The Mission-Minded Book Coach
The Mission-Minded Book Coach
Some thoughts on pricing book coaching services when you're on a mission to serve. The last in a series on pricing.
Part 2: The Friends & Family Problem
Part 4: Some Thoughts About Cheap Post-In Notes and Pricing Your Book Coaching Packages
Hey writers! Join me for the Summer Blueprint Sprint over at the #amwriting podcast. It’s a 10-week podcast series + workbook + weekly AMAs with Author Accelerator Certified Book Coaches AND you’ll get a free digital download of one of my Blueprint books AND if you finish your Blueprint in 10 weeks (a very do-able pace), you’ll be entered to win a Blueprint review from me or
Dell’Antonia. It’s effective for writers in any genre. It starts July 2 for subscribers of the #amwriting podcast.I’ve been writing about pricing for the past four weeks and the overall message I’ve been sharing is how most of us need to reconsider the value of what we are offering and raise our rates to reflect it.
The primary objection I get to this kind of thinking is from book coaches whose business is based on a mission of serving a particular kind of writer. They frequently say something like this:
“I’m committed to serving _________________ writers and they can’t pay high prices. I have to keep my prices low in order to honor my mission.”
The blank could be anything — young writers, beginning writers, marginalized writers, neurodivergent writers, LGBTQ+ writers, incarcerated writers, chronically ill writers, military veterans, parents with a houseful of kids who need orthodontia.
People who are drawn to book coaching tend to be drawn to teaching, nurturing, inspiring, and uplifting, so it makes sense that a lot of us would also have a mission in mind. This is part of what makes the work so powerful and meaningful: you can make a big impact. You can help people raise their voices and bring their work into a world that needs to hear what they have to say.
But you can’t make an impact if you can’t sustain your business. Your mission depends on your paying yourself.
There are two parts of the objection I want to address:
1. The assumption that the writers you want to serve can’t pay the prices you need to charge.
Rachel Rodgers, author of We Should All Be Millionaires, talks about getting out of your client’s wallet. What she means is to stop telling yourself a story of what people can and can’t pay.
You don’t know people’s financial situation. Maybe you know the stories of a few of the writers you want to serve and maybe they say they can’t pay*, but these people may be a tiny fraction of the writers who could be your ideal clients.
Your ideal clients may have grants you don’t know about, secret inheritances, generous benefactors, second jobs they have taken in order to do this work, or a stash of cash in a coffee can they have been waiting to spend to help them bring a long-held dream of writing a book to life.
Your job is not to manufacture reasons they can’t pay.
Your job is to determine the sort of work that lights you up, to deliver a desired outcome to your ideal clients, and to run your business in a way that is sustainable — which means paying yourself enough to keep doing it.
*People don’t always say what they mean. Sometimes people say they can’t afford something but what they really mean is that they can’t afford to fork over money and not get the outcome they desire. What they mean, in other words, is they don’t trust you. That’s not a problem with your clients. That’s a problem with your messaging and the way you are inviting them into your business.
2. The assumption that the only way to fulfill the mission is to offer high-touch services for a low price.
I have seen so many book coaches make this mistake. They have a mission to serve a particular kind of writer, and they set up their businesses to offer high-touch services for low prices.
High-touch services (which means line edits on a lot of pages, the ability to ask you questions between deadlines, and 1:1 strategy sessions) necessarily take a lot of time, and so the coaches take on more clients in order to make the money they need to make.
This puts them back on the kind of treadmill they probably hoped to get off when they started their own book coaching business. It leads to resentment and burnout.
There are so many other ways to fulfill a mission in book coaching:
You can start a low-priced group coaching program to run alongside higher-priced individual coaching packages.
You can offer self-study courses for a low price and charge more for 1:1 services. (This concept would also work for a podcast, which you would offer for free.)
You can offer guides, PDFs, ebooks, and other tools for free or for low prices and charge high prices for your 1:1 services.
You can institute a sliding scale or a “pay what you can” model for certain packages and a fixed price for others.
You can charge high prices and offer scholarships.
You can charge high prices and then volunteer your time with a group or organization serving the writers you wish to serve.
What all of this means is being intentional about the kinds of writers you wish to serve, how you wish to serve them, and what your business model is going to be.
Learn more
To read more about business model design and mission-driven businesses, I highly recommend business coach Dallas Travers. She has a whole podcast series on this topic, which features *five* Author Accelerator Certified Book Coaches (Dani Abernathy, Janet Fox, Julie Artz, Suzette Mullen, and Stephanie Dethlefs!!) She is modeling what I am talking about — she gives away all this podcast teaching for FREE, but her signature program is $6,825/year.
I also highly recommend Tad Hargrave at marketingforhippies.com. Start with this post: What if the people I want to help are broke? And then search for his material on business models, making sure you watch this video and read these articles.