How Does the Book Serve the Writer?
Helping a writer think about how their book will function in the context of their larger goals.
A whole bunch of new subscribers came here as a result of Suzy Vitello’s new novel, Bitterroot. Cheryl Strayed wrote a post about Suzy and the book (which Suzy was working on at a retreat I ran in Maine a few years ago) and Suzy recommends my Substack on her Substack (which is called Let's Talk About Writing), and that’s how you landed here. Thanks to Suzy for highlighting my work — and welcome, new readers!
I am the founder and CEO of Author Accelerator, a company that trains and certifies book coaches. I write about how to help writers do their best work — which sometimes means I am talking about how to write good books, and sometimes means I am talking about being an entrepreneur, and always means I am talking about the creative process.
If you have never heard about book coaching and you are thinking, Wait I need a book coach! check out the 101 series here to learn what book coaches do and then go to authoraccelerator.com/matchme to search our directory of certified coaches and find someone awesome who can help you develop your book and navigate the path to publishing.
If you have never heard about book coaching and you are thinking, Wait I think this might be my dream job! check out the 101 series and then go to bookcoaches.com/abc to watch the FAQ videos. If you would like a coupon to take the course on that page for free, DM me here.
Now onto today’s regular programming…
I wrote a post a few weeks ago about how to take a manuscript from good to great. There is another piece to that puzzle that I want to talk about today, which is helping a writer think about how their book will function in the context of their larger goals.
A book isn’t made in a vacuum and it doesn’t function in a vacuum, either. Every writer is starting a business, whether or not they admit that reality, or embrace it. A book coach needs to help writers think about that business and what role the book is going to play in it.
Do they hope writing a book will allow them to write another book? Many fiction writers just want to keep writing books and publishing success means they can continue doing what they love. They want, in other words, to launch a career as a storyteller.
Do they want to make an impact? Many memoir writers want to prevent other people from suffering in the particular way they did. Knowing how they will connect with their ideal readers — how exactly will they use the book to teach and inspire — is key.
Do they hope it will make them money and if so, how much money? Just any dollar amount so that they can call themselves a “real” writer? Enough to afford a nice vacation every year? Enough to quit their day job? While you can’t control how a book will do in the marketplace, someone whose primary goal is to make money may approach the work differently than someone whose primary goal is to write the story of their heart.
Are they looking to boost their reputation? Be seen as a thought leader? Get invited to bigger podcasts and bigger stages?
Is the book the cornerstone of a business plan that involves consulting, teaching, or launching other ventures?
For a nonfiction writer, these are not only questions about goals. They are questions that will inform the structure of the book and need to be asked at the start of the writing process — or if you aren’t lucky enough to be there at the start, as part of the revision process.
To show you how to think about how a nonfiction book can serve a writer, I’m going to share the story of my client, Renee Guilbuilt.
Everything And The Kitchen Sink
When Renee first came to me, she had a gazillion ideas — a spreadsheet with dozens of tabs, hundreds of entries, and thousands (?) of stories she wanted to tell. It was a monster brain dump of a document and she had no vision for the book she wanted to write or how that book might serve the other things she wanted to create and to launch.
She knew she wanted to capture her ideas about the food industry in a book — the amazing career opportunities that were available for people who stuck with it the way she did, as well as the power the industry has to address some of the biggest social and cultural issues of our time and the way certain players were abusing that power — but she was overwhelmed. She came to me to help her sort everything out.
We set aside the giant spreadsheet and worked through the 14 steps of the Blueprint process, answering the core questions about what the book was and who it was for.
Simple But Profound
The questions in the Blueprint are simple. You can toss them off in a hot second if you want to, but if you spend reflecting on them and allow someone else to push you to be more specific, to go deeper, and to choose, they can be profound.
Renee’s answers were full of fire and her story was inspiring. She never finished high school. She got a job at California Pizza Kitchen that lasted a week, then she got a job at a food packager, where she learned, among other things, that the divine smell that comes from packaged mac and cheese was the result of a chemical powder. These were entry-level jobs, low-paying, and sometimes demeaning. But Renee learned how to do them well. She fought her way up the ladder. She endured.
Along the way, Renee became interested in food as a vehicle for pleasure and communion — she threw epic dinner parties and started to play around with scratch cooking — but she also became interested in the complex global industry that exists to feed all the people on the planet. Why were things done the way they were done? Why was there so much waste and deceit? Why was there so much neglect?
She went to a prestigious cooking school to become a chef, worked in kitchens across Europe, and kept learning and looking around for how to do things in ways that were both better for the people eating the food and better for business. Eventually, she became head of food for companies such as Le Pain Quotidian and Google, where she finally had the power to effect change at scale.
