What's the Worst-Case Scenario If You Raise Your Book Coaching Prices? A First Person Account.

How to navigate fears around pricing and rejection.

Welcome new subscribers! I’m kicking off the official start of my Substack newsletter today with a topic at the white-hot center of so many book coaching businesses: pricing. If there’s a topic you’re burning to hear about, let me know!

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Photo by the blowup on Unsplash

For more than ten years, I’ve run a business that by every metric has been very successful. I’ve made many millions of dollars(!), paid myself well, and helped more than 200 people learn the fundamentals of book coaching and launch their own businesses. My company is a leader in the new book coaching industry and I feel very confident in my entrepreneurial skills. But in November of 2023, the worst thing that can happen to a businessperson happened to me.

A year ago, I decided it was time to do a major refresh on our core course offerings – the nine-month book coach certification training programs in fiction and nonfiction. Students had been asking for a transcript, for closed captions on the video trainings, and for a searchable workbook, among other things. The refresh would also give us the chance to fix a lot of small problems in the course, smooth out lessons that weren’t as clear as we wanted them to be, and update out-of-date information. 

My team and I spent months planning the updates and many more months executing the updates. (Just one of the two courses we updated has more than 100 videos we had to make new slides for, re-shoot, edit, transcribe, download, and upload. It was a huge amount of work!) 

I have long believed that our pricing on this course was too low. It delivers amazing content to be sure, but also comes with nine months of support from me and my team and an online platform that facilitates people building friendships and community. The update seemed to be the perfect moment to increase the price to align better with the value we are offering. I committed to a price increase.

In June of 2023, we ran a “last chance” sale at the old price point of $2,400 (which 35 people purchased) and we announced that we would be raising the price of the new course to $3,600. We re-opened the doors to the course in November… and got no sales.

NONE! ZERO! ZIP!!!!

This is the moment every entrepreneur dreads.

I felt so deflated – and embarrassed, and sad. There were days when I thought, Maybe I’m not as good at being an entrepreneur as I’ve been telling myself. And there were days when I thought, Maybe I got too greedy and full of myself. And there were days when I thought, Maybe this is a sign that it’s time to shut the business down and call it a day.

It was very tempting to quit. It’s sometimes just so exhausting and overwhelming to try to be an entrepreneur. People talk about the freedom of being the boss, the exhilarating challenge of solving problems, and how great it is to be in control of your time and your money – and all that is true. But they don’t often talk about these feelings or these days, and I think they should. One doesn’t come without the other. Just like writing a book, building a successful business is a long process with no guarantees. If you decide to be in it, you are in it, for better and for worse. Having no sales was definitely worse.

My temptation to quit was compounded by the fact that I just had my first grandchild. All I want to do is visit her (across the country), and hang out with her, and watch her grow, and help her mom and dad. Plus I’m going to turn 60 in May of this year and many of my friends are retiring. Couldn’t I just be DONE?

I could, obviously, choose to be done at any time. I call the shots and the beauty of running your own business is that you can do whatever you want.

But I realized that I’m not ready to be done. The thought of walking away felt wrong in my brain and in my body. I have so many things I want to do with my business and so much I want to share and achieve.

So I stopped telling myself the story that the pricing crisis was a fatal blow. And this is the tl;dr if you are running a book coaching business, or you are a freelance editor who wants to up their game, or you are helping writers in some other way and it’s not going well: you can tell yourself another story.

We’re writers, after all. We work with stories. We can change the narrative.

Selling a service to writers is not a science, it’s an art.

What that means is that you listen to your gut and you listen to your customers. You take in the evidence around you in the marketplace. You discern and you decide how to proceed – and you do this over and over and over again. (Again, if this sounds like the writing process, it is! Running a book coaching business and writing a book have so much in common – I see parallels every single day.)

There were five steps I took to tell myself a different story, which you can use if you come to a fork in the road in your business.

1.)   I looked for evidence that there was another story to tell.

