207 Mary DeMuth: “Re-Story” Your Life

Mary deMuth is an inspiring author of 35 books, an entrepreneur who helps business leaders grow their influence and impact by writing their story at her company Book Launch Mentor, and a podcaster who brings her faith to the world with Pray Every Day.  Mary shares her entrepreneurial journey, how entrepreneurs must find their true authentic voices as they “re-story” their lives, her latest book The Seven Deadly Friendships – How to Heal When Painful Relationships Eat Away at Your Joy and why relationships matter.

Melinda Wittstock:         Mary, welcome to Wings.

Mary De Muth                  Thank you so much for having me. It’s a delight to be here.

Melinda Wittstock:         Well, I am so grateful to have you on as well and I think I might have to ask you to do a prayer for all of us a little bit later. Before I do that, so many entrepreneurs, in particular women entrepreneurs, when we’re trying to figure out how to make a market for ourselves and grow our businesses, it’s really important to emerge as thought leaders. The book is a critical part of that. I know you mentor so many authors. What stands in the way between say me and my book or just getting going? How do you start I guess if you know that you need to go out there and write a book?

Mary De Muth                  This is more my career, so I’m coming at it from kind of a career perspective. One of the things that I learned through reading “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell is that 10,000 hours of applied practice. I spent definitely 10,000 hours writing unpublished words so that when I got to the place of being published, it came very quickly to me. What I mean to say by that is that writing is a muscle. I’m currently on like a five day streak of not working out and I know that when I go work out tomorrow, I’m going to be humiliated and my muscles are going to hurt because I haven’t been practicing it. That’s how writing is too.

If you can make a choice to choose to write a certain amount of words per day for a month, and you can like the weekends off if you want, you will be surprised at how quickly you’ll have a book. Let’s say you write a thousand words a day. Now that’s kind of a high amount, but that’s basically three written double-spaced pages; a little bit more than that. If you do that everyday, in a week you’ll have 5,000 words. By the end of the month, you’ll have 20,000 words. In two and a half months, you’ll have a book written. It’s just as simple as that. You have to overcome yourself.

One of the things that I do is I’ll create a little chart, just an Excel, where there’s a box for every unit that I am going to create. There’s a thousand word box and there’s like 50 of them because a typical nonfiction book is 50,000 words. Everyday I have to fill in and color that box. It is highly motivational to me. I’m very literal and I’m very visual. To see the fact that, “Oh My Gosh, I’ve to fill in my box today,” that really helps me to accomplish a book.

Melinda Wittstock:         Oh, that’s so interesting. I mean really is just about starting. I think so often we can all fall under this trap of procrastinating or trying to make perfect, the enemy of the good. Like I’ll start the book when, right?

Mary De Muth                  Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah. What’s your best advice for people? I mean it really just is at the end of the day if you’re going to do it, you just have to start and not get stressed out about your sentence like, “Oh, that sentence is not perfect.” Do you recommend just writing?

Mary De Muth                  Yeah. Anne Lamott in her “Bird by Bird,” she talks about writing really bad first drafts. She uses some more colorful word that that.

Melinda Wittstock:         It’s okay. You can swear on this podcast.

Mary De Muth                  It’s there. I have found that a visual helps me because having gone to high school and college, I was an English major in college, I had all these professors and English teachers who said all sorts of things to me. They were standing on my shoulder and they were yelling in my ear and they were preventing me from writing that first draft. I’ve had to dethrone them. I have to take them off my shoulder and take them like screaming, “Ah,” and put them on a shelf and kind of put them behind something. Once I’ve dethroned them, I can go ahead and write the bad first draft. I give myself permission.

