Book Coaching 101, Part 2: The 7 Steps to Building a Successful Book Coaching Business
Book Coaching 101, Part 2: The 7 Steps to Building a Successful Book Coaching Business
After certifying hundreds of book coaches and helping them build and grow their businesses, I have a good sense of what it takes—and where the pitfalls lie. These seven steps are a reliable roadmap.
Step 1: Decide to Take the Leap
Know what it takes
Before you start a book coaching business, either as a side gig or a whole new career, you need to educate yourself on what it entails. We are in a golden age of online business growth and the sky’s the limit on what you can create, but you don’t want to launch a new venture that sounds like a dream job only to realize that you can’t deal with the technology or you can’t stand the marketing. Educate yourself on the business of book coaching and how to run a successful, sustainable business.
Make sure it’s a good fit
Writers tend to have a lot of the key characteristics of a good book coach – including creativity, curiosity, empathy, and being able to communicate effectively – but you want to be sure it’s a good fit for your skills and your temperament. You need to be honest about what talents and skills you bring to the table and whether or not you think you will thrive. Here, too, you need to educate yourself – both on the demands of book coaching and on your capacity to do it.
Decide to commit
Committing to becoming a book coach is an important part of the journey – the same as it is for writing a book. If you kind of sort of think that you might like to do this work, you aren’t going to lay a strong foundation for it. You may slide into it, with bad habits – including bad pricing habits – that will doom you before you even start. Make a decision that you are going to be all-in, and then go all-in.
Step 2: Build Your Skills
Editorial skills
You need to be able to accurately assess the genre you will be coaching and give effective editorial feedback. This means being able to evaluate the genre you want to coach on the level of the line, the scene or chapter, and the entire story or narrative. It also means developing a philosophy for feedback that is empathetic, honest, and designed to achieve the outcomes you promise.
Book coaching skills
Coaching writers has as much to do with the writer as with the writing. You need to make sure you understand how to deal with people and their projects – how to motivate them when the going gets tough, how to hold them accountable, how to communicate clearly, and how to help them navigate the marketplace. You also need to learn how to protect yourself from getting sucked into emotions or burdens that are not yours to carry.
Business/Entrepreneurial skills
This is the area where many people who are curious about book coaching get nervous. They say that they aren’t sure how they will find clients or what to charge. They say they hate marketing and social media. They say they are uncomfortable selling anything. The truth is that business is really just about people – connecting with them, understanding them, being in relationship with them – and book lovers who have spent a lifetime reading can leverage their skills and talents to build and run a sustainable business.
Step 3: Decide Who You Will Serve
Find your Zone of Genius
The biggest mistake new book coaches make is thinking that they can build a business serving “fiction writers” or some other large general category of writers. This is the road to chaos. You need to be very specific about who you are serving and how you are serving them. You need to think about what they are writing, but also who they are as a person, where in the book development process you are meeting them, and how you can help them in a specific way. Your Zone of Genius is the place where what you love to do intersects with a service that is effective for your clients and is sustainable for you to offer. It starts with defining who you will serve.
Zone of Genius
Define the problem you are helping writers solve
Once you know who your ideal client is, you need to get very clear about the problem you are helping them solve. They have a problem – that’s why they are seeking out a coach. You need to be able to articulate what that problem is in language that will resonate with your ideal client so that when they see your offerings, they say to themselves, Finally, someone who can help me with my specific challenge!
Define the solution you are offering
A book coach can’t promise that anyone is going to get published, or make money, or get a movie deal, or leave their day job – so we have to be clear about what we can promise. This usually has to do with achieving something within the writer’s control (such as coming to a clear understanding about what they are writing, writing a certain number of pages, learning how to write a better argument, scene, character, story) and/or something that is the result of accountability, habits, and creative collaboration (such as confidence and craft.)
Step 4: Set Up Solid Systems
Understand that systems are the antidote to chaos
If you have defined your ideal client, you know what you need to do to help them succeed – which means you can start building systems to help them do it. Systems are simply repeatable steps that you take for each client – the process you use, the workflow you follow. Most new book coaches and people coming from “race to the bottom” freelance editing businesses bake chaos into their businesses. Understanding the role of systems is the way to take back control.
