Book Coaching 101, Part 3: Shaking Off the "I’ll Take Whatever I Can Get" Business Mindset
A discussion of the mindset shift that is the single most important move you can make to improve your book coaching business
I was speaking to a full-time freelance editor the other day. This person is well-trained in popular story structure methods (I know they said Story Grid and I think they said Save the Cat) and is affiliated with publishing companies that send them writers to work with. They enjoy working with words and ideas and they have a steady stream of jobs.
But their marketing and business strategy is “I’ll take whatever I can get.” In other words, they do the work that other people send them for whatever fee those people have decided to pay.
“Are you making the kind of money you want to be making?” I asked.
They laughed and said, “No, not really.”
“Are you doing work you love?”
“Sort of,” they said, “I mean, I love working with writers, but I don’t love every person or every project.”
“Do you feel in control of your business?” I asked.
At this, they became silent, because the truth is that they are trapped in an “I’ll take whatever I can get” mentality that is rampant in our industry, and over time, it doesn’t feel great.
Where This Thinking Comes From
The root of this kind of thinking is the belief that writers make no money.
If writers make no money, then it follows that editors and other people who educate and serve them should make no money, either. We should take whatever we can get.
Part of this reasoning is sound: it’s true that writers don’t make much money. In this 2023 essay, Jane Friedman lays out the stark reality. Most writers have to do something else to support themselves — teach, edit, coach, or some other job that has nothing to do with writing.
Of course, there are exceptions (and what Substack is doing is working to normalize the idea that writers should make money) but in general, the belief that writers make no money is grounded in fact.
People who serve writers internalize this reality and adopt an “I’ll take whenever I can get” mentality. They are saying to themselves, Writers make so little money that they can’t afford to pay very much and I should be happy to take whatever I can get.
They accept pricing that is tied to word count, page count, or hours spent on the task, which not only diminishes the value of the work but punishes people who are more experienced and more efficient; the better you become at doing what you do, the less you earn.
This mindset is perpetuated by the race-to-the-bottom pricing model perpetuated by online freelancer marketplaces. Freelancers tell themselves, I have to charge this way because everyone else is charging this way and there is always going to be someone willing to do the work for less.
Since the majority of these freelance editors are women (this study estimates the number to be 59% but that feels low to me), they are probably also telling themselves that this is as good as they can do in a society that undervalues their work in general. In March 2023, the Pew Research Center wrote, “The gender pay gap – the difference between the earnings of men and women – has barely closed in the United States in the past two decades. In 2022, American women typically earned 82 cents for every dollar earned by men. That was about the same as in 2002, when they earned 80 cents to the dollar.”
The Realities of Running a Scaleable Business Make Things Even Worse
When I started Author Accelerator in 2013, I conceived of it as an agency model: I would bring in writers and hire people to coach them through the development of their books. The whole enterprise depended on how little I could pay the very talented people I was hiring to help me.
And these people were indeed talented. I don’t want to name names, but off the top of my head, I can think of three of those early coaches who have gone on to big careers as writers themselves. They were extremely well-educated, wise, compassionate, and dedicated. I was paying them $15 an hour and they were thrilled.
They were helping other writers in order to support their own writing, and they were happy to take whatever they could get.
After a while, the most experienced and talented book coaches became well-known in writing circles and writers began going to them directly, bypassing me. The book coaches would naturally ask me for a raise for the writers I was still matching them with.
I didn’t have to give them a raise because there were legions of other talented people happy to take the lower price I was offering. At one point, I had 120 people on a waitlist to work for me. All I had to do was select the most talented among them, train them in the systems and processes I had developed, and my business kept rolling.
The only problem was that it started to feel pretty shitty. I was making money on the backs of (mostly) women who didn’t realize what their services were really worth.
I saw businesses all over our industry working on this same model and decided I didn’t want to play that game.
I Pivoted To Teaching The Writers How To Run Their Own Book Coaching Businesses
In 2018, I changed my business model. Rather than matching writers with book coaches and skimming off the fees, I would train book coaches to run their own businesses. This would allow them to focus on the kinds of writers they most enjoyed and the parts of the process where they excelled. They would set their own prices and make money directly from the writers they served.
I took the program I had designed to train people to work for me and made it even more robust. I taught frameworks for helping writers at the start of a project (the Blueprint method), showed people how to edit more efficiently when presented with a complete or partial manuscript, explained how to manage a long project (the deadlines, the emotions, the fees), and designed systems and processes for client intaking, package pricing, and marketing.
