Marie Forleo Would Say, "Earn 20% More Next Month!"

The first in a series of posts on pricing your book coaching services with a lookat how I priced my training on pricing.

Photo by Adam Nir on Unsplash

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Before I get to today’s post, I have two opportunities to share:

1. I’m doing a free webinar next Tuesday, June 11th at 9 am PST/ 12 EST for anyone interested in becoming a book coach or becoming a better one: I’ll be going through the Seven Steps to Building a Successful Book Coaching Business with book coach and podcaster Savannah Gilbo. Sign up HERE:

2. I’m excited to announce that The Art of Pricing, my masterclass on how to price your book coaching services, is open for sign-ups. Check out the details HERE.

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My post today is on how I priced my masterclass on pricing. The steps I used to determine the price are based on the framework I will be teaching in The Art of Pricing training. It’s all very meta!

I knew I didn’t want this to be just another webinar — although I love webinars. I enjoy giving them and taking them. But I wanted to teach pricing in a way that allowed more depth because the issues we all have around money and pricing are deep. Breaking down the myths around what writers will pay and what we can charge takes some time and effort.

But I also didn’t want to develop an entire course curriculum, because a.) I just came off completing a year-long curriculum development project, and b.) one of my goals with this training is to have an offer that is not as intense and expensive and c.) I don’t think a formal course is the best way to teach pricing. There is a lot of playing around involved in pricing (which is one reason I called the masterclass “the art of…”) and a big part of the work is mindset. A long, formal course isn’t necessarily the best format for changing mindset. I think that is better done in a group, with a lot of sharing.

I began developing the format of the masterclass and the pricing (the two go hand-in-hand) by thinking about why I wanted to teach a program on pricing.

1. It all starts with what the customer needs

I have known for a long time that book coaches needed help with pricing, but it became even more clear in the last several months. I have been making a big push to test our 5-day mini-course, The One Page Book Coaching Business Plan, which is an introduction to the business of book coaching for people who might be interested in our comprehensive book coach certification program (i.e. a lead magnet.) I have been offering this course at different discounts and to different audiences to try out what works. The course is normally $199. What would happen if I gave it away for 50% off to a “warm” audience, or for free to a “cold” audience? Would more people take the course, complete it, and sign up for the certification program?

The offer currently ends with a 1:1 discovery call with me, so as a result, I have been speaking to a lot of people who are either thinking about becoming book coaches or who are already doing the work and considering more training to level up their businesses — and I have been really surprised at the prices they tend to set for their services.

People are stuck in race-to-the-bottom pricing models. They are telling themselves stories about the low prices they think they have no choice but to charge.

There’s no way their businesses are going to succeed at those prices unless they are only doing book coaching as a side gig — but even then, the prices are so low that they are undervaluing their skills and their talents. That eats at you, and usually only leads to resentment. You can’t do excellent work for people if you are feeling resentful and the first step in becoming a successful book coach (see the upcoming webinar on The Seven Steps to Building a Successful Book Coaching Business) is to do excellent work.

I have also seen inside the businesses of a lot of Author Accelerator certified book coaches and sometimes I want to scream, “No, no, no! Raise that rate!” This is usually when I am talking to a book coach whose business is booming, who is talking about the wild success of their clients, who is well-trained, experienced, confident, and thriving — and still selling themselves short.

So I have seen first-hand that there is a huge need to help book coaches think differently about pricing.

Working in your Zone of Genius means serving your clients with packages that will help them solve identifiable needs, so for me, this topic ticks the lower lefthand circle in my Zone of Genius model (below.)

2. Is this work you love?

The top circle of the Zone of Genius is to do work that lights you up — work you love.

I love to teach, to inspire, to make a lasting impact — and I know that training on pricing can do that. Just a few days ago, I was on a call with some of our memoir coaches and I was up on my soapbox about pricing and thinking, I could talk about this topic all day long.

The day after that call, I was hosting one of those 1:1 discovery calls with an incredibly well-trained, well-credentialed person who is considering joining our training program. The first thing she said to me was, “I’m ready to be paid for what I’ve been doing out of the kindness of my heart.” I may have fist-pumped the Zoom screen and said, “YES!!!!!” (And she signed up for our certification program, which was awesome. She was READY.)