When Renee came to me, she was a new mom who was running a food consulting business — and she had thoughts. People tend not to think of the food industry as a place to have a “real” job or make a global impact, but Renee knew there was wild opportunity, especially for marginalized people and people who didn’t thrive in traditional educational settings. In the food industry, you could make a very nice life for yourself. You could do work that has deep meaning. You could work on the biggest problems that plague our society and our planet.
But what was the book going to be, exactly? And how was it going to serve her larger vision?
The first key question we had to solve was who the book was going to be for? The entry-level food worker who only saw their job as a dead-end? That food worker’s manager, who desperately needed them to stick with the job so they didn’t have to find and train someone new? That manager’s regional VP, who was wrestling with supply chains and how to get enough antibiotic-free chicken for the chicken salad that was just put on the menu? The CEO, who was beholden to stockholders but also in a position to have massive impact on issues such as plastic recycling, food labeling, and the obesity epidemic? How could one book speak to all those potential readers (and were all those people potential readers?)
As we worked through the Blueprint, Renee honed her answer and her vision.
How Does the Book Serve The Writer?
Renee wanted to work with the biggest food companies in the world to effect change. She wanted to teach them what she had learned about people, menus, and the planet. The book would serve as a foundational text for her ideas. She would build classes and curriculum based on the content. She would form partnerships to spread the ideas. She would reach those low-wage workers she felt such empathy for, by reaching the people at the top of the literal food chain. She would empower the middle managers in the same way.
From these beginnings, Renee crafted a TOC that told a story — and she bravely fought the impulse to try to cram everything in. (An agent who I sadly can’t remember calls this the “no notecard left behind” impulse.) She created an elegant framework for thinking about food called Mise Mode, which became the branding for her online classes and workshops.
Renee wrestled with her material — sometimes in a way that felt really physical. For instance, she wanted to include recipes in the book. She’s a chef, she loves food, and she wanted to inspire people through food. So she tested recipes, wrote them in an engaging way, and put dozens of them in the manuscript as full-page images. I found those images and recipes distracting, and was worried about a book that was part-cookbook, part call-to-arms to the world of food. It would be hard to produce and might be hard to market.
We just kept talking and thinking and organizing the material until it felt right — and Renee held on tight to the recipes at every turn. (I’ll get back to the recipes and will share one in a moment!)
Writing Forward
Over the next year, Renee wrote her manuscript, getting up at 4 a.m. to write (remember she had a small child) and never backing down from her commitment to excellence. She threw out chapters, started again, revised, and stuck with the process until she had something that not only carried her message but would help her in her mission.
I gave her editorial feedback, asked a ton of questions, and held her accountable to her goals. When the book was complete, I helped her develop a book proposal, a pitch strategy, and a query letter.
Here is the final query, which perfectly encapsulates her vision for the book:
Dear Agent,
Most people in the food world are not famous chefs with sharp knives and sharp tongues. It’s a trillion-dollar industry in America, and it is filled with everyday people, most of whom actually started in a restaurant as a first job. While there are hundreds of books about cooking each season, and there are always books about food celebrities, there are seldom books about making a career in the world of food. The industry is often overlooked and underestimated as a real career choice for many reasons, but the food world and particularly the restaurant industry is wild with the opportunity to impact and to lead, especially for women, minorities, and people not served by traditional schooling. I want to crack open the conversation. There are things wrong with this industry to be sure, but there is so much that is right about it, too – even after COVID. No one knows how or when the industry will rebound, but we all know it will -- not only because it is the third largest expense after housing and transportation in American households, but because everybody has to eat. And pretty much everybody in the world loves food.
It’s Not About the Knife is my love letter to the industry and my invitation for people to be a part of it. It is a book about leadership in food and why the food world is such an amazing place to have a career. It includes my story of climbing the ladder, some recipes that help tell the tale, and a call-to-action for those of us who stay in the business, because once you become a leader in food, you really can change the world.
My first jobs in the industry were typical low wage, hourly jobs, yet I ended up having a long and rewarding career running restaurants, developing recipes served all over the globe, and travelling the world. I led the food and beverage platforms for two major international food brands, Pret A Manger in the US and Le Pain Quotidien globally. I went from running a kitchen of 10 employees in my first kitchen management role to overseeing 1200+ employees in operations with 40+ restaurants and serving over 70,000 meals a day at Google. I am a Le Cordon Bleu-trained Chef and run a food consulting company, Essayer Consulting. Oh, and I am a high school dropout. The food world welcomed me with open arms and now I want to swing the door wide open for others as they find their way.
This is my first book. I am pitching to a select group of agents and chose you because it is clear from the books you represent that you love food and might just understand what I am seeking to do here.
I appreciate your consideration.
Publishing
After considering agents and traditional publishers — who were having a hard time understanding how to sell the book, since it was about food but wasn’t a cookbook or a celebrity bio — Renee decided to publish with Page Two, a hybrid publisher with an amazing track record and two women founders Renee felt a deep connection to.