Every Book Coach Had To Learn That Writers Actually Will Pay
New book coaches had to learn how to put a price on their offerings that would allow them to build a sustainable business. Sustainable means that you are earning enough to make it worthwhile and that you are not working at a breakneck speed. As coaches gained traction in their businesses, they had to learn how to increase their prices — a surprisingly difficult undertaking at every level.
Every single one of them struggled to shake off the “I’ll take whatever I can get” mentality. So although I was teaching editorial and entrepreneurial processes, the most profound lessons were around valuing the work.
What every book coach had to learn is that writers actually will pay, regardless of the risk that they might never earn much money from their work.
Writers will happily spend money to learn how to get their ideas out of their heads and onto the page, to get professional feedback to improve their work, to connect with other writers who are serious about publishing good books, to receive emotional support for the creative journey, and to understand the requirements of the marketplace so that they can feel confident about sending their work out into it. People value education and intensive training in the endeavors they are passionate about.
The same is true, by the way, for golfers who want to improve their swing, for cyclists who want a professional guide to give them a tour through the Dolomites, and for people who want to learn how to play the guitar or cook nutritionally healthy dinners for their families— and those people have no intention of ever making any money from their efforts. Although most writers won’t make a full-time living from their work, some will. And others will have the deep satisfaction of writing something that has a profound impact on their readers.
A book coach acting with integrity* can offer writers the editorial feedback, accountability, emotional support, and project management they need to improve their writing, finish their projects, and prepare for the marketplace, and if they build a track record of successfully delivering those outcomes, they can charge much more than “I’ll take whatever I can get” for their services.
*Shady business owners have long known that writers will pay to bring their dreams to life, and they offer services and products to take advantage of unsuspecting writers’ desires. They offer “write a book in 30 days” programs and dangle the promise of becoming an Amazon bestseller, which might sound good, but is a relatively meaningless achievement for anyone who knows the way it all works. I find these practices questionable because they are based on the belief that the quality of the book and the reader's experience don’t matter. Not every book deserves to be published.
Shifting The Money Mindset
The way to shift the “I’ll take whatever I can get” mindset is to think about the services that writers really need rather than the services they have been conditioned to want. Take one small example of a commonly offered service — a query letter edit. I just looked it up on Upwork and I could book this service for $30. But does any writer really just need a query letter edit? Let’s consider.
Let’s say that the result is a killer query letter. Great! Let’s say the writer sends that query to an agent who is a friend of their college roommate — who doesn’t even represent the right genre. They do this because they don’t want to bother to take the time to research the market or because they are scared of putting themselves out into a cold and judgemental world. The result? An instant (but potentially kind) rejection.
Let’s say instead that the writer does their research and sends their killer query letter to a small pool of select agents. Several of them request the manuscript — but the first page makes no sense for the genre. The first chapter is a hot mess. It’s another ding.
Or perhaps the manuscript wasn’t ready to go at all, and the writer knows this. They sought query letter help because they wanted affirmation about their story — from the query letter editor and from the agents they would then pitch. So they take their great query letter and send it out and three agents love the pitch and want to see the manuscript. A win! Except the writer knows their work is not ready. So they tell the agents they will send it soon. And they never do. Because by the time they get the manuscript in shape, it’s been too long and they feel ashamed.
Perhaps we can be more charitable to this writer and imagine that they have been working hard on their manuscript. But they have been working with a critique group that only allows a 10-page review every other month. No one has reviewed the manuscript as a whole, except the writer’s sister, who loves everything they write. Their first chapter is amazing — everyone in the group loved it! And Chapter Three is really good too. But the manuscript falls apart at Chapter 10 so even if they get manuscript requests from their killer query, they get rejection after rejection after rejection — and they can’t understand why when their friends loved what they read.
A far more strategic offering for the book coach to make is to provide comprehensive pitch training and support — to help that writer prepare their mind, their manuscript, their pitch list, and their pitch strategy so they have the best possible chance of landing an agent. This service would cost a whole lot more than $30, but it would give them what they actually need: manuscript prep, marketplace intelligence, pitch strategy, query letter edit, pitch support, and confidence to take advantage of the opportunities they make for themselves.
So shifting your money mindset is not just about an arbitrary “charge more” mentality. It’s about shaking off the “take what you can get” way of thinking and being smarter about who you serve, how you serve them, and the outcomes you help them achieve.