The topic of pricing touches on so many things I am passionate about — how to really help writers, not just give them a Band-aid or a little bit of help but to give them all the help they need to reach their goals; how to empower entrepreneurs — especially women, whose skills and talents are so often undervalued in our culture, and especially people who never imagined they would be entrepreneurs — to earn enough money to keep doing their work; and how to design effective and elegant business systems.

I decided to do a short, interactive program as a beta test. Will it sell? Will it be effective and impactful? Will I love teaching it? Is there a better way at a better price?

Part of pricing your services well is being willing to try out different structures and services — this is what I mean by play — so this is me walking the walk.

3. Is this offer sustainable?

The third part of the Zone of Genius is to make sure your offering is sustainable — meaning is it priced in such a way that you can afford to continue to offer it? Are you making enough money to pay yourself what you want and need to be paid?

So many of the book coaching packages I see are not sustainable. The coach is giving too much away. They are going to end up feeling resentful of their clients and angry about the business they invested in building. I know this because I have seen it and I have lived it.

The problem is that they approach pricing by asking themselves, “What are writers willing to pay?” or “What is everyone else charging?” There is a time and place for those questions (well, versions of them…) but it’s more effective to start with what you believe the value of the program to be and then to stress test it with a pricing framework.

The first price I landed on for The Art of Pricing was $1,800.

I came to the $1,800 price as a reaction to the webinars typically priced at $25, $49 and $69 webinar, where there might be hundreds of viewers and little time to have any meaningful conversation or feedback. As I said earlier, I love webinars, but I also sometimes find them frustrating.

I wanted to go much deeper than you can in that kind of format. I believe this topic warrants it. And I also know that if people master pricing, they have a real chance ot running a successful business and that if they don’t, they don’t. So the stakes around this topic are high, which means the value is high.

With that $1,800 price point in mind, I began to think about the format of the training. I could offer a long, intensive initial group training followed by 1:1 feedback for each participant — perhaps an individual strategy session. I am at a point in my career where I charge a lot for 1:1 strategy consultation, whether it is about books, book positioning (i.e. what that book is going to do for a writer’s career), or building book coaching businesses. All of that went into my initial $1,800 price point.

But I could immediately see that there was a problem with this price point. That price is half the price of Author Accelerator’s primary offering, which is a $3,600 course with nine months of teaching and support. $1,800 for a short single-topic training was not logical in the context of our other offers. It makes sense in the context of Jennie Nash the individual, but not in the context of the larger business and this masterclass was meant to be part of that larger business ecosystem.

Having your offerings line up with each other in a logical way is one of the core ideas I’ll be teaching in the masterclass. You are telling a story with your pricing and a price point that doesn’t make sense pulls your potential clients out of the story just as surely as author intrusion in a novel. This story is what I refer to as your ecosystem — a term I learned from Pam Slim in her wonderful book, The Widest Net.

I dialed the price down to $1,200, but now I was feeling resentful of the offer. Giving 1:1 feedback on people’s business models would require a lot of brainpower and time on my part. It would leverage my 30+ years of experience in publishing and my 10+ years running Author Accelerator. I didn’t want to undersell myself, especially for a course on pricing!

I began to re-think the idea of offering 1:1 feedback in the way I had imagined. I brainstormed other ways to deliver feedback that would still be useful and generative. I came up with the idea of a 50-page workbook that we would work through in the first, intensive training day, which would give participants something active to dig their teeth into, followed by a small group working session where I could bring people on for hot seat coaching and everyone could learn from everyone else.

This format felt good. It had the community element I wanted, the back-and-forth element I wanted, and if I made the sessions longer than the standard webinar, would give me significant time with all students without requiring scheduling a bunch of 1:1 sessions.

I turned again to my whole business ecosysm. I considered the 3D Revision course I offer Author Accelerator certified coaches, which I consider to be one of the best courses I’ve ever made. It includes a philosophy of revision, tools to help coaches and writers alike, and intensive deep dive case studies (including the wild 6-week revision process KJ Dell’Antonia went through at the very end of writing her New York Times bestselling novel, The Chicken Sisters) but is one of the few courses I offer that doesn’t come with live coaching help. It’s priced at $899.