I know that I’ll go back and edit it, but in order for the creative flow to happen and to get into that state of flow, you have to freeze that editor inside of you. Get rid of the English teacher or you will never write a word of your book. I remember I was at a conference once and there was an agent, a literary agent who was teaching a class. He pointed out to this man in the back of the room, which was super scary and awkward, but he said, “You.” The guy’s like, “What?” He said, “You have edited the life out of your book. There’s no more you left.” We also have to be super careful that we’re not so worried about the grammar that we take our personalities out of the text.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah, this is really true. Speaking as someone who understands a thing or two about marketing and some of the companies and what not that I’ve built, that authenticity really is everything. Sally Hogshead says this really well. I mean really your mission is to be more of you. Not the same as everybody else. More of you. That means everything that makes you differentiated and different and finding your own voice. Do you think it’s imperative for entrepreneurs to have books these days?

Mary De Muth                  I do. They are an amazing business card and they give you credibility. Whether they’re long or short, I mean these days I think people have shorter attention span, so there’s ways that you can create content that the book is only 10,000 words, which is really not a lot to write, but I do think it’s important. It helps people to see that you are an expert in that area.

Melinda Wittstock:         Right. No, it’s really true. I see a lot of people using books as lead magnets for their programs or for their companies. It’s a must do. What do you think of all the folks out there, like I mean there’s Tucker Max’s “Book In A Box” or other folks, Angela Lauria does something as well, where people come in and like basically ghostwrite your book for you and do all the marketing and all of that.

Mary De Muth                  Yeah. I would really like for someone to do that for me, but no. I’ve got a pretty distinctive voice. That’s one of the things that I know I cannot do. I cannot ghostwrite because my voice is too distinctive. I can’t take on someone else’s voice. If you really, really cannot write and it is an extreme struggle for you and you feel like vomiting when you sit in front of your computer, it’s a really great way to go about it. Really good ghostwriters are amazing at capturing your voice. They listen to you. They interview you. They try to capture the cadence of what you say. It’s a really nice option. You will pay for it, but it’s certainly something that’s permissible and helpful if you just can’t do it.

Melinda Wittstock:         What do you think about publishing models? I know there’s a lot of people who think, “Okay. I’ve got to be on The New York Times bestseller list.” That’s a bit of a game, you know, to get there. From what little I know about it, I do know that it’s not necessarily about having a good book.

Mary De Muth                  Right. No, it’s not.

Melinda Wittstock:         Right?

Mary De Muth                  That’s true.

Melinda Wittstock:         Break it down a little bit about the difference between say the advantages or disadvantages of self-publishing versus kind of New York Times bestseller and going for that or some sort of hybrid model?

Mary De Muth                  Right. And so, when I started all of this there was really only one model. The only way was for me to a literary agent and go traditional. There was self publishing way back in the early 2000s, but it was really ugly and not cute all. And people could know. Like, they would see it and it would cost you like $20000 and you’d have this garage full of books and it was really not great. They would just rot in there and be really sad. But, nowadays yeah you’re right. There’s a couple different models. The traditional model is the more, the way that you could land on the New York Times bestseller, although there are self published books that make it on there if they are in stores.

But yeah, that’s the traditional model. The negative side of that is that you do have to go through all the hoops and the gatekeepers. You have to have a literary agent, they have to shop it, the publisher has to receive it, all that kind of stuff. And you don’t make as much money. So, like on my traditionally published book I’ll make like 79 cents a copy. Whereas if I’m self publishing I can make anywhere between five and eight dollars a copy. But then again, I don’t have the distribution. So, if you have a self published book, like on Create Space or whatever, it will be out there with Amazon and that will be distributed that way but it most likely will not be in stores unless you pay for it to be distributed through like Anchor one of those other entities. And in that case then you can have the joy of going into a bookstore and seeing on the shelf.

Although I think that since Amazon’s kind of taking over the world, we’re moving more toward buying our books online than we do on book stores. I still love a bookstore, I still love the smell of books. All of that. But that’s just kind of the way things are. And then hybrid would be there’s companies out there that will kind of help you and shepherd you through the process and you can do either an offset print or print on demand. So, print on demand is what Create Space does on Amazon. It means when someone buys the book then they print and ship in that moment. Offset printing is what would be like a traditional book. You for print run.

