Review: Before and After the Book Deal by Courtney Maum

Before and After the Book Deal: A Writer’s Guide to Finishing, Publishing, Promoting, and Surviving Your First Book by Courtney Maum

Two Sparkers; nonfiction, help for writers but not in terms of craft.

As part of my continuing education as an indie writer, I read books about the business of writing. After all, anyone can write a book. Amazon proves this, particularly when you get down below the weeds with the other amoebas looking for books that rank down in the millions. That is to say, millions of books have sold more copies than the one that you are currently observing. I recall David Gaughran (indie author, marketer and former Amazon employee) claiming that as many as a fifth of all books listed on Amazon have no sales ranking because they’ve never sold a single copy. To anyone. Ever.

So if you want to sell books, it’s important to know the business of writing, managing your relationship with a publisher (whichever kind you have including your ever-supportive spouse), getting publicity, and finding readers. It’s more important than writing the book since if you can’t find readers, then what do you have? Not a readership, that’s for sure. You also don’t have any money. Money is so useful. The landlord, the grocer, and the taxman all insist on being paid. They care even less about your soulful literary endeavors than your friends and relatives do.

This brings us to Courtney Maum’s Before and After the Book Deal: A Writer’s Guide to Finishing, Publishing, Promoting, and Surviving Your First Book. I’m not sure anymore how I came across it. It might have been while I was searching Dauphin County Library’s online catalog for Jane Friedman’s book, The Business of Being a Writer. I always use very broad keywords when I’m searching the catalog because I like the serendipity of discovering a book I didn’t know existed.

That must have been it, because I’m happily oblivious to most of the book world, particularly the farther reaches of the literary genre, where earning buckets of money is sort of frowned on. It’s so déclassé when you, dear author, should be writing from your heart for the sake of art.

Literary is, make no mistake, just as much of a genre of writing as romance or science fiction. It has its own subcategories, like romance has subcategories including Sweet Amish and Werewolf Bondage Porn and science fiction can be hard, soft, military, or space opera to name a few variants. Literary spans from the sort of books that book clubs like (low-brow for this crowd but with respectable sales) up to the rarified heights where the number of sales is in direct opposition to the fawning press coverage in the sort of literary magazines where sales never top five hundred.

I finished and reviewed Jane Friedman’s book — excellent even if you’re not writing Literary — then dutifully began plowing through Ms. Maum’s opus.

It was a slog.

I’m an indie writer of science-fiction romance (but not the lucrative subcategory of “I was the alien’s love slave”). My dear husband is my editor, layout person, and publisher — it’s a complex relationship — and he’s published two of my novels to date. My third novel is currently being savaged by my beta readers. I’m writing novel number four, and I can see the finish line. I’ve also written and published two nonfiction books (self-help of a sort and a how-to manual for production sewing of cloth market bags).

I began writing around 2013, so I’ve got a little experience. I never bothered with trying to find an agent or get traditionally published because nothing I’ve written would be acceptable to those gatekeepers. Doorstops weighing in at 235,000 words are not what the industry wants at the moment.

I associate with other indie writers and publishers and while we complain about many things, one thing we do not do is wail about how the publishing world doesn’t take proper care of us. That’s one of the reasons we’re indie.

So I know how difficult it can be to construct a coherent narrative and how much more difficult it is to market an unusual, doesn’t fit into the standard subcategory title. Yet at no point do I recall other indie writers whining about how they have to, simply must locate a therapist for after their book is published and subsequently ignored by the larger world.

The wailing! The gnashing of teeth! The sobbing! The angst! How hard it is to get attention and when you get it, it’s not the right kind! What delicate, dainty flowers literary writers must be. They wilt at the slightest provocation.

Or maybe Ms. Maum was trying to be funny and I didn’t get it. That’s likely too.

There are good bits of information tucked in here and there. On page 306, Ms. Maum gives very good advice on blurb writing, even providing an all-purpose structure that can be adapted to fit your needs. The last section includes advice from literary writers. Some of it’s even good or useful for ordinary genre writers.

