful to me.

Lisa [11:41]

I think it’s a testament to how needed this is, and your skill and your generosity in sharing this and culling and putting all this together, because we do need this. And I meet so many people who want to write a book who have never taken a writing class and sometimes know nothing about it, not just the writing process, but the publication process, and suddenly it’s like, you know, I want to do this thing. I want to learn how to swim, so I’m going to jump in the middle of the ocean with nothing else around and then see what happens. And that’s a really unhealthy way to go about it. We need to have these systematic ways of understanding what does this landscape look like, and you offer that to us. And I love how you really focus on the different kinds of success. I recently interviewed Dr Ramani Durvasula, who is amazing. Everyone should get her book. She’s incredible, and she did make The New York Times bestseller list. And one of the questions I asked her was, how are you taking care of yourself while you’re doing this? And her answer was, I’m not, because the level of work that was required to get there and do all these things was immense. And this wasn’t her first book. She had had other books out, so it would be interesting to have a conversation with her a year or two from now to say, looking back, how do you feel about the level of effort you put forth, the energy? I mean in terms of numbers, she’s got it all right, but I always look at what does it do inside you, and how does it affect you, because that is what you take with you.

Courtney [15:15]

100% and you don’t, again, you don’t know, because most agents are not going to protect you from this, because the more opportunities you’re accepting, the more money that brings them, generally, and even the best agents who have really good intentions, you know, you get offered a podcast or a web series or something, they’re going to want you to do it. But it takes a long time in the business to understand the more I say yes to the more I’m saying no to my own writing time. And that’s something I started to learn around book two. Book one, and I wouldn’t have done this differently, I said yes to everything. A podcast in Chattahoochee, Louisiana, with one listener. Yes. Blog post for ABC, absolutely. You want me to go to North Dakota? Sure, right? I said yeah, because what do I know? You don’t know what will move the needle. Book two kind of repeated that process and I ended up physically broken.

And so, with book three, which is, you know, on purpose, when I started working with independent presses, and kind of put a pause on the Big Five experience, which is another way of saying, I lived with much less money for a while. The less money you’re getting from a book advance, I will say, the more peace you have, right? My Tin House book advance was so small, they’re not going to ask me, oh, could you start a podcast? Could you start an interview series? Can you start a newsletter? They’re just sort of like, hey, could you send an email blast to get people to pre-order? The asks are not very large, but at the higher level, certainly the one the doctor’s playing at, you know, can you write the scripts for this to be optioned on spec, by the way. You already have a podcast, start a spin off? Could you write a pilot, or could you do a proposal for the next book, because we need to write it right away. And we need you to be on a speaking series that’s separate from your book and sometimes they’re throwing big money at you, so it takes a very special person to say no.

I color block day parts in my week to make sure that there are nonnegotiable times that I can’t schedule anything. And that helps me understand how many yeses I have left in a season, right? So, like, this summer, I’m out of yeses. I have no more yeses. They’ve all been used. It’s all no’s until probably November, and that took some maturity, and it also took some savings. Again, back to the socioeconomics.

I saved money from my first two good book advances to weather me through the three soulfully nourishing, but financially empty book advances from the independent presses. And then an amazing thing, and partly this is age too, right? Like I’m 45. I wasn’t evolved in my 20s, but now I’m like it’s going to take a massive sum of money for me to sacrifice my peace and the joy that you get from saying yes to the right things and the right people and protecting yourself from wastes of time, from toxic energy. I literally have no space for that anymore, and I’ve gotten quite good at sussing that out. I can kind of tell whether it’s a client, a podcast invitation, a festival. You can tell from having received these invitations for so long and going on some journeys that were disastrous. It’s like dating, right? You just get that little Spidey sense that’s like, this is going to be a hot mess. Okay? So, say no. You do learn. And I think, what moves the needle? And I have to say, the one true thing that moves the needle is just to continue writing, to keep on going. You know, your first book underperformed. Write a second book, write a third book, write a fourth book. Maybe it’s your fourth book that brings people to your first book. You know you, because I know lots of people that had crazy breakout successes with their debuts haven’t even followed it up with anything they just sort of, or they did, and it underperformed, and that completely broke them, because they, nobody told them your first book doesn’t necessarily beget the same result as the second. It’s like an athlete. They’re human beings. You can’t guarantee that they’re going to go out and perform the same every single day. It just doesn’t work like that, and success doesn’t work like that either.

True success is first of all being able to financially support yourself, just enough that you can make time to write, and then writing more or less what you want, and being given the opportunities to publish—that’s success. After that, your book moves a lot of units. It doesn’t, it’s panned, whatever. You can’t control, that it really doesn’t have to do with you.

