What Makes a Book Coaching Business Sustainable?
Today’s blog post comes to us from Author Accelerator CEO Jennie Nash. If you enjoy today’s content, you can sign up for Jennie's weekly newsletter here.
Updated on 5/27/22: This post was edited to include information about our new Business of Book Coaching Bundle. The Business Mastermind program is no longer available.
At Author Accelerator, we talk about teaching people to run sustainable book coaching businesses, and by sustainable we mean three things:
You have the coaching skills to offer a valuable service to help writers write their best books
You have a business model with solid systems and processes that help you work efficiently so you don’t burn out
You are making enough money to make it worthwhile, whether this is your side gig or a whole new career
A Valuable Service
The way to add value as a book coach is to identify exactly how writers need help and to deliver a service that solves their problems.
Writers need so much help! In today’s publishing climate, writers are responsible for a wide variety of factors related to their projects and their careers. They need to decide on the right project to pursue, master their craft, tackle revisions, determine a pitch strategy, figure out how to market their books, decide on a path to publication, and so much more.
All of this can certainly be done alone – we all love the romantic fantasy of the writer toiling away in the garret. And sometimes writers get lucky and find fabulous critique partners or writing groups to help them do their best work. But a great many writers are eager to work with a professional who can guide and support them rather than figuring everything out the hard way.
What a book coach needs to do in order to run a robust and sustainable business is zero in on the specific kinds of writers they want to serve and the specific kinds of problems they want to help solve.
It’s not just a matter of choosing a genre. It’s genre, but also where in the process the writer might be – the start of a project, getting ready to pitch, stuck in the middle? In addition, there is the question of what craft issues to focus on – for fiction, it could be character development, plot, pacing and flow, or all of the above. For nonfiction, it could be structure and shape, audience analysis, voice, content, market positioning, or all of the above. The coach should also identify what sort of person they like working with – total newbies, hard-driving seasoned professionals, people who want to go fast or slow, people who have lost (or found) their courage?
In my own coaching business, I specialize in coaching nonfiction book proposals for high-achieving entrepreneurs and experts, because I love working on structure and big ideas, and I love helping experts step into their power. I am also skilled at the pitching process, so this focus takes advantage of a lot of my talents and interests.
We have certified coaches who specialize in helping speculative fiction writers from marginalized communities; who love helping LGBTQ+ memoir writers; who focus on helping writers figure out the best path to publication; who only work with first-time writers of self-help projects.
When you define your audience this specifically, it’s easy to find ways to dazzle them – to guide and help and support them as they write their best books. It’s easy to become known as the go-to person for exactly what you do. There are a lot of people who offer general services to help writers. But very narrowly defined coaching services that promise specific outcomes for a specialized kind of writer? That’s the sweet spot where businesses thrive.
A Solid Business Model
A solid business model is one of the secrets behind a sustainable business. A solid business model is one built on systems and processes that help you do your work efficiently so that you are not making things up on the fly – or customizing packages for every client. When I finally figured this out after many painful years of winging it, I started to enjoy my work and to make a good living at it. Before I made this move, I was constantly hustling and it was the worst.
Systems and processes can (and should!) be designed for everything from taking payments to editing pages to collecting testimonials to scheduling client calls to posting on social media. It’s all part of the ecosystem you make to create a thriving business.
A solid business model also honors your talent and your time. Your pricing pays you for the time you are spending and the expertise you have acquired. You know when to say yes and when to say, “Absolutely no way” – to projects, to working late, to going the extra mile. You don’t get burned out because you have your hand on the levers of control.
Making Enough Money
Most people come to book coaching because they love books and they love writers. They want to spend all day immersed in the world of words and ideas. But we are not only doing it because of our love; we are also doing it to make money. In order for a book coaching business to be sustainable, it has to bring in enough money.
What’s enough money? This depends on why you are getting into coaching. For some book coaches doing the work as a side gig, it’s enough to earn a few hundred extra dollars a week. They might need one or two clients at a time to sustain that cash flow.
For people adding book coaching on as a stable income stream to support their writing career, they might want to earn several thousand dollars a month, because the income most writers earn from writing tends to be quite variable. There are lean times and boom times. Book coaching can fill in the gaps. If you know this is why you are getting into coaching, you can set up your business to serve your needs, as well as your clients’.
We have a growing number of book coaches making coaching their main money-making venture, and for these coaches, the sky's the limit. About six years ago, for example, I had a goal to make $100,000 a year from book coaching. I hit the goal, then the next year moved it up to $250,000 a year, then $300,000 a year, then $400,000, and I have hit every milestone.
I set my sights very high because I am on a mission to be a leader in this industry and show people by my example that book coaching can be not just a satisfying career but a lucrative one, as well. This is my mission for several reasons.
For one thing, many book coaches are women, who tend to undervalue this work. They say things to their writer friends like, “You want me to read a few pages, help you see the story, and cheer you on while you write? I’m happy to do that.” They are then spending all their time helping other people, not doing their own work, and not getting paid. That kind of thinking undervalues what is a true skill and a true talent. If you are giving it away intentionally, that’s one thing, but if you are giving it away because you didn’t know there was an alternative, or you were afraid to ask for what the skills are worth, that is another thing entirely – and the kind of thinking I want people to squash.
Another thing people say is that book coaching can’t possibly be a real business because writers can’t afford to pay, which is flat out not true. In the Before Times, writers were going to conferences, and taking trips to Italy to work with famous writers, and buying subscriptions to Masterclass, and buying books and classes and workshops. Writers invest in their own education every day – and they are happy to pay for that education. They don’t want to waste their money – none of us do. But if they can get the help they need on the problems that plague them? They will sign up for book coaching, which means book coaches make money.
All of this thinking rests on the core philosophy we teach at Author Accelerator, which is that writing a book is hard work and that people who are serious about doing it are better off with professional, sustained support. Getting 1:1 focused editorial, emotional, and project management support is the single best way for most book writers to meet their goals.
This is what my mission really comes down to: to show the world that book coaching is a wildly effective way for writers to make an impact.
Business of Book Coaching Bundle
In May 2022, we launched a brand-new part of our business, focused on supporting our certified coaches. It’s a Business of Book Coaching Bundle – a toolkit that offers step-by-step guidance for setting up and running a sustainable book coaching business. We offer expert advice from industry leaders, a community of like-minded professionals, and small-group support for coaches whether they are taking their first client or they’ve been in business for many years.
We designed the Business of Book Coaching Bundle because our certified coaches want to run sustainable businesses, and they both wanted and needed our help to do that. We are following our own model of adding value to clients who need it.
You can’t sign up for the bundle until you have successfully completed our certification program, but we’ll be here to guide you when you get there – and we can’t wait to cheer you on.