Yet when she discusses advances and royalties (in book one, section five), she doesn’t mention the single most important fact an author needs to know about how advances and royalties are related. Instead, two-thirds of the book later, on page 321, she finally reveals this truth:

“You receive a royalty check if you have earned back your advance, period. If you haven’t earned out, you don’t get a check.”

This is basic and should have been discussed in book one, section five! An advance is a loan against the money your publisher thinks your book will make. If your publisher thinks he’s got a blockbuster, the kind of book that Oprah or Reese will choose for their book clubs, you might (depending on how skillful your agent is) get a larger advance. If your publisher is honest about the potential sales of your twee memoir about surviving something or other that is only special because you, the writer, endured it and everyone else’s similar experiences don’t matter a tinker’s dam, then your advance may be tiny. In either case, if sales don’t match what the publisher paid you as an advance, you’ll never see another penny.

Her contract interpretation section was weak, too.

This is one of those books where if you have a delicate, literary, sensitive soul, then it might work for you. If you want more useful data, without the constant urging to examine your feelings and see a therapist because — the trauma! — you managed to write a book, found an agent, found a publisher, and thus need someone to help you manage the angst of it all, then look elsewhere.

I highly recommend Jane Friedman’s book, The Business of Being a Writer. Like Ms. Maum, Ms. Friedman aims her book at new writers emerging from MFA programs and hoping to write literature as opposed to Werewolf Bondage Porn. Unlike Ms. Maum, Ms. Friedman doesn’t waste pages on the need for therapy and managing your relatives’ disappointing responses. She discusses the ins and outs of contracts. She recognizes how criminally inadequate MFA programs can be, instructing their students in the fine arts while neglecting those pesky money and contract issues.

Unlike Ms. Maum’s book, Ms. Friedman’s book is also useful for indie writers who would never go near an MFA program. They write Werewolf Bondage Porn and need to better handle the piles of money they make.

Every writer should understand the basics of contracts, starting with the idea that if you can’t understand the contract, pay your lawyer to explain it until you do. Do not sign anything without understanding exactly what you are signing away. Your own lawyer, whom you pay yourself, will be far more reliable on the subject than either your agent or — shudder — your publisher.

I’m not the correct person for Ms. Maum’s book. Unless you’re a dainty-minded MFA student, you probably aren’t either. In either case, I recommend you get Ms. Maum’s book from the library. Your tax dollars already paid for it, so take advantage of them.

But before you do, check out Jane Friedman’s book first. It’s far more useful.

Postscript: Lest you think I was too hard on Ms. Maum and her cri di coeur for therapy for misunderstood and unappreciated writers laboring at their laptops in coffee shops, I must tell you a story.

I was giving this review one last pass when Younger Son (aka Bunny despite having shot up to six feet tall) came home from work. He had an exciting day, performing hard, dirty manual labor in the cold, removing the enormous light-up frames for Hersheypark’s Sweet Lights display.

He got stabbed in the eye by an errant guywire.

He’s still got his left eye, along with a big bloody bruise in the sclera, a trip to the local MedExpress office care of Hershey Entertainment and Resorts, and a trip to the CVS to get his antibiotic prescription. He went back to work and finished out the day. According to him, the doctor said he’d heal but another quarter-inch and we wouldn’t be having this written conversation. Bunny would be undergoing emergency surgery for his left eye. A deeper wound would have been even more devastating. Lost eye. Brain damage. Disability. Death.

But Bunny was spared and he might remember to wear his safety goggles after this instead of leaving them in his backpack.

Ms. Maum is currently leveraging Before and After the Book Deal into online classes. If you’re interested in learning more from her or about her, follow her adventures at https://www.courtneymaum.com/ Ms. Maum has written three novels as well as Before and After the Book Deal. You can learn about them at her website too.

If you want to purchase her book (which I don’t recommend since your library has a copy you can borrow for free) here’s the link.

If you want to purchase Jane Friedman’s much better book The Business of Being a Writer go here.