Lisa [18:52]

Yeah, there’s so much that you can’t control. And I think people build all these stories inside themselves, around, you know, this is what it means, or that’s what it means, and then it becomes very personal. You recently had a Substack article about writing in the dark and keeping yourself in the dark, which I loved. I thought that it was interesting, because you used to work in trends, and you have this uncanny ability to identify trends. And I know lots of authors, especially in the narrative nonfiction and the memoir space, who are very focused on their author platforms, and trying to follow the trends or think about the numbers, which makes them miserable, and then they’re like, I hate doing this, which, of course, you do. How do you balance that? You talk about it in that post, which I’m going to share in the show notes. But could you say a little bit more about the internal compass?

Courtney [19:50]

Yeah, so that post was in respect to a comment I made to someone’s note that was like, oh my god, the metrics. Just write whatever you want. And she was talking about specifically Substack, but basically, I was saying just write whatever the hell you want, and you’ll find your way. And I responded, but then I wrote something about writing from the delicious dark, and people seem to like it. So, I thought, oh, I’ll write a whole post about it. And I started realizing that I really do stay in the dark even though I’ve become something of like a publishing expert, and people pay me to talk about publishing, which I enjoy it very much. I think that I’m good at it. I think that that’s an earned title. But I’m an art witch first, you know. And so, it’s sort of funny, because in my coaching, you know, sometimes people want, like, behind the scenes, insider information on getting analytics and SEO and all this stuff. And I’m always like, Listen, what makes your heart sing? What makes you get out of bed in the morning? Like, let’s start with that. And then, coming from a branding background, I will say the things that I don’t do for me, the delicious darkness is, don’t look at my analytics, my metrics. I’m talking about Substack specifically, but also my royalty statements. I don’t know what region I sell in better than others. I don’t know where people are finding my Substack from. I don’t, don’t know who unsubscribes. I don’t, you know, I don’t look at that stuff. Substack is just built in a way that there are some numbers you can’t escape. When you log in, you see your paid subscriber account. You see your all, so that I can’t escape, or at least I don’t know how to escape it. And then with my writing, I don’t even know how to read my royalty statement. But what I do know, coming from a branding background, is that whether we’re talking about a blog, a newsletter, a Substack, podcast, anything, you do need to come out the gate, if you’re going to take this seriously and you want to be discovered, you do need to have some brand assets.

So, in our writing world, that would mean some great title, a catchy title that communicates what the umbrella is that you’re going to be writing under. So not everything has to do with like, for instance, Before and After the Book Deal. That’s the name of my book, but I named my Substack after that. I do not write exclusively about publishing and getting book deals. I write about mental health. Sometimes I’ll write about my cat, right? But I’m allowed to do that because I developed categories and segments. I guess they’re called segments or sections. MailChimp calls them something, Substack calls them something, but basically, you want categories, and you need to think this out before you start. What categories can I put under the umbrella that I’ve given a title, to make sure that I’m not, you know, let’s say that your big thing is elder care. If you’re only writing about, I mean, there’s lots of ways to write about elder care, but birth trauma, you’re like, that’s all I’m writing about. Well, that doesn’t leave you any room to write about something joyful, easy, superficial, and if you’re getting especially Substack, which does require kind of constant posting, you’re going to burn the hell out if you’ve picked a difficult, traumatic subject. So, make sure that your title has a little room for all the different shades of emotions, not just joy, not just pain. It’s nice to have a tagline. I have a tagline that a little bit more of what you’re going to be doing. You need the little categories. And then you should have a logo. If you want to get the A plus, plus the two stars, you should come to the table with an idea of what your brand colors are, just to make sure that everything looks coherent and discoverable. I don’t do that on Instagram. My Instagram’s a mess. I don’t care about that at all, but my Substack I do care about, mostly because the brand tools they make are really accessible. So, just like in branding, I was hired as a namer and a copywriter, so I would name the brand, but we would always work in tandem with the brand managers, right? So, they would be showing us the sketches for the new companies with logos and taglines, and then we would come in with our naming recommendations. And we certainly did not just throw up a website and launch product. And what I tell people again, more and more people were getting pushed to start newsletters, and I see these people every day, just like, I started a Substack. And I think, God Almighty, it’s like I’m running for president. It takes a lot more. I was on MailChimp for two or three years before I migrated. I had 3000 followers, so not insane numbers, but a nice place to start. I migrated with my people, and I already had three years of seeing what worked, what felt good to me, what didn’t, before I launched on Substack, which is about two years ago. So, Substack, to me, is not the place to launch with zero followers. I really like to encourage people to either start out on a somewhat lower profile newsletter, Tiny Letter, MailChimp, whatever, Beehive, there’s lots of them. Try things out, see how it goes, and then hopefully bring people with you to Substack. Rebrand a little bit. So, when you launch on Substack, you already have people who can recommend you. But if you don’t want to do that, you can also use Facebook and Instagram, you know, pick your messaging, your storytelling lane, try it out. If you’re comfortable with video, you can do the IG reel, Tiktok, whatever the hell it is. So, for example, the other day, I was working with someone who’s in the wine industry, and she pointed me to this influencer who basically does, like, anti-snob wine, right? It’s wine for people who are in lower-to-lower middle class. And she does all these pairings with a certain kind of white and Cheetos, right? Or like, microwave popcorn, and all the bottles are under 20. Some are closer to 10 or 11, or 12. And so I was watching her stuff, and I thought, Wow. I mean, she’s like, a big, big influencer and speaker, and I can’t remember her handle, otherwise I would share it. But I thought I bet that this person started off on Instagram, Facebook, just with that angle or something approaching. They tried it out, and people must have been like, I love this. This is the gap in the market. And then she built it up and professionalized it. I think we’re unfortunately living in an era where people just are forgetting how much time it takes to become professional.  