I opened up the folder I keep on my desktop called Praise. I read through the testimonials people have given us about our program. I get notes from people telling me that they learned more in our program than they learned in their MFA or PhD program, that the trainings unlocked their own writing in a way nothing else had, and that I have changed their lives by giving them a path to make money doing work they love; or a path to doing earning a living even though they have a chronic illness that prevents them from having a typical job; or a path to returning to the work of their heart after ten, twenty, or thirty years doing work they thought they had to do because their parents said so or society said so or the scared part in themselves said so. These are deep, soulful, rave reviews, ya’ll. And there are not just a few. There are a lot.

You may not have this kind of overwhelming evidence in your business yet, but you probably have SOME evidence: maybe you helped someone find their story or their confidence. Maybe you helped someone navigate their path to publishing and recover from rejection. 

And if you have no evidence yet? If you are brand new to this? Open a Praise folder on your desktop, and seek to put something in it. Seek to be helpful to someone, to serve them, to help them where they hurt. Make this your primary goal.

2.)   I looked close to home for proof that our course is worth the higher price.

I went and looked at the websites of some of the coaches we’ve trained who have built thriving book coaching businesses. I’ve been running Author Accelerator for ten years, and some of our students are doing amazing things! 

I visited site after site of book coaches who are running powerful businesses and making an impact in their corner of the writing world. They are running mentorships and workshops, leading and speaking at top conferences and events, and contributing to some of the most popular newsletters, blogs, and podcasts in the writing education universe. In other words, they have taken the ball we passed them and run with it. It was so thrilling to see. I felt an immediate flip in my emotion from despair to pride – and then to a fierce resolve: No way am I going to stop now just because one program launch didn’t work.

One of the core principles I teach in my book coach training program is about putting an end to race-to-the-bottom pricing perpetuated by some of the online freelance forums. Writers are not served by the lowest price for editorial and coaching services. They are served by selecting the right help at the right time and for the right reasons – and being willing to invest in their own success. I see our coaches out there walking that walk. They are charging prices that reflect the value they are offering, and in several cases, those prices are similar or more than what I am charging for the training. I was delighted — and inspired.

So I’m listening to my own teaching. What I am offering is not cheap and it’s not fast. It’s a thorough and rigorous training program designed to empower people who have a history of giving away their time and talent. It is worth what I am charging.

If you are in search of broader evidence for your pricing, study the marketplace of people you admire. Don’t look for common pricing just to find a price point that is “safe.” Look for evidence that writers will pay for help that is truly helpful.

3.)   I looked further afield for proof that our course is worth the higher price.

I found similar training and certification courses in other industries and saw that people are charging 5x and even 10x what I am for programs that I am certain don’t offer as much because they are not nearly as long, don’t offer nearly as much support and interaction, and they don’t offer a test at the end of training. 

In some of these courses, if you pay, you get certified. That is not true for what we are doing. We only accept ~75% of applications for certification; we ask our students to re-do work that is not up to our high standards. This testing step takes a great deal of time and effort (we have a highly trained team of people maintaining a rigorous process of checks and balances) but we are proud of how we do it.

My search convinced me that our course is worth what we are charging.

If you are searching for evidence for your own pricing, don’t just look at other people who serve writers. Look everywhere, at the broad range of human activity. Look for people who are doing work you admire in other industries that feels like it delivers a similar outcome to what you are offering. Think about what writing a book means to the writer: it often feels like a matter of life and death. In what other situations are people yearning for change and transformation on that deeply emotional level? Look at those industries and what they are charging to deliver the transformation.

4.)   I ran the numbers -- again.

I looked at what I was paying my staff and myself at the lower course price point. I looked at our technology expenses and our marketing expenses. I ran the numbers again and again (with the gracious help of my husband, who oversees the finances for our company and also serves a key role in talking me down whenever I fall into catastrophizing). I asked myself how I would feel if I returned to the lower price point – and the answer was NOT GOOD. 

I talk a lot about building a sustainable book coaching business. Sustainable means that you can pay your expenses and pay yourself what you want to be making. Sustainable means that you are not resentful of your business, not crushed by it. Sustainable means that it brings you joy – not only in the work itself but in the money you make. 

I love teaching people how to run book coaching businesses, and I love the book coaching I still get to do, but I also love paying myself and my employees well.