Now, I had a book that I shopped to all the publishers and they said, “We don’t think there’s a market for it.” It was about recovery from sexual abuse. They’re all freaked out by it.

Melinda Wittstock:         No market for it? Oh my God.

Mary De Muth                  I know. Hello? Whatever. I’m sure they’re regretting it now. I decided that I still felt like it needed to be a book and I wanted it to be offset printed because I wanted to donate a book to prisons and to halfway houses and to trafficked victims and all of that. And I knew that if I had an offset print it would be much cheaper. So, for 5000 copes it was about a dollar a copy. So, less than a greeting card. And so, I crowd funded that book using Indie Gogo but you could also use Kickstarter and some of those other crowdfunding platforms. Hoping to raise $10000 to be able to run that print run and do all the editing and the interior format, exterior format, and that.

Ended up raising $25000 and was able to do all the other things. Like an audio book and all of that. And it was an amazing thing and I’m really grateful that I did it. So, I have experienced all three.

I have traditional published, I have indie published, I have e-published, I’ve done all those thing. Offset versus POD and all of them are just different models. That was a really long answer, sorry.

Melinda Wittstock:         No, but it’s really, really helpful. I mean, I think a lot of people get stuck with all that and they just really don’t know, you know? What the best way to go is. I love that you did the crowd funding model for that too because in a way, you know, and I think about this in the context of technology entrepreneurs as well, or people who are building products. It’s a great way to market test your idea. It’s not just about funding, it’s marketing.

Mary De Muth                  Yeah, and I had this sudden list of people who were so excited about that book and they were able to get it and it was amazing. I had this built in list, and I still have that list to this day and I market very specific things to that list about sexual abuse recovery and I’m so grateful for it.

Melinda Wittstock:         That’s awesome. So, what made you want to be a writer? When did you start?

Mary De Muth                  When I was really, really young. I was always writing. And I grew in kind of a difficult home and I think a lot of listeners would share that story as well. But one of things that would happen in my house … I had a mom who would say one thing and the next day I would be like, “Hey, remember that thing you said?” And she would say something like, “I never said that. I don’t know what you’re talking.” And it was super crazy making. So, part of the reason I wrote in journals was just to make sure I wasn’t crazy. So, I would write it down and then she should say she didn’t say that, and then I would go back to my journal and be like, “Okay, I’m not crazy.” I didn’t run it in her face as a nice little kid, but it was just helpful for me.

And then, like I said, I was an English major in college. But the moment I gave birth to my first child who was a girl, I don’t know what happened with the placenta, but the moment I birthed her, almost the first thought out of my head was, “I need to write a book.” That journey took about ten years from just thinking about it to actually doing it. But there was just something that happened. I don’t know what that’s about, but I knew. I’ve always kind of known I was a writer and that was the beginning of that journey.

Melinda Wittstock:         So, you have a new book coming out soon and you’re in the throes of all the promotion for it and everything. We can talk about what that actually means, as well. We talked a little bit about the writing. But first, tell everybody about your new book.

Mary De Muth                  Yeah. It’s called The Seven Deadly Friendships. How to heal when people relationships eat away at your joy. And there’s popsicles on the cover because I thought, you know this book kind of sounds like a downer. So we need some popsicles to make it less stressful.

So, I wrote that book because I felt like there weren’t a lot of books out there about friendship, toxic friendship recovery. There was like divorce recovery books out there. But what happens when you find yourself in a toxic relationship? Or why do you keep attracting toxic relationships? And this absolutely applies to business people as well. Some of my most painful relationships that I had to break up with were people that I did business with. Predatory, narcissistic, sociopathic. Those were terrible. And the hard thing with those kind of relationship is that it affects your bottom line. There’s a fear there of breaking up with someone like that because they could harm you.

It’s just really rubber meets the road. In our personal life but also in our business life.