I determined that The Art of Pricing training should be less than that course if it wasn’t going to have 1:1 feedback.

You can see that every business design decision I make changes the price — the assets I will be sharing (the big workbook), the content I will be teaching, the length of the training, small groups versus 1:1. You can also see that I was playing around with pricing within my own business ecosystem, and not looking outside it — although outside research is something I do a lot and something I will talk about more in another post.

Pricing is an iterative process just like writing a book. You start with a concept, an idea, and you play around with it. You make a series of inquiries about it related to your goals in offering it, your customer needs, your other offerings, your time, your energy, and your emotion.

I finally set the price to $600.

4. Sitting With It

The art of pricing means sitting with your decision a bit to see how they feel.

Making a sales page is always a big part of the process of this “sitting” for me. I usually build the pages myself, because when I put the ideas on the webpage, they become real. I draft the language, sketch out the bullet points of the program, and then share it with people on my team and in my universe and see how it all feels.

It was at this point that a friend of mine who shall remain nameless suggested that on my sales page for this course, I should say, “Earn 20% more next month!” to entice people to sign up. They were joking. Kind of.

They said, “Come on — Marie Forleo would say it.”

And I laughed. Because she probably would. And many marketing experts would say the same thing — to make a big, quantifiable promise like that.

While I know without a doubt that people can make a lot more money if they work on their pricing, I’m not making a % promise like that (Double your income! Earn $10,000 in ten days!) because I don’t know what any of my students are going to do or not to in terms of implementing the lessons I teach, and I don’t know what their particular life or business situation is, and I don’t know anything about their relationship to money. It doesn’t feel in alignment with my values to make a claim like that.

(By the way, the $10,000 in ten days example comes from Rachel Rodgers, author of We Should All Be Millionaires and CEO of Hello Seven. She is an intellectual property attorney and although I have not been an official student in her program, I have learned so much from her over the years about money mindset. I highly recommend her work — and the $10,000 in ten days challenge she does works for some people. It proves to them that you can raise your rates, make a new offer, ask people to work with you, and ask for money you are owed. It can effectively change the story you are telling yourself about money. But that kind of challenge is not my style. It would stress me out to do it or to teach it. ALSO if you think you need fundamental mindset work around charging anything for your skill and talent, I highly recommend Playing Big by Tara Mohr. It is one of my all-time most recommended books.)

5. Commit — and Test

Finally, I committed to the price — which is not a commitment to charge this price for the rest of time, but to put it out there and test and iterate.

Does the program sell at this price?

Do people balk at the price?

If I fill the class, is it a great experience? Do people learn what I want them to learn? Do they achieve the outcomes I want for them? Do any of them double their income? Earn 20% more next month? Have tangible results?

I also want to know if I love teaching the program. Will I be sad about not giving 1:1 feedback? Can I improve the structure or the content? Does the price seem in alignment with what I give to delivering it?

I know will run this training again, which makes picking a price for this first beta run of it less fraught.

6. Discounts

Why offer a discount? I don’t often do it and I don’t always advocate it. But when testing something new — this is both a new program and I’m selling it to a new audience of Substack subscribers — it can make sense to offer special discounts to people in your community who support you and your work. You’ll hear some people refer to this as a “founder’s offer.”

I decided to offer a discount for Substack subscribers (thank you!) and to Author Accelerator members who have supported me and my work in such a big way (thank you!)

You can DM me here for the Substack subscriber code (it’s 10% off) or DM me in Mighty Networks for the Author Accelerator member code (it’s 30% off). (Note that if you are both a Substack subscriber and a member of Author Accelerator, you can only get one of those discounts. The Author Accelerator one is bigger, so go for that!)

Go Check It Out

You can check out The Art of Pricing sales page to see how I laid out the program — and if you would like to join me for this mastermind, you can sign up!

Being confident with your pricing is fundamental to a healthy business and can be so difficult. I’m excited to share more with you in some posts over the next few weeks.

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