Are You Afraid to Make Money?

Some thoughts on business mindset.

Photo by Jonathan Cooper on Unsplash

I taught a masterclass on developing lead magnets for Author Accelerator Certified Book Coaches. A lead magnet is something useful you make to solve a small, urgent problem for your ideal client so that they move closer to becoming a paid client. Examples of a lead magnet might be a quiz or a mini course, a guide or a private podcast series. (Here is an example: this is one of my lead magnets for Author Accelerator — a free, 40-page guide called The Business of Book Coaching Start-Up Kit.)

Lead magnets allow you to be creative, helpful, and generous, which makes them a fun part of the sales and marketing process.

One of the people in this training raised their hand to ask a question. She asked, (and I paraphrase) “Why does the lead magnet have to lead to a paid offer? Doesn’t it negate the generosity if your intention is to get them to pay for coaching?”

This brought me up cold.

You can’t run a business if you don’t make money

You can’t make money if you don’t get clients.

I began to think: What if this coach’s entire marketing and sales challenge was that they actually didn’t want to make money?

What if they wanted to literally give away their services?

You Certainly Could…

You certainly could give away your time, talent, and expertise. A lot of people do — either by choice (in other words, they just like to help writers and so they do it out of the goodness of their heart) or because they refuse to learn the fundamentals of running a business, including figuring out how to make money.

Refusing to learn isn’t always literal. It doesn’t mean holding a hand up— like STOP: I SHALL NOT LEARN! It often looks just like this coach sounded: genuinely uncomfortable at the idea that generosity might be tied to money-making activities.

Please Be Generous

I love being generous to my clients and my students. I love giving more than they expect, helping more than they expect, staying longer than they expect, sharing all the secrets. It feels great to be of service.

Just last night, I was out to dinner with a former client and our husbands, and we got into a discussion where I ended up coaching her for an hour on her business strategy and (ha!) money mindset. I made the choice to enter into this discussion and to continue it, and it was fun to be that generous. But it was a choice.

I made it in the context of the many other times when I choose not to do that or say to someone, “You should book a strategy session to talk about that.”

Generosity is fun!

But So Is Making Money

It feels good to be paid for your expertise. When you are able to genuinely help your writers and make money in the process, it’s a win-win-win. (The third win is for the readers; they get to read better books!)

The money people pay you is a sign of respect.

It’s a sign of gratitude.

It’s a sign that the client values your work — and the fact that you ask for it and happily receive it means that you value yourself.

I have come to believe that people who balk at making money — who think that helping writers in the deep way a coach can help belongs solely in the realm of a gift or a favor, or even a low-priced transactional service —is having trouble valuing themselves.

I have been there, more times than I can count.

You tell yourself that the kinds of writers you want to help can’t pay.

You tell yourself that you can’t raise your prices too high or you will price yourself out of business.

You tell yourself that if you charge more, you have to offer more.

You tell yourself that there is only so much you can earn in your business and limit yourself before you even start.

You tell yourself that the culture doesn’t value the work of nurturing (writers, artists, creative people, children, etc) because the culture has been telling you that your whole life.

You tell yourself that every writer who has the ability to pay for your coaching has already paid you, and there is no one left in the entire world who needs what you have to offer.

👆That last one may sound like I am exaggerating, but that is a thought I have recently had, so I am here to say it’s a real thought a lot of us have. (I know that if I’ve had it, others have too.)

Running a Successful Book Coaching Business Means Making Peace With Making Money

And guess what? The same is true for your writers.

We all have to get comfortable with the fact that we are in a marketplace and we need to market our work. We need to ask people to engage. We need to ask people to buy.

If someone were to ask me what topics we talk about most in Author Accelerator’s community of certified coaches, I would put money right up there at the top of the list. Sure, we talk about coaching and how to give good feedback and help our writers, and we talk about the ways the publishing landscape is changing. But we also talk all the time about money — the strategies for making it, the tactics for making it, the mindset we need to persist and to pivot and to make peace with making money.

It’s deep work. It’s never-ending work.

It’s work we have to do if we want to elevate the profession of book coaching and run successful businesses.

Stop Being Afraid to Make Money

So how do we stop being afraid to make money?

1.) We name our fear. We call it what it is.

2.) We speak it out loud so that it is no longer trapped in our heads. We hear other people react to it and acknowledge it and normalize it. (Writing it down does a similar thing.)

3.) We devote time to money. We set goals for what we want to make and set aside time to look at how much is coming in and how much is going out.

4.) We join communities where people are focused on doing good work and making good money. We see other people succeeding at it and owning it, and showing us the way. This is a big part of what we are doing at Author Accelerator, and if you are not already in our community, we would love to have you join us. (See invitation to a live training, below. )If you don’t wish to join us, look for other communities or teachers that are modeling this behavior. Look at Rachel Rodger’s Hello Seven community, as a start. Listen to her podcast. Soak it up.

5.) We look at the context in which our money narrative is happening — how people talked about money when we were growing up, how much money we had or didn’t have. If there is trauma around this, we might do this work with a therapist.

6.) We read about the topic — after all, we are book people 😎 There are so many great books about money — how to invest it, understand it, make peace with it. I recently heard Lynn Twist speak. She is the author of a book called The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Life that I read years ago and still remember as being so impactful. I also love Rachel Rodger’s We Should All Be Millionaires and Bari Tessler’s The Art of Money.

7.) We tell ourselves a new story about money and about the work we do. We get comfortable talking about money and making it. We get comfortable investing it in our business growth. We start to believe that we can enjoy making money.

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📚 Become a Certified Book Coach

Are you interested in learning more about Author Accelerator’s Book Coach Certification Program? In June, we are enrolling a cohort of 12 students in fiction, memoir, or nonfiction. I’ll be doing a live webinar to walk you through the three keys to running a successful book coaching business on June 4, 2025, at 5pm PST. It’s a great chance to learn all about being a book coach and ask me anything about our year-long, fully-supported program. You can sign up to join me for that training HERE.

✈️ A Note About Comments

I hope there are a lot of comments on this post. I hope people are into it! Please note that I won’t be replying right away. I’m traveling this week and next — gathering a group of 15 coaches in London and 3 in Amsterdam, among things. But I will reply — so thanks for commenting!

🔍 A Note About Paid Posts

A note about paid posts: I just realized that Substack was paywalling my older posts, which I did not intend. It was a setting I hadn’t turned off. I just turned it off. So if you want to poke around my older posts, do it!

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