I learned a great deal about my relationship to my business from Nicole Lewis Keeber’s teachings, and from people who talk about the money mindset and business growth, including Bari Tessler, who offers gentle, helpful advice about money; Rachel Rodgers, who offers some thumping big inspiration about money; Gay Hendricks, who offers instruction on upper limit thinking in The Big Leap; and Tara Mohr, whose book, Playing Big is a touchstone for me and many of my students.

Money is not the reason I do this work but the money has to be there in order for me to keep doing it. The same is true for all of us.

I decided I had made a good and wise decision to raise my rates. 

5.) I thought of the people.

 In addition to our course, we have another product we offer – a thriving membership program filled with many engaged book coaches eager to learn and grow with us. I love this community. It is a generous and lively, wise and engaged group of people. I consider all of our members my colleagues and many of our members my friends. Whenever people in the world complain about how nasty public life has become, I think of this community and how there is goodness in the world, too. 

These people are striving to do good work – to help writers write better books. They are striving to hone their skills and honor the value they bring to their businesses. They are generous to each other and working hard to lift up other book coaches.

Why would I turn my back on this – and on them?

A lot of the 60-something friends I mentioned who are retiring are searching for their second act – for something they can do that brings them meaning and joy and makes them feel that they are having a positive impact on the world.

I have that, right in front of me.

6.)   I determined what I can control—and set about controlling it.

If I know that my course delivers what it promises and that people are not buying it at the higher price point, the problem is not that the price is too high. The problem is that I have not accurately conveyed the value I am offering or lowered the sense of risk people feel around taking the leap to join. It follows that I have not taken the right message to the right pool of potential students. 

I binge-watched a bunch of trainings on these concepts from people I admire* and here is my takeaway:

• Value is conveyed by accurate and honest messaging, which means I needed to re-think how I talk about the course in all the places I talk about it. I often used to say that our training was great for writers who want to start a side gig as a book coach, but a $3,600 course is far too high for someone wanting to start a side gig. I needed to change my messaging to convey that what I am offering is a whole new career. (And guess what? This realization leads me to think that maybe there is a different service I can offer for people who want to start a side gig; maybe this is a whole new thing I can create.)

• Lowering the sense of risk can be done through social proof of how the course has impacted people and by offering people a real taste of what it’s like to be inside the course. I have already started to create these things – and, in fact, you can take a look at one of the first things I made to capture this kind of social proof: it’s a 52-page mini-magazine that showcases one of our student’s journey from being a lost lawyer and an empty nest mom to running a mission-driving, thriving book coaching business and landing a book deal for her first book. (Click here – you don’t even have to give your email!) 

*Some of the best trainings on these subjects come from Tad Hargrave at marketingforhippies.com Tad’s ability to cut through the noise and offer simple, actionable ways to think about marketing (and make you feel less icky about it) is astounding. I have learned an enormous amount from his free offerings – in which he models both a.) and b.) I have probably told more than 1,000 people about Tad in the last two months – in one-on-one coaching sessions, on workshops I have given, and podcasts I have done. That is the way marketing happens – by word of mouth from people who see what you are doing, need what you are doing, and share what you are doing. I am also grateful to my friend,

Dan Blank

, who helps me talk through so many business-related things and who has a reasonable, calm, long-game view of marketing. I also talk about Dan all the time when I refer him to writers are looking for help marketing their books.

Controlling what I can control is the process I am engaged in now. I have work to do and I am going to do it. Business – and writing – is putting your heart and mind to a series of challenges. It’s not meant to be easy. If you can’t find a way to get excited about solving these puzzles and rising to these challenges, it might be that the work isn’t right for you.

But if you can?

What fun to try.

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In upcoming newsletters, I’ll be talking about what I did to fix my messaging, my lead magnet, my landing page, my sales funnel, and my marketing outreach and letting you know how it goes in terms of this pricing crisis. Will anyone buy at the higher prices? Time will tell….

In between these long-form newsletters, I’ll also be doing shorter FAQs (the first few are coming up soon), Book Coach Q&As, and my “What We Can Learn About Book Coaching From….”  series.