I do draw parallels pretty often to athletics. I think in America, we have a real respect for athletes and how hard they work and train to get to whatever level they’re at, right? It could be state championships for high school basketball. It could be national-level figures, whatever the hell it is. I think we really understand. We have the minor leagues, the Major League, the varsity, the JV. So, you’re kind of born, even if you’re just going through the public school system, you’re born understanding or not born, but right, you get it pretty quickly. The hierarchy of determination, dedication, hard work, whereas I don’t know what the hell is going on with our culture, where you go into a bookshop and you’re like, cool, I can do this, yes, and maybe you can, but you can’t do it in six months? No, you have to do all the things that the athletes are doing right? They are getting up at four, they are working out, they are not drinking. They are making major sacrifices, and they are doing it, understanding that this could take 10 years, you know, and I don’t know why we really do encourage this. This rush in this society. I mean, in part, the fault is the gatekeepers who are like, hmm, I liked your query. But come back to us when you have some absurd number, 100,000 followers and a podcast. Come back when you have a platform. Well, I’m old enough that my platform came from publishing books. Call me old fashioned, but that seems the way to go about it, unless you’re coming to publishing as an expert in something already, like psychotherapy, child, animal rescue, whatever. That’s different. You’re bringing your platform there, but especially for those of us who write fiction, your writing is your platform. So, you can’t come out the gate with the platform until you start to publish, and especially publish books. It’s just so cart before the horse.

It’s, it’s, it’s really absurd.

Lisa [31:00]

Absolutely. But I also meet people who are like, you know, I’ve been reading my whole life. I read avidly. I’ve been in book clubs. I can do this, and it’s going to be nothing, so easy, and it is not an easy transition. And the metaphor that I often use is dealing with cars. So, we’re in cars all the time. We’re riding in cars. We learn to drive cars. We might feel like we’re great at that. Being a writer is like being a master mechanic. You need to know how to replace the intake manifold and rebuild a carburetor and all these other things.

Courtney [31:50]

It’s making my cortisol rise, because I’m definitely someone that drives a car around. If something happens to it, I’m screwed. I know nothing about what’s going on. Same thing with my house. I thank God I have a husband who knows stuff right, but like, something goes wrong with the plumbing. I’m living in sewage. I don’t know what I’d do, yeah, but right? It’s true, yeah, it’s, it’s the same thing.

Lisa [32:12]

And when I’ve told people that, the shame that often comes with getting feedback that is different from what you expected, or getting those rejections, or experiencing all these things. I’m like, of course you’re going to, you haven’t learned the skills that are needed and taken the time, because it does take time. So, I love everything you said about Substack, because Jane Friedman wrote this great post a little while ago. It was about, I’m going to get the title wrong, but this one was, Substack is the best and the worst thing for writers. And her main point was, don’t try to have a paid Substack, especially if you’ve never created a newsletter and you don’t know what you’re doing. And I think that’s something that you’re also advocating for. If you’re going to have a Substack, or any other kind of newsletter, you need to understand how to write one. And this is one thing you talked about in terms of delicious dark is there’s all these things, number wise, to not pay attention to, but you need to understand your readers what they want, what they need. And so, yeah, there’s a lot of work that goes into this. And I’ve actually seen a lot of writers who jump on the Substack bandwagon and they’re feeling bad about their experience, because they see a few people who have just amazing success. You happen to be one of those people, and then they’re like, well, why isn’t it happening for me?

