Money, Mindset, and Mission
Money, Mindset, and Mission
Some thoughts (and announcements) about making money and making an impact
In order to keep Author Accelerator healthy and thriving, we are making a significant change to the price and format of the Book Coach Certification Program.
I have written a lot in the last several months about pricing (see the “Pricing” category in the navigation here on Substack to read all the posts) because challenging book coaches around pricing has become a core part of my teaching.
We all come from a culture and an industry that doesn’t value the work of nurturing creativity. We typically pay editors by the word, the page, or the hour for work that is nuanced, emotional, skilled, and highly valued by the writer and the publisher. Part of the reason I continue to do the work of training book coaches is because I want to change this narrative.
I want to teach people how to think of the work they do with writers as transformational, not transactional.
I have seen so many of our certified coaches make this mindset leap and build businesses that are good for them and good for their writers. It’s a win-win-win, The third win in that list is about the world at large, because I believe the world will be a better place when more women (it’s mostly women) who nurture creative work are paid well for what they do.
Walking the Walk
The reason I am saying all this is that over the past few years, I came to see I was not walking the walk in my own business. I was teaching others to make this money mindset shift because I had made it myself in my book coaching career — and I had the receipts to prove it.
But in my work at Author Accelerator, I have been undervaluing what I do and what my team does. I have been holding back from offering the program I know would be most effective for fear that the program would be too expensive.
I’ve made the decision that I do not want to operate from a place of fear. It’s not how I want to work or how I want to lead. The result is that I’m making changes to the program to offer more individual feedback and accountability (the program I know will result in the very best outcomes) and I’m increasing the price.
In 2025, Author Accelerator’s Book Coach Certification program in either fiction, nonfiction, or memoir will be $9,000 for a year of training, feedback, and support, which is an increase from $3,600 for fiction and nonfiction and up from $4,800 for memoir.
The last day to buy at the current price is December 10, 2024. If you want to learn more about our program, I have a brand new on-demand free webinar that comes with a pretty great bonus. You can check it out HERE.
Note that the CONTENT of our book coach certification program is not changing in 2025. If you join now, you get the same content we will be offering in 2025.
That’s a BIG Price Increase!
It is indeed.
And there is one thing about it that bothers me, which is the fact that such a price might make it more difficult for book coaches whose mission is to serve underrepresented writers to get the training they need to make a big impact.
Around the time of George Floyd’s murder, I became aware of how much I was not aware of the systemic inequalities in the world in general and in the publishing industry in particular. I read a lot, I listened a lot, and I reflected a lot on my upbringing and the many privileges I have enjoyed and continue to enjoy.
Rachel Rodgers (an intellectual attorney who is the CEO of HelloSeven and author of We Should All Be Millionaire’s) posted a small business challenge to get us not just to think but to act to change the system, and Trudy LeBron (who has since written a book called The Antiracist Business Book) ran a series of workshops to get us to think about how to act to change the system, and I strove to understand the particular problems with publishing by reading Felicia Rose Chavez (The Anti-Racists Writing Workshop) and Matthew Salesses (Craft in the Real World.) These were just some of the people I tried to learn from.
At Author Accelerator, we instituted a scholarship for BIPOC writers and over the next few years, welcomed about 100 people into our program. We soon realized, however, that if we wanted these students to succeed in their book coaching business, we needed to offer more than just a seat in the course; we needed to offer individualized attention and support. Sometimes you have to take action to realize how to take better action.
We reduced the number of scholarships to just three each year, built a system to offer more support from our staff, and paired the recipients with (some amazing!) certified book coaches who volunteered their time to help the scholarship recipients succeed. The people we awarded those scholarships to in the last few years are incredible and we can’t wait to see what they do in the years to come.
In 2024, we expanded the mission of our scholarship to train book coaches who were in a position to make an impact on any underrepresented writer population and changed the name to the Impact Fellowship. We awarded three Impact Fellowships in the inaugural year. You can read about those three coaches in the “Coach Spotlight” section of this Substack and catch a sense of the incredible impact these people are poised to make.
In 2025, we will be offering one Impact Fellowship. We’re so excited about what someone will be able to do after receiving two years of deep support.
The Impact Fellowship comes with one year of training, feedback, and support and a second year of support in the certified coaches’ membership where we focus on business fundamentals and getting your book coaching business off the ground. We’re looking for an individual with a vision and a mission for reaching underrepresented writers.
The Impact Fellowship application will open in December, but you can read about it and study the application HERE. Please share the link with anyone you believe would be a good fit.
So What About Your Business?
When running a business, we have to care for the business itself first and foremost — to make sure it is thriving and healthy. If we don’t do that, we can’t stay in business, which means we can’t serve anyone.
We also have to care about the people we serve and ensure they are getting the results they want and need from us.
And then there is caring about our industry and our world, and doing what we can to make it a better place for everyone.
This is a lot of caring! But it’s one of the things I love about running a business.
We have a mechanism for doing good work.
We have the power to make decisions and to make change.
We have the great privilege of getting to think about these things, and care about them, and continue to try to do a better job at all of them.
What will you do to run a better business in 2025?
Free Summit
There is still time to jump into the upcoming Write Anyway Summit. There will be nine Author Accelerator coaches presenting.
My presentation will be on Wednesday, October 3 at 8am Pacific, 11am Eastern. It’s called The Surprising Power of Asking for Help. We dig deep into the reasons why it’s so hard for writers to ask for help and how a book coach can help a writer build trust in the process of letting other people into their creative process. My presentation includes a free download of The Writer’s Universe of Support — a simple but powerful tool I made to help writers figure out who to go to to ask for help with their writing, and who to avoid.
You can sign up for the summit HERE. It’s free.
There is also a VIP All Access Pass for sale that gives you more time to watch all the content, which you can purchase as soon as you sign up using the link above. There are a lot of bonus giveaways that will come from that All Access Pass purchase — including a free download of my Blueprint books. Note that if you use that link above, Author Accelerator will earn a % from the All Access Pass sign-ups.
Congrats on raising your prices! Even though I constantly tell other coaches to do this, I also have my own accustomed-to-scarcity-thinking patterns. You hit on a key truth, which is that all of our actions are communicating something. So if we're encouraging people to be amazing and be bigger and then are keeping our prices safe and innocuous (for fear of being rejected or disliked), others are hearing both messages and feeling the disconnect. It's like we're saying "you're amazing" and also "(but you might not actually be all that amazing just FYI)".
What people often forget is that you, as a business owner, pay all the expenses to keep your business running. You aren't just making money... you contribute to the overall economy and expenses go up every year. You don't just pocket all that money... you have to pay expenses first!