Book Coaching 201: Disaster Planning for Book Coaches
Book Coaching 201: Disaster Planning for Book Coaches
The most important plan you may ever make.
This is the first Book Coaching 201 post I’ve written. The 201 series is for people who are in their second or third (or more) year of business and who have a steady stream of 1:1 clients. If you are new to book coaching and just getting started, you may not be ready for the advice on making a scaleable offer and you may not have the capacity to get generous right now. You just need clients! Keep honing your packages and processes, reaching out to writers, and serving clients with integrity and excellence. That is the primary work for the 101 level. My posts in the Book Coaching 101 tab speak more directly to your phase of development. Of course, you’re welcome to read this 201 post and take away anything useful.
Someone in the Author Accelerator Book Coaching community, whom I shall call Jillian, recently shared about two major life events she had been going through — one unexpected and joyous and the other unexpected and gut-wrenching. She had two things happen that demanded her attention, both of which impacted her ability to serve her clients.
Almost every book coach is a solopreneur. We are out here doing it on our own and if difficult things happen, we are out here facing them on our own. It is up to us to have a disaster plan.
Jillian had the great good fortune to have already created some “scaleable” offers — robust courses she could sell that did not have to involve her giving 1:1 feedback and support. I know her work well and her courses are outstanding.
When she found herself unable to work, she asked her book coaching colleagues for help in spreading the word about her scaleable offers — and many of us enthusiastically responded in whatever way we felt we could help.
We all did this because we all know that book coaching is not a zero-sum game. If you get a client who is ideal for you, that is not going to take away from my ability to get a client who is ideal for me. I’m sure in the back of our minds, we were also thinking about how we could just as easily be the ones who needed the help.
It was easy to step in because Jillian had an offer she could simply turn on and let run. I say “simply” but setting up that kind of offer takes a lot of time and effort. It’s difficult to take away from the “daily” work of running your business to build something like this, but at a certain point, it’s a critically important step to take to safeguard your business.
A scaleable offer is designed to serve a lot of writers without a lot of your involvement. It helps you leverage your time and expertise, reach more writers, build a business with multiple income streams, and be ready for the day when life pulls the rug out from under you.
Examples of scaleable offers for book coaches to offer writers include:
A course to answer all the foundational questions your ideal clients ask at a critical point in the book development process, including starting a project, revising a project, pitching a project, and marketing a project.
A series of craft-based video workshops.
A “self-study” version of a program you typically teach with feedback and support.
A membership community, where you bring together a community of like-minded writers. You might offer write-alongs, accountability check-ins, and hot seat coaching (which someone else could step in and do for you if needed.)
A book club where you break down the kinds of books you coach in order to teach writers. Sessions can be recorded and sold as a bundle.
A summit where you invite industry experts to offer guidance to a particular kind of writer. Sessions can be recorded and sold as a bundle.
A book ;)
Having a scaleable offer that your friends and colleagues can share is one way to make a disaster plan. Another is to maintain a robust mailing list.
A Three-Year Newsletter Hiatus
Every business expert talks about the mailing list as the backbone of an online business because it’s the one thing you own. It’s also the one thing that remains even if your business goes dark.
I recently received an email from an entrepreneur named Jenny Shih who hadn’t emailed anyone on her mailing list for three years. She was writing to reintroduce herself and to announce that she was coming back to business after a three-year hiatus she had been forced to take due to some kind of personal emergency (which she didn’t share.)
She said she wasn’t exactly sure what she would be offering, but she was reaching out to give people a chance to opt in or out of her list. It was a very raw and vulnerable email.
I knew exactly who she was the second I saw her name in my inbox. I hadn’t thought of her in three years, but I also hadn’t forgotten her. She used to put out excellent and helpful content about business strategy and structure. She wrote newsletters, did webinars, and offered free trainings. I always found her to be particularly generous and smart.
I learned a lead magnet strategy from her around making an “easy offer”— one that’s easy for you to deliver and easy for your ideal client to say yes to. She had a term for it that I can’t recall, but I’m almost positive this is where I first heard of the idea and it’s a strategy I now teach all my book coaches.
I can’t recall if I ever bought anything from Jenny Shih, if I've ever paid her one single dime, but I know that she taught me something valuable and helped me on my journey.
So I replied to her email to say that I was glad she was back. I was moved by her experience of having to step away from her work and moved by the authentic way she was coming back. I wished her well.
In the next email she sent, she said that she received hundreds of similar replies. She called it “an inbox full of love.”
Jenny gave me permission to share this part of her email. I made it widescreen so you can read it and feel the love that she must have felt:
If that is not an argument for consistently putting out good content, I don’t know what is.
Do you see how she talks about showing up to serve?
How she talks about how much she loves her work?
I don’t know what Jenny Shih is going to be offering, but I know it’s going to be worth paying attention to.
Sometimes you have to step away for good reasons, too
I am currently enrolled in a year-long business coaching program run by Claire Pelletreau. It’s a program designed to teach ad strategy, but really it’s much more than that, too: it touches on every single aspect of our businesses, and I am loving it.
The program used to be six months long, but Claire is pregnant with her third child, and she will be taking two months of maternity leave in the middle of that timeframe. To plan for her absence, she gave participants in this cohort double the time with her and is bringing in a trusted colleague to help us while she is gone.
Hearing Claire explain this offer is one of the things that inspired me to sign up. I thought it was an elegant solution that would serve both her and her clients. I could tell from the care with which Claire designed this plan that she was someone I wanted to learn from.
And what makes this plan possible? A colleague — someone Claire has done business with and worked with over a number of years — and a deep understanding of why her clients come to her and why they trust her.
The ultimate catastrophe*
Not too long ago, I heard the story of a small business owner in the publishing universe who died and whose clients were frustrated and angry at losing out on whatever they had already paid. I can’t remember who this was, unfortunately, but not long after I read about it, a potential client asked me if there were any contingency plans in place if I were to die.
I decided to talk to my team about it. My business is slightly bigger than a solo business — I have a team of three full-time employees (including my husband) and two long-term subcontractors) — and we had a productive conversation.
We made a plan for how the team would continue to deliver on what we promise our clients — a plan rooted in the values by which we run the company every day.
It was a relief to have this discussion — and was one of those days when I felt like a real adult!
*I don’t actually think of death as a catastrophe. It’s part of living! But in terms of business, I suppose it it.
Some things to consider for your disaster plan:
1.) Identify one or two people you trust to serve your clients in a crisis. Ask them if they would back you up and offer to back them up.
2.) Join a business community and be engaged in it. Jillian has been a steadfast, generous, and spirited member of the Author Accelerator community for more than five years — which is part of the reason why so many book coaches responded to her request for help.
3.) Be generous in the wider writing world. Say yes to invitations to serve, be generous with your wisdom, and volunteer for organizations you believe in. It feels good, you can learn things, but should you ever need to ask for favors, you know you’ve put deposits in the bank you can draw from. I did a wonderful podcast interview about this concept of being a good literary citizen here.
4.) Practice asking for help. I wrote a newsletter about that here, referencing one of my favorite books, The Art of Asking.
5.) Hire a virtual assistant. Inviting someone else into your business and your process is obviously an enormous help under normal circumstances, but in an emergency, they can be a lifesaver. One of the most useful things about working with a VA is that it forces you to document your workflows and processes so that someone can follow what you do. (Thanks to Alice S. for reminding me of this! It was a late addition to the post!)
6.) Make a disaster plan. It can be just a few lines about what to do in an emergency or who to go to for help or what steps to take first. If you ever need it, you will thank yourself for having taken the time to write it down.