Courtney [33:42]

Not everyone can be on site. Substack is so saturated already, but especially if you’re trying to make money from your writing, I think I really blame the MFA program for this. There are so many ways to make money. As a writer, I have pretty much tried all of them, and none of them are taught. It’s all just like, write a good short story, get it published for what, $300, hooray. But there’s speech writing, there’s copywriting, there’s branding, there’s translation, which there’s a real need for. There’s technical writing, yes, copyediting, proofreading, naming, you know, which is something that I’ve done, which was extremely lucrative and fun as hell and PR—press releases. I used to make lots of money. I mean, lots of money, not like hedge fund money, but money to allow myself to write on the side with no problem and no worries and pay my rent. And I was writing and learning these technical skills that have served me so well, because once you get a book accepted, what happens all the time is, you’re told you have two months to do an edit, and then your editor’s like, four weeks late with the edits, but they don’t give you any more time. Or they say, oh my gosh, we just got this amazing opportunity. But you have to choose 20,000 whatever the hell it is. You have to do something by the end of the afternoon. And you know, that’s never been a problem for me, because I developed these skills outside of writing a nice short story, working on the deadline, working with stressed-out people, and learning to time manage. And those skills are more important. I sometimes tell people, especially young people like, go work as a bartender or a waitress and listen to the dialog. Pay attention to the way that people are treating you, even when you’re being treated very badly. What’s their body language like? What’s your body language like in that moment? The socioeconomic divide is always yes, being in restaurant work too. But you know, this is the elitist thing about writing, is we have this ridiculous, unattainable image that in our minds as young people, that writing means going into an MFA program, somehow being able to live in a place you don’t have a support network and just write and then come out and get a book deal. Yeah, who’s doing that? I mean how? We never see the big New York Times profiles about the adjunct professors who are working at three different universities with bags of clothing and deodorant in their car, who have no office or are working out of their car. And who are writing award winning indie press books on the side. We don’t hear about those people. We hear about the million-dollar book deals, and this is what they do with their Sundays in New York. And I don’t give a shit. I mean, it’s great. I hope that those people are going on to support other writers. But we do not need those people. They allow the rest of us to get book advances, but these are not the models that we need to be looking up to here. We need to be looking up to the people that are getting up at 4 am to write before they teach, or they have to care for their kids or their sick parents or the ones who are in completely different industries, science, finance, a lot, and doing this on the side. That’s so, so inspiring,

Lisa [39:13]

There is this huge myth that you can just quit your job, be a writer, be financially successful. And yes, I work within the industry. I make my money by working with other people and editing their work and teaching classes and doing all these other things, that’s the primary way that I make my money. And then I also publish, and I get some money, but I am happy with that, because then it gives me the freedom to write what I want, to follow my joy, to really serve the people that I want to serve with my writing, and not feel that same financial pressure. And I think that’s reasonable for most people, and healthy.

Courtney [39:59]

Yeah. And again, I don’t want to come off as a gatekeeper. If you feel ready to have your book out in the world, that’s exciting, that’s exciting, and you can do that on the fast track by either self-publishing or finding a hybrid publisher, there’s nothing wrong with that, especially these days. My gosh, when you really sit down to think about the economics of it. It’s truly unfair. I’ve been trying to talk with my agent about, like, the royalties. It’s insane how little we get from our own books, especially if you’re lucky enough to earn out. So, there’s nothing wrong with self-publishing and hybrid. I’ve done it, and it was so empowering and worthwhile. And you can use social media to start getting your story out there right away. So again, you feel ready to have a book out in the world. There are so many exciting, empowering and cost-effective ways to do that, but not everyone gets a traditional book deal just because they are ready for one. That it is a meritocracy, and by meritocracy, I don’t mean like, oh, you went to a fancy school, and you made the right connections. I mean you put the time in, not just on the computer, but you’ve gone to bad reading series, and sat in a hot room with someone spilling beer on your foot. You’ve gone to the writer’s conferences and sat there while 12 people ripped your work to shreds. You had to share a dorm with, this happened to me, someone who hated you. You buy books from actual independent bookstores. That’s putting the work in. That’s the initiation period. You’re maybe one of 50 people who have a subscription to a dying literary magazine. You’ve volunteered for a festival in your town. You write for your town newspaper. You have to put in that citizenship piece, which we just don’t think is emphasized or respected or taught on us.

Lisa [42:12]

That reminds me of medical school and doctors, or the whole idea of residency. There are lots of thoughts around residency and people working 24 and 48 and 72 hours at a time. And I personally don’t want a doctor to see me in their 71st hour in their residency. And yet, doctors who’ve gone through that gauntlet feel like, no, you need to go through that gauntlet. Yet, there is some aspect of a gauntlet that we do need to go through in terms of learning how to write well, learning how to market our books, whatever that’s going to be, whether it’s self-publishing or you’re going the traditional path. So, there’s lots of different ways we can do that.

