TCC Podcast #297: How to Write and Publish a Book with Mary Adkins

Our guest for the 297th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is Mary Adkins. Mary is an author and writing coach who helps her clients start and publish a book. She walks through her process to writing her first book and how she’s gone on to publish three. This episode is the journey of getting permission to pursue the passion project that so often gets left on the backburner and to fully embrace where your creativity takes you. And it goes like… Mary’s journey from law to fiction author in the span of a few years. The affirmations Mary kept top of mind when there was too much rejection to count. Feedback – What’s the right way to get feedback without crushing your vision? What is your first draft meant to be? The reality of how we give feedback and why it’s all wrong. How to find the topic you are meant to write about and how to open it with curiosity. Building the skill of perseverance when you feel like your story belongs in the gutter. How to create something new to your project when things get a bit dull and how it can translate to the copywriting world. Where the best place to learn how to write, edit, and pitch a novel. How much money can you really make in the book writing world? Is there room to negotiate? What’s it like to work with a literary agent? Do enneagram types affect the book writing process? The struggles that may get in your way and how to avoid them. How to properly set writing goals based on your enneagram type. The reminders you need to keep in mind during the process of writing and publishing your book. Tune into the episode or read all about it in the transcription below. The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: The Accelerator Waitlist The Copywriter Think Tank Kira’s website Rob’s website Mary's website How Much Money Can an Author Expect to Make on Their Book? Blog The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Free month of Brain.FM     Full Transcript: Rob Marsh:  Do you want to write a book? We've interviewed a couple of book specialists on the podcast over the past couple of years, but in those interviews, we've focused on non-fiction books that you could use to grow your business. But a lot of copywriters want to write something a little more creative, something like a short story or a screenplay, or a novel. Today's guest for the Copywriter Club podcast is best-selling novelist Mary Adkins, who has published three novels and, in addition to writing, helps others figure out how to write and publish their own work. This is a pretty fun discussion that got us thinking about writing something that could be turned into a movie instead of a workshop. If you listen between the lines, there are a lot of good ideas and some good advice that applies to copywriting too. Kira Hug:  But first, this episode of the podcast is sponsored by the Copywriter Accelerator. This is our program designed to give you everything you need to start your copywriting business, to pivot your copywriting business if you're changing it up, or to grow your copywriting business if you feel like you've hit a plateau. We have blueprints, we have structure so you know what to do, or we provide coaching and an incredible community so that you can work through and build your business with your peers and you don't have to do it alone. We're kicking it off in August and you can jump on the waitlist if you want to learn more about that program. Just click on the link in our show notes, and you'll hear more information about it soon. Let's get into our interview with Mary. Mary Adkins:  I always loved creative writing since I was in 7th grade actually is when my English teacher turned me on to creative writing. I loved it and I always wanted to be a writer, but at some point along the way, I don't know, I think I lost some confidence and felt like I needed to do something more practical and wound up in law school, which I actually think is a pretty common path for a lot of writers and a lot of creative people. I went to law school. I liked law school, I really enjoyed it. I liked being a student and I liked learning. That was a good experience, but as soon as I actually became a lawyer after law school, it was pretty clear to me immediately that it was not a good fit for me. I wanted to be writing and that's really what I knew and as soon as I got this job, I don't want to be doing this. I want to be writing. I pretty quickly, under a year left law completely, so that I could prioritize launching a writing career. I quit my job and went back to tutoring to pay my bills, which is what I was doing before I went to law school, and moved apartments, moved to a cheaper apartment. I was living in New York City and had to change my lifestyle to afford it. I would tutor in the evenings and I would write during the day. I didn't know what I wanted to write. I did some freelance copywriting, I did some freelance journalism, I published some personal essays, just got some odd writing jobs here and there. But mostly, I was interested in writing and publishing a book. I knew that that's ultimately what I wanted to do and ideally, more than one, so I set about taking writing classes to figure out how to do that. I started with a memoir. That was my first big idea, was that I was going to write a memoir. I learned how to write and publish a memoir, which is at least at the time, which was, this was 2010, the way that you sold a memoir was on proposal, which is largely still the way it's done. Sometimes it's a little different depending on the type of book and who you are. I put together this memoir proposal and started sending it out to literary agents, which is how you get a traditional publishing book deal still. Long story short, I got a lot of nos, I got a lot of rejections and one of them wrote back though and said, he said, "Well, I could have sold the hell out of this in the 900s, but I can't now, so do you have anything else?" I didn't have anything else, but I think at this point I had learned that you never say that. You never say you don't have something else, so I said, "Well, what could you sell now?" He said, "A novel. Do you have a novel idea?" I actually did have a novel idea. I just hadn't had the confidence to write it yet. I wrote a little paragraph about this novel idea to him and he was the first person I had shared this novel idea with. I wrote it in an email and he wrote back, "Oh, that sounds like, that sounds great. I love this concept, write the novel and then send it to me." That is really what launched my career as a novelist because I didn't realize it at the time, but I didn't have the confidence to write a novel. I think I just thought, "Well, that's something that people who are a lot smarter than me do. I don't know how to do that. I hadn't even written a short story that I liked, so how could I possibly write a novel, much longer fiction?" Getting that permission slip from that literary agent is why I wrote a novel. That novel became my first novel and I've since written and published three, and I think of myself primarily as a novelist. I'm really grateful to him for that because ... and he didn't end up becoming my literary agent, by the way. I did send it to him and once I was finished, he never offered to represent me, but I did find obviously another path to publication through another agent, who is my agent to date and is wonderful. That's essentially my story of getting published. In terms of the program I now run, The Book Incubator, I realized after my first book came out that I had had this kind of long and meandering path to publication. That novel, that first novel that I wrote, came out in 2019, and I had started it in early 2012. It was a seven-year process. I didn't have any regrets about that process, it was my path. It was also, I think, unnecessarily solitary and I learned a lot through trial and error and I hobbled together how to do a lot of things to ultimately write the novel well and get a book deal. I took a lot of classes that were not helpful and that I think actually derailed me for a while, so, I decided to put together what I learned into a writing course. I just started with one course. I'm like, "I'm going to put this course online and I'll teach people what I wish I had known." That first course I put together was just around how to write the novel, how to write the first draft of the novel. People started taking it and they loved it and then they were like, "Well, how do I revise it now?" Then, I put a course together on how to revise the novel, and then they took that and they liked that, and then they were like, "How do I pitch it now? How do I get a book deal?" I put that. Eventually, it grew into this all-inclusive, how-to-write, revise and pitch your book to get a book deal year-long program, which is what I run now, The Book Incubator. Long story short, that's my six-minute version. Rob Marsh:  Lots of stuff to cover in there. I want to go back to when you were just starting out as a writer and that experimentation phase. I have a lot of questions about this, but you were trying a lot of different things. What was it that kept you going? What was it that made you say, "Okay, I'll try this, or I'll try this"? I know you wanted to be a writer, but talk us through that experimentation phase and how you found the path to the thing that you wanted to do. I think a lot of writers get stuck here thinking that, "Well, I want to be a writer, and then maybe I'll have them end up as copywriters because they just never get past the thing," and it's like, "Well, I can make money copywriting," but yeah, talk about that phase for us. Mary Adkins:  When you said, what kept you going? The first thing that came to mind was glimmers of affirmation. I feel whenever I would get, publishing my first essay,