Melinda Wittstock:         I love that and I love how you applied it there, especially for our audience to business. Because you can sometimes, especially in the startup stages where you need revenue, right? So badly. And so often we’ll compromise our values or we’ll do business with somebody that really, it’s a toxic relationship. Or we’ll compromise ourselves or over deliver, not create boundaries around ourselves. That can be more costly in the end than having the right clients. Sometimes it’s better just to say no. So, what advice for people do you have about being able to recognize who you should be working with from like … As you build a team. As you go and get customers and clients. You really have to know yourself, right? To know what it is you actually want and who you should be working with.

Mary De Muth                  Exactly. And you need to know your emotional landscape really well. And I think one of the good ways to figure that is to ask yourself when you leave the room, after you’ve been with that person, or off the phone, do you feel weird? Do you feel like, “Ugh. I don’t want to ever have to talk to them again.” I mean, that’s a really strong indication. And then like you said, to know yourself. So, when I first started mentoring writers it was all new writers and I realized I started getting really frustrated because I was too far along to bring them farther along, if that makes sense. The gap was too wide and I was constantly frustrated with where they were and where I was.

And so, I had to kind of close shop. I did something called the writing slaw where I was helping new writers. And know I help more advanced writers, or writers that are wanting to launch their books, for instance, ’cause they’ve already gone through that process. And so, I had to know myself. I had to look at why I was so upset and why I was kind of angry after I’d get off a phone call with someone. And that helped me to understand, okay I just need a different kind of client.

Melinda Wittstock:         That’s great advice for coaches. I heard somebody say this, I wish I could remember now, I’m having a little bit of a senior moment … Who said this. But say for instance if you apply high school to it. Like, a senior is best placed to help a junior, and a junior is best placed to help a sophomore. Like, you just need to be a little bit more ahead of the people that you are teaching. ‘Cause if there is that gap, yeah it can get kind of frustrated. Or, you’ve gotten so far ahead you can forget, easily, what it was like. Unless you’re a highly empathetic person, what it was like in that stage of a company.

I know we have a lot of coaches listening, a lot of people who do information products and programs and that sort of thing. And so, so you find your own clientele really through your own experience, I guess primarily. Are there any other ways that people can read your book, to go to the emotional landscape …

Mary De Muth                  Sure, yes. That’d be great.

Melinda Wittstock:         Are there other tactics though that one can deploy?

Mary De Muth                  Yeah. There’s another really great book out there called Safe People by Henry Cloud. Just really helpful to help you navigate. Another one that’s really good, I believe it’s by the same author and it’s called Necessary Endings and it’s actually a business book. And that actually was helpful to me in both realms. Both in my business and also personally about how not every relationship is supposed to go on forever and ever, amen. There’s times when you need to have a necessary ending. Or in the entrepreneurial space, sometimes you have to close up shop and say, “Okay, this is over. I’m going to take a deep breath and I’m going to forgot about, or try to forget about, all the work that I did and move on because I think there’s something better for me.”

I’ve done it a lot. I’ve done it in my branding on my website, I’ve rebranded myself a couple times. And I find that a lot of times authors are afraid of that. They think, well this is my brand forever and ever. But I grew past them. I grew beyond them. And I had to move to what the next thing was for me.

Melinda Wittstock:         I love this. Because this brings up in business the concept of scale. And so, who you are being when you’re the scrappy, startup entrepreneur and you’re doing all of it, is very different from who you need to be when you’re getting to the six figures and the high six figures, and a million dollars, or you know, and hopefully you’re beyond that three percent that never … You know, only three percent makes it to a million dollars. Three percent of women. And so, there’s so much in that scaling and growing process that you have to let go to able to get to the next level and things get uncomfortable and difficult and people who were in the right seats in your company at a certain level … Suddenly it’s not working anymore, or whatever. And they need to either leave or new seats. Sometimes you have to fire yourself.

Mary De Muth                  Yeah, exactly.

Melinda Wittstock:         Like sometimes you’re not the right person and maybe it’s time to hire a CEO for your own company. Those sorts of things. But it really comes down to that, really being very honest with ourselves. I always think that business growth is really about personal growth.