The Page Two team made the book so much sharper. This was the final result:
And does the book include recipes? A few. Page Two suggested creating a second book of recipes, which was a brilliant and delightful way to approach the challenge of so many recipes. This is the result:
.
Launching the Book
Renee orchestrated a book launch, creating a buzz-worthy video series with some luminaries from the world of food:
She landed big press opportunities:
She built the Mide Mode courses she had envisioned and began to form the kinds of partnerships she dreamed about:
The Ripples Spread
A few weeks ago, Renee announced the launch of a TV show, a cooking show, that she would host in partnership with her uncle, Harry Hamlin.
In all the years I worked with Renee, I had no idea she was related to a famous actor. It never came up.
And she did not have visions of staring in a cooking show — but can you see how it all connects to the vision she did have: to spread her love of food, to help people connect to each other through food, and to talk about what makes food healthy and good on each of our tables and in the wider world. It all fits — and I would venture to say that it fits because she did the hard work of articulating her vision in the first place.
Here’s the announcement she made about the cooking show and the trailer for it:
I can honestly say that I did not have co-hosting a scratch-cooking docuseries with my dear Uncle Harry Hamlin, on my bingo card at any point in the last 3 decades – but here we are. I am officially a 47-year old nepo baby!
As someone who has been privileged to spend the last 30 years (yep, it’s been 30 years!) in various roles across the food industry, and in both private and public sectors, working with organizations and clients dedicated to positively impacting their communities and the planet through food experiences – there has been one common thread.
Fresh food, scratch-cooked, lovingly prepared.
So, how did this cooking show come to be?
Over the past decade, Uncle Harry became fairly well-known for his scratch-cooking due to all the delicious meals he served for Lisa and the girls on her reality tv show. Especially his famous Bolognese!
His incredible home network, AMC Networks, asked him to do a cooking show, and he would not do it unless I did it with him (because he says he’s not a “real” cook, but let’s be honest – that’s totally not true 😊).
And I said mmmmm… “not sure about this” because I’m a happily middle-aged, non-celeb mortal and a “behind the scenes” kind of human, and because I believe strongly that a lot of today’s culinary programming is a barrier to getting folks joyfully cooking in their kitchens.
A barrier because it’s either too perfect or too time intensive, or too performative, or too stressful (I don’t need to make a 6-layer cake in under an hour… ever…?) but it sure can be fun to watch.
To participate in a show that could become a "love letter to cooking" and celebrate the true joy that sharing meals together brings? THAT would be really cool.
So, after a year+ of development in collaboration with the phenomenal AMC Content Room Team Katherine Dore, Kevin A. Howard, Bill Trojanowski, Michael Greaney and so many others, "In the Kitchen with Harry Hamlin" was born.
The show's focus: simple, easy recipes for dinner parties (so you can actually enjoy your party and not get stuck in the kitchen!)
Emmy-nominated dream team Sheena Joyce and Don Argott, the visual storytellers behind the incredible 2023 documentary KELCE (unsurprisingly, the most watched sports documentary in Amazon Prime’s history!), produced and directed the series for AMC and I could not be more grateful or thrilled with how the show has turned out.
I laughed, I cried, I winced, and ultimately my heart expanded with the gift of a new world of people I truly adore and for this really precious gift of getting to spend, time hanging out and cooking with my UH.
I hope you will get a chance to check it out on AMC+ or IFC – Episode 1 was a really dear Holiday special, released in December (featuring our family incl. Harro Meijran!) New episodes premiere on May 14th.
Above all, I hope the show inspires you to grab your friends and families and get in the kitchen and get cooking. 🙌
So Does All Of This Sell Books?
Maybe. Maybe not. But Renee is now in the business of selling her point — in books, in courses, in consulting, on a cooking show, in all the fantastic things she’s creating (which she can’t yet share publicly yet, but are so cool.) The book is one pillar of a larger plan to use her experience and knowledge to make an impact.
Because of the thought she put into her book, Renee is in a position to be having important conversations, making big moves, and launching an unexpected, but totally on-point TV show.
The work of coaching a nonfiction book is not just about the book. It’s about how that book will serve the writer once it’s out in the world, how it will carry their vision and their message, how it will help them with their wider mission.
Recipe
I promised a recipe! Here is Renees’s recipe for Bolognese sauce.
Bonus Post!
Author Accelerator Certified Book Coach Christine Sheehy, who lives in New Zealand, just wrote a blog that captures what working with clients in this way feels like. It’s a great post!
Fascinating case study, Jennie. I was particularly interested in the discipline of outlining the book, throwing out what wasn't needed and distilling the purpose. Thanks so much for sharing this.
This is a WONDERFUL post, Jennie. Thank you. Such a great story, so well told -- inspiring on many levels.