The second people hear about book coaching, they often feel that it’s EXACTLY what they were meant to be. Nurture writers, talk about books all day, and have the freedom to design a career that works with your life.

Yes, please!

And then they start telling themselves stories about why they can’t do it: they didn’t major in English, they’ve never worked in publishing, and they would never be comfortable marketing themselves.

At Author Accelerator, we’ve certified more than 220 book coaches all over the world, and every single one of them felt something like this before they launched their business.

I did too.

I worried that I would ruin my writer’s projects or their chances.

I was terrified of raising my prices above the per-word, per-page, per-hour industry standard.

I feared I could never figure out how to create and maintain a website, take payment from clients, and (when my business took off) hire a virtual assistant.

I didn’t dare call myself an entrepreneur because I didn’t go to business school — my husband did! — and I get really nervous about math and spreadsheets.

Who was I to call myself a book coach?

I knew I could be a good book coach. It was work that would take advantage of all my talents — from editing and understanding narrative design to managing relationships and looking deeply at creative projects.

But I needed to overcome the sense that I was an imposter.

I needed to remind myself that book coaching is a brand new industry and no one grew up doing it, or trained in college to do it, or had any more right to do it than I did.

I needed to stop thinking about how I might hurt my writers and focus on all the ways I could help them.

The path to publishing is long, lonely, and complicated; imagine if I could be a trusted guide for my writers, a creative collaborator, someone who was committed to helping them write the best book they could?

I needed to tell myself a different story.