I have one quick question I’m going to ask you, and then we’re going to get to this lightning round, because we could be here forever. You have so many insights and so many wonderful things to share. And I am just in awe of all that you do. But one of the things I wanted to ask about is you recently went to an ENT.  You had this lifelong insomnia, and you had this certain story about who you were as a sleeper, as a human, you know this, this identity that was built upon what you had been told, and then suddenly you found out something different. And now you are correcting that. I resonate with that because I’m a person who has also struggled with health issues and was told one thing about my experience for a very long time, and then suddenly found out that it was something completely different. So how has this experience changed the way you’re thinking about your writing, about your stories, and particularly about your memoir, which is about your insomnia.

Courtney [43.52]

I’m going to have to do a sequel to the memoir. Well, thank you for this question. So yeah, to summarize really quick, I’ve had debilitating chronic insomnia since I was eight, eight years old, unfortunately, and have seen all the doctors, the Western doctors, the woo-woo doctors, you know, la, la, la. When I was eight, my parents split up. My brother was deeply, deeply sick. He was having these insane seizures every day. He ended up spending years in a children’s hospital. It’s just a very dark time of my life, very challenging. I’m just left alone a lot. And that’s my memoir, the childhood portion, the memoirs, The Year of the Horses, that’s the childhood portion takes. There’s a lot during that eight-, nine-year-old period, I developed disordered eating as a way to find control. The insomnia thing, it’s tough because I feel good today, but most of the time I’m so overtired that being proactive for my health is hard. Making the calls, it’s hard to reach doctors. They give you appointments. I just made an appointment, and the first one is on January 30, 2025. It’s overwhelming. So basically, every two or three years, I’m getting together the energy, and I’m going to kind of take my health by storm. So, the last time I had that burst of energy was about a year ago, and I finally went to see an ear, nose and throat doctor, which I hadn’t done because no one had recommended it, which is rather bonkers, and that doctor had me go through a series of palliative exercises. He was kind of watching how I spoke and swallowed and breathed. And he said—I’ll never forget this—he said, by any chance, did you have braces very young? I said, oh, I did. I got them when I was eight, and in my mind, I was like, eight. That’s when my insomnia started. And then he says, and this definitely was big moment, you know, you’re trying not to, like, break down in the doctor’s office. He said, well, you know, I’ve looked at your mouth. Having braces that early, for that long, stunted your jaw growth. Your tongue continued to grow. Your nasal passages didn’t develop correctly because of the stunted jaw, and you have not been able to breathe correctly for about 30 years, and you’re a candidate for some major surgeries. So, I underwent the surgery. So, your question’s a little challenging for me to answer, I underwent these surgeries in April, and the reason it’s challenging is because only 50% worked. My left nostril was a success. Everything was internal, but inside they broke everything down and rebuilt it. But on the right side, something went wrong. The cartilage had slipped and collapsed, and I can’t get any air through this nostril. I have to go back for even more aggressive surgery, where they’ll actually open the outside of my nose. So, I don’t have the best energy around this experience yet. I don’t have the big takeaways. I was hoping to absolutely this summer be on the path to what everyone said, you know, you’re going to be a new woman, and you’ll get your life back. It’s feeling worse than before.

I guess, to answer your question, the way that has changed my thinking about this narrative I had about myself in my head, where I’ve always been told by doctors, you’re just high strung, you’re neurotic, you need yoga and meditation, which is a form of gaslighting, because I think doctors are always telling women that we’re neurotic and high strung. All of that to say, I think I’ve become even more passionate about encouraging women, specifically people who identify as women, to really advocate for their health and just scream, yell, kick until they find someone to listen to them.

I wrote a Substack about that experience, and I have never had such a flood of lead. It made me cry quite a lot. How many women wrote me who are in my age range, who admitted they have horrible sleep, insomnia? I also have struggled with chronic canker sores my whole life, and it’s a debilitating place like I sometimes have to cancel podcasts because I can’t talk. And that felt like a dirty secret, and the doctor told me, you’re not getting oxidized air because you can’t breathe through your nose. It’s not hormonal, as I’d always been told. And all these other women were writing me about their chronic canker sores that they’ve been too embarrassed to. I mean, I should have got a commission the amount of people I think that went to see ear, nose and throat doctors. So, yeah, what’s changed for me is when I hear my women friends say, you know, maybe I’m just feeling off, or I’m just like, let’s, let’s think who you can see, who will listen to you. This is more than you being stressed out.

Lisa [52:52]

Women are so dismissed, and that was my experience for a long time. I had chronic health issues and one issue I don’t talk about a whole lot is that when I was really young, I was in a bad car accident and didn’t have seat belt on, and ended up literally hitting a telephone pole with my head, with the side of my face, like and I was lucky, you know, but for a wide variety of reasons, they weren’t thinking about head trauma at that time, and so they just, they did a CT of my abdomen and said okay, you’re fine. Just go back to school. And I’d had all this anxiety, and I had a lot of insomnia and a lot of different things going on, and to complicate matters, there was a lot of stress and chaos and violence in my childhood. So, I ended up with this bipolar diagnosis in my early 20s, and I ended up being like the model patient at the bipolar clinic. Why was I the model patient? Because I didn’t have it. But I had been dismissed for all this time. And some people would say, well, you know, maybe you need to take a vacation. Or just these different things around how I needed to be calmer when I finally ended up getting this, you know, special EEG of my brain, that injury had gone into the white matter of my brain. That’s how severe it was.

Courtney [54:06]

That’s really tough.

Lisa [54:08]

Yeah, it’s okay, it is, and it’s actually…

Courtney [54:12]

But it’s like when you think of all the people, the women this happened to in one iteration or another. And of course, yes, we’re both white people, so when you think of the people of color, it , it makes me so angry. I mean, I wrote a lot about the medical gaslighting in my memoir because I’d had a second term miscarriage, and when they wheeled me in, I’m on this gurney, I was far enough along I had to have the DNC, and this anesthesiologist comes over and he had my chart, and he must have had someone else’s chart. He cited a weight that was about 40 pounds heavier than I am. He said, this is your second miscarriage. It was my first. He had everything wrong, and I started to cry a little because I just didn’t feel safe with this person who’s about to put me under and of course, I was sad, and he grabs the tissue, and he goes, oh, you got a cold. And I said, What? No, I’m sad. And he punched me. He actually punched me on the shoulder while I was on the gurney. Punched me in the shoulder. And he goes, you’ll just make another one. And I was like, the rage, of course. Now this man put me under three seconds late, but the rage in me was—I am surprised I didn’t shove my finger in that man’s eye. He clearly had the wrong chart, because I was over 40 years old. You can’t just go make another one. It doesn’t work that way. And I remember, right before he put me under, I was like, strongly worded letter is coming your way, sir. I wrote a complaint to the entire hospital. I’m a writer. It feels like a duty, but I just thought, like, who is this asshole telling women who have just had…you don’t know why I miscarried, you don’t know how much I was looking forward to this. What the hell do you know about anything? Shut up. Just give me a Kleenex and shut your mouth.

It’s hard to become a doctor. It’s so hard. It takes so many years and so much money, and so many of them have no bedside manner whatsoever. It’s actually beyond me. I refuse to believe that it’s that hard. Writers, you take one semester of writing, and you learn how to speak to people kindly about their work, or even in half an hour, you learn to start with compliments, right? We learn pretty quick as artists, to be sensitive and intuitive, and I’m not, it’s not all doctors. #notalldoctors, doctors, but #mostdoctors. There are a lot of them, and I really do start to think there’s something in the people that are drawn toward medicine that they might be missing, actually, an essential compassion component that is maybe necessary so that they’re not always taking their job home, and I can understand that, I can get on board with, but it doesn’t feel good when you’re on the other side. And that’s fine if that is cerebrally, neurologically the case, well then, they need to have a sidekick with them, right? Or a puppy. Anyway. Yeah, we could clearly talk for the rest of 2024.

Lisa [58:12]

I think this was the big takeaway for me and I certainly had lots of pain around that, was that when I finally got that diagnosis, it was vindicating, because what I learned is I need to trust my own experience. I deserve to be listened to, and I need to be able to weed out the people who are not going to listen and dismiss them because they’re not worth my time. But I think that also serves us well in writing, because we can begin to, you know, I think this, this process can be so difficult that, and especially there’s so many gatekeepers that we begin to dismiss ourselves and think, well, it doesn’t matter, and what I have to say isn’t true, and you have to learn how to build that internal compass.