Look for efficiencies in every part of your business
There are ways to streamline every part of your book coaching business, from how you connect with potential clients to how you first speak to them, to how you share your edits, set up phone calls, get testimonials, and update your website. The more you can design repeatable processes and systems, the more efficient your business will be – and the more money you will make.
Embrace technological solutions
There can be technology solutions for many different systems in your business. Something as simple as a calendaring app (like Calendly or Acuity) or building response templates in gmail can save you time and headaches every day. One of the joys of book coaching is that there is always something new to learn from your client about the stories they are telling, the worlds they are building, and the topics they are exploring. Technology can be a learning edge, too, and if you embrace technological solutions, you will build a better business.
Step 5: Connect with Ideal Clients
Make peace with marketing
You’re going to have to market your products and services, but marketing does not have to be slimy and uncomfortable. If you reframe marketing to mean simply connecting with people who need what you have to offer, you can have a better relationship with this key part of the business. To learn more about a human-centered approach to marketing, follow Dan Blank at wegrowmedia.com (he’s my friend) or Tad Hargrave at MarketingforHippies.com (he’s Dan’s friend.)
Take small, repeatable actions
The best way to market a business is by taking small, repeatable actions. This is a concept I learned from Pam Slim, and which is the foundation of James Clear’s Atomic Habits (which you should go read if you haven’t.) Marketing is not going to happen all at once and it’s never going to end. It’s about getting into he habit of doing small, effective things consistently.
Be generous
The best way to connect with potential ideal clients is to be generous. Make them something to help them solve the first small step of their biggest problem. Share what you made in the places where your ideal client gathers. It feels good to be of service, and it shows people what you can do. Note that there is a fine line between generosity and giving away your work for free – and you don’t want to give away your work for free without some kind of a strategy for how, when, and why you do it.
Step 6: Believe in Yourself
Believe you can meet any challenge
Running a business, much like writing a book, is about solving a series of challenges. If you believe you can sort out whatever problems crop up in your business, you likely can. It’s like that Henry Ford quote: “Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.”
Visualize success
One of the key skills of a book coach is the ability to visualize a book on the shelf before the writer can see it themselves. If you can picture which shelf it will sit on, who will be coming to buy it, and what they will get from that book, you can help the writer bring their vision to life. The same is true for running a book coaching business. Imagine what it will be like to read books all day and get paid for it – to have the freedom to design a business you love, to be doing work that feels meaningful, to be making a solid income based on your passion for books. This vision will propel you.
Invest in the support you need
Being an entrepreneur is hard work. Having other people around you who are building businesses helping writers will make the work less lonely and will also offer shortcuts to many common challenges. You can learn from their efforts – and then pass on what you know to those coming up behind you. Book coaching is not a zero-sum game: There are millions of writers in the world who need help with all different kinds of books at all different phases of the development process. We can lift ourselves up by lifting up the book coaches around us.
Step 7: Do Excellent Work
Figure out a way to give clients what they need
Doing excellent work is the best way to build a business. Satisfied clients refer their writer friends to you. The word goes out like ripples in a pond. By helping people, you gain a reputation and your reputation grows and spreads.
Continue to look for ways to serve
As demand for your services grows, you can raise your prices and the level of service you offer. You can add additional programs to your offerings – including group coaching, self-study courses, retreats, and VIP workshops.
Build confidence
Doing excellent work feels good, which builds your confidence and motivation. If you feel you are helping writers bring their dreams to life, you will feel that your work has purpose and meaning, which will make you want to keep doing it, and doing it even better than before.
You Don’t Have to Build Your Book Coaching Business All on Your Own
Author Accelerator offers intensive book coach certification programs in fiction, nonfiction, and memoir. These nine- or twelve-month courses teach you the skills you need to succeed, give you real-world practice coaching clients so you can build confidence, and offer you live and asyncronistic support from a dedicated team. We’d love to have you join our community.
You can learn more at bookcoaches.com/abc
If you have any questions, please reach out to me here or at contact@authoraccelerator.com.
This post is part of a series: