How I Built My Book Coaching Business, Part 4
Learning the power of saying yes and saying no.
👉 Part 1 of this series can be found HERE.
👉 Part 2 of this series can be found HERE.
👉 Part 3 of this series can be found HERE
Saying No is the Key to Book Coaching Success
In my last newsletter about building a six-figure coaching business, I talked about designing whole-solution packages that could help writers with their biggest challenges and deliver real value to them. I did that while homing in on my own zone of genius — working with the kinds of people and projects that allowed me to do my best work. (It was doing Blueprints with people at the very beginning of the book-writing process. I am best at helping people go from vague idea to solid plan and I just love the 14-step Blueprint process. It lets me see the whole picture, catch the writer’s vision, and help them develop a strategy for bringing their book to life.)
The problem was that a wide range of writers was still coming to me for help with a wide range of projects, small jobs, and one-off requests. In order to focus and level up my business on what I was best at, I had to start saying no.
It was so hard. I would be so tempted by someone eager to work with me and ready to pay.
Sometimes I would say to my husband, “How can I say no? What if I never get another client again? Wouldn’t I feel like a fool for turning away a paying client?”
He would roll his eyes — because I had a steady stream of people wanting to work with me, including book writers coming back for their second books. It made no sense that the work would suddenly dry up just because I started to say no to projects that weren’t a good fit for me.
But logic was not speaking to me; I didn’t believe the evidence that I was at the point in my career where I could choose.
I still saw myself as a scrappy freelancer, happy for any work at all, and happy to be making more than $50,000 a year. It was more money than I ever imagined I could make.
I could see that if I wanted to crack six figures, I had to start telling myself a different tale.
And I wanted to do it. I was excited by the challenge.
"What If" Works for Businesses as Well as Stories
One of the things book coaches do is ask our clients to consider different paths forward. We ask, What if?
What if you started your story in this place rather than that?
What if you wrote two books instead of one?
What if you allowed yourself to say what you really wanted to say?
I started to think, What if? about my business.
What if I could work with my ideal clients and only my ideal clients? I could start building templates and cheat sheets for them, write a newsletter for them, and put out content for them — courses and guidebooks and events.
What if I stopped teaching at UCLA? I would save the time I was spending commuting, developing syllabi, and reading a few pages from a lot of students and I could put all that time into writing guest posts for high-traffic writer sites, speaking at conferences, and building my own authority.
What if I designed a client intake process that helped me flag the writers who would be an ideal fit for me and weed out the ones who weren’t so that I wasn’t guessing or wondering, but I knew?
Making big moves starts with imagining what those moves will get you. I started imagining a different kind of book coaching business — one where I was serving fewer writers, making more money, and doing the work I was ideally suited to do.
As James Clear puts it in Atomic Habits, “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become
For a business person, every action you take is a vote for the type of business you want to run.
Serving Writers Got Me Where I Wanted to Go
Success is not all about how much money you make. My income was growing, but other things were growing, too — my connection with my clients, my confidence, my joy, my belief in the power of this work.
I could feel my power increasing.
And soon I cracked six figures, and then multiple six figures.
People sometimes get frustrated when they hear this story about my path to making six figures as a book coach.
They want to know what social media platform I used, what ads I ran, what marketing tactics I depend on.
They want a bulletproof method they can follow.
But there is no bulletproof method. What worked for me might not work for you — and what what worked for me in the beginning may no longer be relevant in today’s world. I mean, I started my book coaching business before Twitter and Instagram existed.
What worked then and what will work now and what will work in the future is what I have been talking about: paying attention to what you are offering in your business and who you are offering it to and what you are charging for that work.
Truly helping writers is what builds a good book coaching business. They tell their friends, and they tell their agents, and they tell their editors, and they invite you to do things with them that put you in front of more writers, and as they succeed, you succeed.
Investing In Yourself is a Thrill
Making more money allowed me to invest in my business — a better website, a better computer, more software to make things even more easier, and the best investment of all: a full-time assistant.
I used to wonder why writers would pay so much money to work with me; I wasn’t a person who would spend that kind of money on myself, but I could see how it changed them. The transformation I witnessed in my client was inspiring. Coaching empowered them to write the books they knew they wanted to write.
I loved being on the coaching side of that equation and wanted to know what it felt like to be on the client side.
I also wanted to keep making things better in my business — because there are always things that can be improved. I felt a sense of resentment over the hour-long client intake calls I was doing, for example; I felt like I was giving away so much of my expertise and couldn’t figure out how to do it any differently than I was doing it. So I hired a business coach.
I spent $3,000 for one intensive day of in-person coaching with small business coach Pamela Slim, author of Escape From Cubicle Nation and The Widest Net, an excellent book on marketing small businesses. I flew from California to Arizona to work with her — and by 10 a.m. on the morning of our day together, I felt it had been money very well spent.
To have someone sit with you as you define your problems, sketch out your ideas, and envision the business or the book you are creating is such a thrill.
Pam saw me. She got me. And she helped me step into an even bigger sense of what I could do as a book coach.
Here’s one small example:
Pam showed me how I could stop doing those hour-long intake calls that were making me feel so resentful. Instead of giving away my time and talent for free, I could charge $1,200 for the service. That would allow me to spend more time reading pages and giving feedback, which would be even more helpful to writers seeking clarity and guidance.
I went home, made the change, and started booking the new higher-priced offering.
Bit by bit, change by change, I built a better business.
It was better for me because I could do the work with more ease. And it was better for my clients because I was giving them what they really needed, which wasn’t a one-off service, but a comprehensive system to write better books.
The Big Leap to Training Other Book Coaches
In 2013, I started Author Accelerator, a business training other book coaches in my systems and processes. We have changed the business several times over the years — iterating the same way I did in my own book coaching business — and we have finally landed on what we know is an excellent certification program for training book coaches.
Our program is built on the philosophy of centering the writer as well as the writing. We’ve certified more than 130* book coaches and they’re out there finding their own zones of genius and building businesses to help writers do their best work.
*It’s over 255 coaches today! Check out our free series on book coaching at bookcoaches.com/abc
This is the end of this little series. I’ll be back writing live on Friday.