Why Hire a Book Coach?
Looking at book coaching from the perspective of a writer who might be wondering if and how a book coach can help.
I’m going on vacation for a week starting today, so decided to share this piece that I wrote on spec for Harvard Business Review, at the invitation of one of their contributors, whom I connected with after a webinar I gave. I was writing within specific guidelines and thought the piece turned out pretty great. Turns out they didn’t think it hit hard enough on the work/business themes they cover, so they rejected it. I offer it to you here, instead!
I have a guest post (my first one on this site) and a Book Coach Spotlight queued up for next week. I’ll respond to any comments when I return.
You know that writing a book would bring you more business opportunities, recognition, and credibility, but you’re not sure how to go about it and you don’t want to waste your time. Book coaches can help you figure out your goals, navigate the rapidly changing publishing landscape, and give you the guidance you need to write a book you can be proud of. Engaging a coach will require an investment of time, energy, and money, so you want to make sure you’re prepared.
Here are five reasons you might consider hiring a book coach and five tips on how to choose one.
When do you need a book coach?
You’re excited to write a book but you don’t know where to start. How do you know if your idea is any good? How do you go from the swirling ideas in your head to something concrete? How do you make sure you aren’t just wasting your time – or worse, embarrassing yourself? A coach can help you understand your goals, pin down the best idea, and lay a strong foundation for writing a good book.
You’ve started writing a book but you have so many time-sensitive demands on your time that it’s easy to push writing to the back burner. The key to finishing a book is taking consistent, meaningful action (hello, Atomic Habits!) A book coach will give you deadlines, hold you accountable, and help you clarify your thoughts and ideas as you write forward.
You can’t figure out the world of publishing – and for good reason. The industry has undergone massive change in the last decade – and possibly even the last ten minutes. It’s hard to make sense of how money flows, who controls distribution, and what is required of an author in terms of marketing. (TikTok? A blurb from Adam Grant?) A book coach can explain the pros and cons of various paths to publishing and the realities of marketing, and guide you in making choices that serve your goals.
Everyone is talking about using ChatGPT, but headlines about plagiarism scare you. If you’ve played around with AI, you know how it can streamline the process of making outlines, writing subheads, and researching key topics. A book coach can help you leverage the software while ensuring that you are actually writing your own book and aren’t inadvertently stealing someone else’s intellectual property.
You’ve thought about hiring a ghostwriter, but you want the words in your book to be yours. There are situations when a ghostwriter can be a good choice (you don’t like to write, you need a heavier lift in terms of getting words on the page, you’re a global celebrity with a massive book deal and the pressure is on), but if you want to do the work of capturing your voice and honing your message – if you would take pride and pleasure in that process – a book coach might be a better choice. They can help you hone your skills, build the confidence you need, and get into the flow.
If you decide a book coach would help you with writing a book, there are five key things to consider:
How to hire a book coach
Get clear on your motivation. Do you want to hit the best-seller list? Share your wisdom? Make money? Start a revolution? Knowing your why is the key to a good coach-client relationship. You can’t control every outcome ( luck and timing absolutely play a role in publishing success) but knowing what you are after makes the chances of achieving it far higher.
Be honest about your commitment to the process. Writing a book is a complex creative and intellectual undertaking. It’s much harder than most people imagine. How much time do you have to devote to it? Think in terms of hours per week you can set aside for deep work on a book project. You’ll need a minimum of five to eight uninterrupted hours.
Be prepared to show some writing to the book coaches you are considering – a favorite newsletter, a journal article, or five sample pages on the topic you are considering writing about. Most coaches will want to review your writing to get a sense of your voice and try to catch your vision.
Test out the coach’s approach in a sample session. You can get a feel for their style (tough love or gentle guidance?) and understand the nuts and bolts of how they work. Cadence is an important consideration. A VIP intensive consolidates work into a compressed timeframe but every-other-week deadlines allow you more time to think and research if your work involves finding case studies and conducting interviews.
Ask yourself these questions:
Is the book coach asking the kinds of specific and challenging questions that will sharpen your idea and improve your writing?
Does the coach have authority over their process – how submissions work, when you will hear back from them with feedback, how you can ask questions as they arise?
Does their grasp of the publishing options available to you feel well-informed, realistic, and up-to-date?
Do they have enthusiasm for your idea? You’re looking for a partner and an advocate – someone who gets what you are trying to do..
Do you trust them? The best coach-writer relationships are built on mutual trust
When you select a coach, be ready to commit. Prices vary greatly depending on the coach’s level of experience and the amount of hands-on editing offered, but you can expect to pay anywhere from $150 to $1500 a session (or more) and to work with a coach anywhere from three months (to develop a book proposal) to a year (to finish and revise a full manuscript.)
Jennie Nash is a top book coach whose clients have landed spots on the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists. She is the founder and CEO of Author Accelerator, a company that has trained and certified over 200 book coaches. You can search for Author Accelerator certified book coaches at authoraccelerator.com/matchme.