Courtney [59:07]

And again, like what we’ve been talking about. You just have the faith that if everyone says no to you in the traditional publishing space, you can find tons of ways to say yes to yourself, and it might be an even more satisfactory outcome than you could have imagined with a traditional publisher. I worked with a woman not that long ago who, oh, my God, she was sort of embarrassed. I self-published, you know, and I sold 5000 copies during 2020, and I was like, excuse me, during the pandemic, locked in at home, you sold 5000 copies of your memoir, self-published?  She’s like, yeah. I’m like, no, no. Billy Best, to give her book a shout out and her Substack. I said, Billy, you know you might not be aware that 5000 is actually the sales goal right now for traditionally published books. It’s fallen so low, because books are not selling as well as people think they’re selling. And it’s a question I ask my publishers every time I publish, what would make you breathe easier? When I started publishing, it was 30,000, and the last time I published, it was 5000. When I told her that, it blew her up, she was like, wait, I’m a success? Sure are. A huge success. Yes, keep self-publishing, and I think it’s great. I think it’s great. My goal is always trying to respect people’s egos, understand the kind of ego, things that they want, but then help open them up to these other paths and other channels, and also patience, but because the time of “you need an agent, you need a publisher,” these times are behind us. I am starting to think if I have another craft book, I might self-publish it, because I do look at Before and After the Book Deal, which I did completely alone. I didn’t even have an editor when that book came out. My editor had left before the book published. Catapult has gone through a lot of changes, all the efforts to publicize that book, post-publication, post, you know, let’s, let’s give them a year into publication, it’s been me, and when I see that I’m getting, like, all told, 3% of whatever, that doesn’t feel great, you know? Yeah, so I might go back to self-publishing, especially in the craft space. I don’t love the idea of mailing things out of my garage, but hell, you know, I think you can do both.

I mean, look at Colleen Hoover. She tries forever, ever and ever, to get her stuff published. No one wants it. Starts to self-publish and she’s killing it. The publisher’s called, crawling back like, you know? And now she takes it or leaves it. So, she’ll do one or two books with the publisher. And then she’s like, I don’t want to go through all that rigmarole. I’m going to self-publish. So, she self-publishes again. She uses the publishers like mistresses, sort of, it’s sugar daddies. So, she’s the sugar mom. It’s just, it’s awesome. I think it’s great. People love to dump on her. And I’m like, why? Why don’t you take a note? She’s doing pretty good, doing exactly what she wants to do on her own terms. Literally, you know, is her writing my cup of tea. Who cares? I can admire her as a business woman, absolutely,

Lisa [1:02:42]

So, another guest on the podcast, Ingrid Clayton, she self-published her memoir and has sold, I don’t know the exact number now, but I think the last time we spoke, it was well over 11,000 copies. She did it on her own.  

Courtney [1:02:55]

That’s above the national average for traditionally published memoirs that had big advances, exactly, and, and she’s going to be keeping close to 100% of those profits. Probably doesn’t have an agent taking the 15% and again, listen, I’m pro for the moment. I am pro publisher. I love my agent. I’ve really been lucky with my publishers, and I see the value that they put in, and I want them. But yeah, absolutely. I think there will come a time where I think this particular title, for whatever given reason, I want to go with my own. And I also do think I’m really trying to advocate. I’m a council member of the Author’s Guild, and I’m really going to start, you know, in terms of what we hit the pavement for, trying to negotiate, at the very least eBook royalties, yes, and then the paperback and hardcover, because it’s just if the publishers are going to continue to ask more and more unpaid labor of us when they used to provide marketing, right? It’s like if hotels started asking us to bring our own towels and sheets and pay for AC. There’d be an uproar, right? Or they’d have to drop the price. So why are our royalty statements staying the same? But we’re having to do 75% of the marketing, promotion, PR and event management that used to be provided for us. That’s fine. I’ll do it. I’ve got the skills, but you have to pay me more. My royalties have to be way higher. 10% on yeah, let’s get to 60 to 70 percent.

Lisa [1:04:32]

Right. If you’re having to do all that work.

Courtney. [1:04:35]

It’s bonkers and we’ve been taking it for so long. And I really do think that change is coming. I mean, Stephen King just renegotiated his royalty percentages. Now he’s Stephen King, right? So, he’s sort of like the Taylor Swift out there, right? He can do what he wants, but others will follow.

Lisa [1:05:11]

I love that. Well, you give a lot of people writing advice. I’m curious about what the best piece of writing advice is that you’ve received that you hold on to.

Courtney [1:05:22]