A book coach who is acting with integrity can’t guarantee that a writer is going to get an agent or a book deal, or that they will ever earn back the money they invest in developing a book idea. But you can guarantee that you will create a safe and nurturing space for your writers to do their best work. You can guarantee that you will bring to bear your years of professional training and experience to their project and their pages. You can guarantee that you will listen, that you will care, that you will provide consistent, ongoing, compassionate, and honest feedback on their work. You can guarantee that they will be well prepared when it is time to approach the market and you can guarantee that they will not feel so alone in the creative process.
I have been the recipient of this kind of book coaching, and it is well worth the money I have paid — even on books I knew I was going to self-publish for a small market, and even on books that have yet to see the light of day and may never see the light of day.
Moving Away From The “I’ll Take What I Can Get” Mentality
Here are some of the steps necessary to move away from the “I’ll Take What I Can Get” mentality. These are baked into the 7 Steps in Building a Book Coaching Business.
Understand that you are bound by a “Take What I Can Get” mentality. Read Tara Mohr’s Playing Big, Gay Hendrick’s The Big Leap, or Rachel Rodger’s We Should All Be Millionaires to get a clear picture of the trap and where it comes from.
Decide to tell yourself a different story. Seven words that are simple to write, and very difficult to do. If I had to name the most valuable thing Author Accelerator does for our book coaches, it is this: we help book coaches tell themselves a different story. By being in a community of people who are all walking the same path, it makes it much easier to take the next step.
Want to join us? I’m hosting an event on February 6th, 2024 on the 7 Steps to Building a Book Coaching Business. You can come meet Suzette Mullen, a successful book coach who learned how to tell herself a different story, and hear how she walked through the seven steps. Go to bookcoaches.com/how-I-built to download an ebook on her journey from lost lawyer and empty nest mom to author and book coach, and sign up for the event. It’s all free.
Do the work of choosing who you will serve. I will write about this critical decision in an upcoming Book Coaching 101 piece, but it’s the work on which this entire shift rests. You get to choose. You get to decide. You get to work with the writers you are most excited to help and uniquely qualified to help. You do not have to take whatever you can get. You can be a lighthouse attracting the people who need what you have to offer. (If someone is reading this and thinking, But I would love to have any job helping writers. I would love one of those `just give me the work’ gigs. I need to feed my child/care for my mom/save up to leave a horrible job then I would say, “DO IT! Take it! Start earning the money and getting experience. Just have a plan in place for shifting your money mindset when you are able to.)
Give those people what they really need rather than the shiny things they think they want. There is an art to designing effective programs and packages writers will buy, but it takes thinking differently about this work. (If someone is reading this and thinking, But my mission is to help writers who can’t pay for expensive book coaching so I can’t charge a lot then I would say, “Okay! Design programs/packages/services that your ideal clients can afford but offer them in a way that doesn’t crush you, disrespect you, or force you to have to do something else and also consider the way you could serve your mission if you were making a lot of money. Also read Rachel Rodger’s book.”)
Price the service according to the value you are providing. This means understanding the value, naming the value, and delivering the value. I’ll be writing about this in an upcoming piece, too
Communicate the value in such a way that your ideal customer understands why they need it.
Here Is What It Feels Like To Shake Off The “I’ll Take What I Can Get” Business Mindset
This is a video that was just posted on Instagram by Author Accelerator Certified Coach Dani Abernathy, shot four years into her book coaching journey. It’s powerful and moving—and I hope it leaves you inspired.
Leave comments about your thoughts. I’m around today to respond.
Note about the newsletter:
I liked posting twice a week and am going to keep trying it.
And I am inspired by what Courtney Maum is doing for her paid subscribers today and am circling around something like that soon.
Jennie,
I'm an Author Accelerator Certified book coach in fiction who has spent forty years practicing law and about 20 years writing novels. I see a lot of parallels between book coaching and the practice of law because one of the first things a lawyer has to do when he hangs out his shingle is learn how much his work is worth. My experience as a young lawyer was that if I took everything that came in the door and undercharged for it I would end up worked to death with little to show for it. Also, clients that wanted the cheapest hourly rate they could get were usually the ones who acted unhappy at the end of the representation.
I spent three years working with a book coach when I decided to get serious about writing, and that experience was priceless. There is nothing like the relationship between a writer and a book coach. It is a relationship to cherish.
Hi Jennie, You’ve described my mindset perfectly. I often work with writers who will have to pay at every step to get their book into the world, and they are ordinary people with an average income. I want to be of service, so I don’t charge steep rates, despite 20 years of experience as a freelance editor. Somehow, the idea that We Should All Be Millionaires feels offensive, and emotionally I can’t take that leap. Yet I do feel down about earning less than $30,000 a year, Canadian!