Mary De Muth                  Yep. I definitely echo that, and that book Necessary Endings by Cloud is so great. So, I would highly recommend it to your listeners.

Melinda Wittstock:         I love that though, when you were talking about rebranding too. That we really need to be open to reinvented ourselves. We have so many acts, I guess, in our lives and not being stuck to what worked in the past doesn’t necessarily work in the future. And so, trying to untethered to all of that. And it can be tricky, right? ‘Cause we get very attached.

Mary De Muth                  Yeah, and I would also just leave a caveat or a caution about gurus. So, when I started this branding journey I hired a guru and he told me that my branding statement was turning trials to triumph. And it really didn’t fit me because, first of all, I didn’t really like the world triumph. It felt kind of, “Ra ra ra.” And I just didn’t-

Melinda Wittstock:         Masculine, maybe?

Mary De Muth                  Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. It just didn’t feel right. And trials sounded like a Debbie Downer, like, “Wa wa.” So, finally as I went through a process and I asked all of my readers, I looked up my list and I asked them, “What’s the one thing you think of when you think of me?” And they didn’t ever say this phraseology, but after all of study I came up with, “Live un-caged.” Which totally fit me because, you know, you’re not the same as you used to be and you’re being set free and you’re going to live … and obviously for your podcast listeners, there are wings involved and all of that.

And that worked for a really long time because what I was doing was telling my story to un-cage others. To set them free so that they would know that they’re not alone. But, in the past year or so I realized that wasn’t fitting me anymore, that I was now in a place where I wanted to shepherd or help people tell their own stories and not just to tell them and to be set free, but to do something about it in the world. So, they needed to have a so what to their story.

And so then, my new branding is, “Restory.” Not restore, but re-story. And just that idea of re-storying your life: Taking your old story, learning from it, and then going out and changing the world with it. And so, that just gives you kind of the journey that I’ve been on in the branding space.

Melinda Wittstock:         I love that. So, I want to talk to you a little bit about what led you to create a podcast and a podcast, in particular, that praying is … You pray everyday on your podcast. Tell me how that came about.

Mary De Muth                  Yeah, so this is actually my third podcast. The first one was called Live Uncaged, so it was connected to the un-caged thing and the second one was called the Restory Show where I had people on, really ordinary people that no one knew but I just wanted to hear their stories, so that was that. Then just released a book this year called Jesus Every Day and it was a book where I prayed for the reader.

So I was in my Mastermind Group, the beginning of this year, and I would highly recommend the Mastermind Group to anybody out there listening. We’ve been together about eight years and this has absolutely changed my life but they were like, “Hey, you’re a good podcaster,” whatever, ” … you should pray for people every day.” My first thought was, you people are dumb and crazy, I am not going to do that because it’s so much work. But as I thought about it, they were right and so it just mimics that book that came out and started in February. Yeah, so every day I read a verse from the Bible and then I pray for five minutes and that’s it, it’s really simple.

Melinda Wittstock:         That’s wonderful. So when you think of where women are right now, in the context of … my goodness, so much going on in society at the moment, but in the context of business where, as I see it, I see women doing amazing things but often we are succeeding in silence. Recently I was speaking at the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce and one of my fellow panelists asked this room of 150 women if they could name five female entrepreneurs and there was this really long silence, like embarrassing silence and then finally my … It was Julia Pimsleur, who’s been a guest on Wings Of Inspired Business and she said, “Oh my goodness, Spanx?” And so someone said, “Oh, oh right, Sarah Blakely.” Then someone said, “Oh, Oprah? Ann Taylor?”

Mary De Muth                  Oh yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:         And then there was more prompting, like Julia again said, “Expensive flip flops anybody?” And someone said, “Tori Burch.” But it was really actually a little bit depressing because there are women out there who are doing amazing game changing technologies. I think of Ping Fu who invented 3D printing or women like Kara Goldin who has a billion dollar company now around fruit flavored water. Women doing amazing things and so we’re suffering in silence. On the other hand though, we have a lot of women with tremendous potential but stuck on the start-up sticky floor, underpricing themselves, kind of over-delivering, kind of in isolation, stuck in perfectionism, that kind of thing. So if you were to think of a prayer for women entrepreneurs, I mean what would it be?

Mary De Muth                  Yeah, it certainly would be some of the language that you just said about God unsticking us from that sticky floor and giving us the wings, like you said, to fly and to move beyond and to have the wisdom and insight to know when to move on and when to promote and when not to. I think that’s one of the things that I personally struggle with. I’m not a me monster. I hate promotion. I know it’s a necessary evil but I’m constantly praying about that, like what’s too much, what’s not enough? So yeah, all those elements would be in there, definitely. But also kind of the idea of shining. I’m an advocate for sexual abuse victims and that’s kind of been the place where I have been on CNN and other places with that message and I still feel small, which is weird. So just that permission to shine, permission to have our voices, permission to not say I’m sorry all the time, but permission to really walk into who we are.

Melinda Wittstock:         Oh my goodness, this is one thing that I see in our conversation, women generally, words … and I see myself doing this, it might be because I’m Canadian, I say I’m sorry all the time-

Mary De Muth                  It’s very Canadian, you’re right.

Melinda Wittstock:         But what am I sorry for and what did I do? But even so, women do that a lot more than men and we’re often very quick to step out of the way or let someone else speak instead and one of my guests on this podcast said that we confuse personal branding with personal bragging and we’re really afraid to show up in our truth. I think it might be that we’re so collaborative and relationship oriented by nature, it’s sometimes easier to praise another woman than ourselves. So when we’re working collaboratively in a network, we would say, “Hey, check out Mary’s thing.” And Mary can say, “Hey, check out Melinda’s thing.” Right? And we do that for each other. I think we’re unstoppable.

Mary De Muth                  Yes, it’s really, really true. There’s a proverb that I go to that I love and it is, “Let someone else promote you and not the words of your own mouth.” I think there’s a lot of power to that. Not to diminish the fact that we also need to stand up in ourselves but I think beautiful, amazing marketing is learning how to bring people alongside you. So as I’m launching a book, for instance, I’m telling a lot of stories. I’m trying to tell stories that … I believe marketing is just storytelling, but I try to tell stories that say, “Hey, I’ve been in this place too, have you ever had this experience?” And then they are able to say, “Yes, I have.” And then they are more apt to say, “Gosh, that piece of information, or that podcast or whatever really helped me.” Then they share it, because when they promote me, it’s so much more powerful than when my own voice is doing it because it’s not me doing it, if that makes sense.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah, no it does. There’s actually some interesting stats on this that we’re 12 times more likely to believe a non-interested partner, sort of like a third party, than we are to believe the person who is … or the brand or the business, whatever, that’s doing the direct sell. There’s another one that’s really interesting too, that 92% of us don’t even make a decision about what to purchase without some sort of third party validation from somebody on social media.

Mary De Muth                  Wow.

Melinda Wittstock:         92%.

Mary De Muth                  Wow.

Melinda Wittstock:         So that means, you don’t even know who’s influencing the conversation and you’ve got to be very authentic and connect with them in a way that’s meaningful on a very human level. I find so many brands and businesses don’t know how to do that or are not very inclined because it’s not efficient but it does work.

Mary De Muth                  Well and I experienced it yesterday, I had a coupon that I was applying to a florist and it was not working and so I went on their chat and it was somebody named Jo, which could have been a man or a woman, I don’t know because it was just J-O, and J-O didn’t say anything to me and so I finally tweeted about it because I was so frustrated. I was like, “La, la, la, la, la, why isn’t Jo talking to me?” And I tweeted to both entities and I felt … this is how I felt. I felt like both of them addressed me but I think it’s only because I have 30,000 Twitter followers to be honest. They said, “We want to fix this,” and whatever and it was not a very exciting experience. Both of them were like, “Well it’s kind of your fault.” Or, “You did this wrong,” and I knew I hadn’t done something wrong.

Now this was a really great opportunity for them to just be awesome and say, “We’ll just send those flowers to that person for free and here’s another coupon.” But they didn’t and I think that’s where women entrepreneurs really have an edge in the space because we know what it’s like to really bless the socks off people and go above and beyond to help people and be kind to them. That really, really stands out. If they had done something really outlandish and amazing, kind of the Zappos story which they would-

Melinda Wittstock:         Right, like the pizza delivery, yeah the pizza delivery in New Hampshire or whatever, right?

Mary De Muth                  Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:         I should talk about that, right?

Mary De Muth                  Yes, so that’s … if we could do stuff like that, and I know we’re capable of it, that’s going to really influence market, definitely.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah, no that’s absolutely right because you think that the 30,000 followers you have on Twitter would all go, “Wow, what an amazing company, I’m going to do business with them.” And they would have all started talking about it and there’s so many missed opportunities that you see like that on social media all the time. So do you think that now … I sense this, I think that women really are coming into our power now, that we have … because we’re so mission focused, and also because, certainly my own social analytics company, Verifeed, and we’ve found that companies, brands and businesses that have a social good mission and that they’re authentic about it, that they walk their talk on it, it’s not just a Susan G. Komen ribbon on a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket, you know what I mean?

Mary De Muth                  Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah, right?

Mary De Muth                  I’m sure they actually like doing it and …

Melinda Wittstock:         Right, but those companies really outperform their rivals, call it conscious capitalism or evolved enterprise and I think we women are so wired that way because we go into business to begin with because we want to make the world better or because we have some personal mission or there’s a problem we want to solve to help people.

Mary De Muth                  Exactly, I mean I feel that. I think that was in play when I did the crowdfunding for Not Marked, because there was just so many people, and this was way before Me Too started, and so many people were like, “I can’t tell my story but I’m glad she is and this is going to help my friend.” They saw that there was a need for that product out in the world that was going to help people heal from the past and so I think there is something really important about tying it to mission and like you said, have it be really vulnerably close to your own heart and what you love.

That’s one of the things I say to writers too, you cannot fake passion on a page. And it’s the same in social media, you cannot fake it, it has to be genuinely something you are fired up about. People can detect it on the page. They can detect it in your voice. They can detect it on a podcast. They can tell if you’re passionate about it or if you just are checking off a list of, “Oh these are the things that successful companies do so I guess I’d better do it.”

Melinda Wittstock:         Oh gosh, you’re so right. So Mary, how can people find you and work with you? I want to go through the list, because there’s a number of ways-

Mary De Muth                  There’s a couple.

Melinda Wittstock:         For everybody who’s listening here right now who really wants to get going with their book and maybe needs some help, how can … who do you work with and how can people find you and get your help?

Mary De Muth                  Yeah, so that place is booklaunchmentor.com and I do intensives twice a year in the US and I also do one in Geneva, Switzerland, which is coming up in a couple weeks, which is awesome. Why not learn to write your book in the Alps? I mean that’s my thought.

Melinda Wittstock:         Oh my goodness, I might join you there, that sounds awesome!

Mary De Muth                  Yeah, so I mentor people in those intensives from idea to complete book, to marketing, to promotion, to PR, to all of that. So I take you through the whole process. Yeah, so that’s where that is. People can find out more about me just personally at marydemuth.com, all my books are there. The book that just came out is sevendeadlyfriendships.com so if you want to find out what is one of your toxic relationships, you can take a free quiz there. The podcast is PrayEveryday.show, you can find everything from marydemuth.com so you don’t have to write all these things down.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah, wonderful.

Mary De Muth                  That’s where I’m found, too much.

Melinda Wittstock:         So we’ll have all of that in the show notes as well and Mary, I just want to thank you for putting on your wings and flying with us.

Mary De Muth                  You know, it is great to fly, I love to do it, it’s awesome and thanks so much for having me on.