 Oh my gosh, I’m now recalling that you had sent this question to me, and I think I’m going to tweak your question a little bit and answer with the best advice I have. The advice I wish I had gotten was to make friends, because I was just so focused on getting the work done. Yeah, you know, I sort of did come in my first book publishing experience was very much like I did everything myself. But that’s not true. That doesn’t play out to be true, right? You do, generally, in the traditional realm, have an entire team, and then when, again, when my first book came out, I didn’t really have a lot of writing friends. I was starting to make them because I’d realized how badly I needed them, and that’s one of the great things about MFA programs. But when you come completely from outside of the industry, I had to learn how to do it myself. And one of the very best things I ever did for my career was there was a period of my life where I was I was living in Massachusetts, in the Berkshires, but I was headhunted for naming and invited to work at a branding agency, and I negotiated, I think, three days a week in house, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and that was long enough that I had to find a place to live, right? So, I had to rent, had roommates, but it’s Brooklyn. It was expensive, so to justify the amount of money I was paying every month on rent. I was like, okay, Courtney, this will be your mini-MFA. For however long this job lasts, every single night you’re in New York City—every single night—you will go to one literary event. It could be a book launch. It could be a reading series, whatever. And then I doubled down, and I was like, and you will introduce yourself by shaking hands, because I still did that. Then I was like, okay, let’s go. I could do this. And I did that. And when I tell you it maybe took 10 days, it was not that it didn’t take very long before I realized, okay, these are all the same people at all these events. They all know each other. And they thought I was some MFA student from like, out on the west coast and they started saying, also everyone that came, I mean, I’m still dear, dear, dear friends. I have a text group with almost all those people that I met then. And they were all editors of Electric Literature, the chief editor of Bomb Magazine, all these places that I had been trying as a faceless person to get into, and I something else I did. And this is another argument for having savings. I would introduce myself, shake hands with one person every night, and then something else I did. Is once in a while, I’d say, hey, can I get you a beer? Because, again, I was working in branding, I had some disposable income. Buy people a beer. The next thing you know, they’re like, hey, we have this upcoming thing. Do you have any writing on the topic of parakeets? I don’t know. By the end of the month, just one month of doing this, I had had like 15 bylines. I’d been invited to perform a reading series myself, and it helps that I’m an outgoing, gregarious person, but still, all told, it probably cost me, like, $103 in beer and tipping the bartender, and, you know, having some late nights and a lot of fun. And I did buy the books. I tried to buy the books of the people I liked at the reading series, and that was it. After a month, I was like in. I basically knew all the movers and shakers. Lisa Lucas was there, like Halima Marcus, who’s now the chief editor of Electric Literature, Benjamin Samuel, everybody who kind of runs the literati. Paul. Just so many people, and they’re amazing, fun humans. And then they became friends, and then I quit my job. That’s like, now I’m good. Now I can just work from home, make the money by working for like, whatever client, and then I have these new friends.

Lisa [1:10:18]

I’m always telling people, be a good literary citizen, but more than anything, be a good human. Because I think there are people who come into this with a very transactional mindset, where they’re like, I’m going to try to be friends with X or Y, because you can give me something else, but really, just be a good human.

Courtney [1:10:38]

And introduce yourself. I think we can all forgive ourselves, if occasionally you’re a little strategic. I mean, I have not always been. I’ve evolved. When I came out the gate, I was very loud about the books I didn’t like, and I’m not like that anymore. I’m a better literary citizen. So, you know, once in a while, we’re going to be petty and conceited and jealous and gossip. And that’s okay. I think you can leave a little space for that. But yes, generally, please make room for authenticity and joy and fun, a little fun in this whole just like goodness, if we can’t have fun, then what the hell are we doing this for? It’s not, you know, not necessarily a fun industry.

Lisa [1:11:21]

No, there are a lot of ups and downs, and there can be some really down downs, that is for sure. So, if people want to buy your books or they want to subscribe to your Substack, what are the best ways for people to connect with you, or even on social media?

Courtney [1:12:45]

I’m in all the places. It’s either CBMaum or CMaum. My website is courtneymaum.com. It is the best place. You can sign up for my newsletter straight from there, I have a bunch of online classes. You can learn about the writing workshop that I run. I am kind of pro author website. That question comes up. So courtneymaum.com and then my books, thankfully, knock on wood for the moment. They’re all still in print. They’re all available everywhere. Yeah. And I will say, as someone right now who has only backlist. I have a book in the works, but I don’t have a deal for it yet. The best thing you could do for an author is buy something from their backlist. So yeah, if you have it in you, throw me that backlist bone, please. It would mean a lot, yeah. There’s something for everyone in my backlist. Truly.

Lisa [1:12:30] I would say, buy it and then review it.

Courtney [1:12:34]

Positively. If you have nothing nice to say, that’s fine. You just keep it to yourself, please.

Lisa [1:12:40]

Exactly. Only five-star reviews. Give a positive review.

Courtney [1:12:42]

I’m a gal who can handle the four stars. That’s fine. If you’re going to take me to the three stars, you know, fine. I can take that too. But just don’t give me a review that’s like, I didn’t like the title. That’s not fair, right? Put some elbow grease into it. Yeah, I can handle it. I could take it, but, but certainly the five stars and four stars keep the bread on my family’s table. Yeah, yeah, they, they do.

Lisa [1:12:50]

And so be sure to do all those things. And thank you so much, Courtney for being on the podcast.

Courtney [1:12:54]

Again. It’s an absolute delight.