Making a Mid-Career Pivot to Book Coaching
Today’s 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.
No one goes to college to become a book coach. Book coaching is not an occupation that has been around long enough to have a university-based training program. The people who are pioneering this profession are the ones who are out here doing it right now. We are creating the standards and the systems, educating writers about how book coaching can help them, and building the industry as we go.
It’s a thrilling time to be doing this work, and one of the parts that is most exciting is working alongside colleagues who are coming from so many different industries.
At Author Accelerator, a great many of our coaches are writers themselves—a topic that I am going to dive deeper into over the next few weeks. I’ll be sharing an interview with one of our book coaches who earned her certification the same week she announced a six-figure book deal for her first novel in a multi-book deal. She worked with another of our book coaches on the book that landed her that deal. It’s an inspiring story about the ways that having a growth mindset can lead to amazing things!
For today, I want to talk about our certified book coaches who are not primary writers themselves.
Book Coaches Come From a Wide Range of Backgrounds
We have book coaches who worked for years as social workers and psychotherapists, who were professors of English and history, who trained to be librarians, lawyers, human resource managers, and anthropologists. We have people who were radiologists and florists, architects and soldiers, and one woman working her way through our class who is a single mother and a doula.
A doula, you might ask? How does that fit??
It fits because this woman, Danielle Jernigan, is on a mission to improve maternal health for Black mothers. She holds degrees and certificates in medicine and therapeutic practices and is a yogi and a writer, and part of her mission is not only to write books for the women she wants to serve but to urge others to write books for that audience, too.
The key to becoming a great book coach is to connect your career experiences to what writers need most in this fast-changing publishing landscape.
The Key Characteristics of a Great Book Coach
Book coaches help writers develop their work so that they can confidently approach the marketplace. We work with the writing as editors, but we also work with the writers—holding them accountable, helping them to set goals and manage their project, guiding them as they confront their doubts and insecurities, their desires and their ambitions.
These are the 10 characteristics we tend to see in our book coaches:
They love books
They love writers
They feel comfortable with the creative process, which is not always linear and often chaotic
They feel confident managing a complex project
They have the ability to focus on editorial details and on the big picture of an idea—often at the same time
They understand the marketplace where books are bought and sold—or are willing to learn
They like to teach people 1:1
They like to work alone
They have the ability to step back from the emotion to protect themselves from getting too drawn in
They are self-motivated
Do you see yourself in that list? (Do you want to take our sweet quiz that digs deeper into these characteristics? You can do that HERE.) If you tick most of these boxes, odds are good you would make a great book coach—no matter what your current job.
Why Not Start Now, Before Your Current Job Drives You Crazy
In her book, Pivot, author Jenny Blake talks about scanning the landscape for what you want to do next in your work life, and gathering resources to help you prepare to make a move. Finding that kind of scaffolding makes taking a leap much easier to stomach.
That’s what our book coach certification program can do for you.
If you are getting tired of your job and tired of having a boss, and if the idea of doing work you love is really tugging at you, you can take action right now to build your book coaching skills.
You can move through the course at your own pace, because that’s how we designed it. We recognize that our students are adults with varying amounts of free time and other responsibilities, so you work through the course the way that works best for you.
It is going to take you some time—on average about eight months.
The bulk of that time is spent actually coaching writers. As I said earlier, you learn this work by doing it, under the guidance of people who have been doing it, too. The three practicums in our program give you hands-on experience—and it’s your work in these practicums that we evaluate when we review your application for certification.
We want to see evidence of you helping your writers move their projects forward. We want to see editing skills to be sure, but also compassion, an understanding of the marketplace your writers seek to enter, and a feel for moving a creative project forward. We want you to be ready—and we know that our program delivers because we hear it every day.
Stuart Wakefield is one of our coaches who worked for more than 20 years at Ford Motor Company and three years at Warner Bros. before he became a book coach. As he puts it, “In the grand scheme of things I don't think books on writing are that useful and I have 57! Writers need someone to talk with, to bounce ideas off, to guide them through what they've learned from a book. The Author Accelerator programs are magnificent. I learned more about writing than those 57 books combined. Nothing beats a highly-trained human, whether they've trained alongside you or are coaching you in person.”
One Step at a Time
If you are thinking book coaching sounds amazing but you can’t possibly make the time, I want to tell you about our coach, Sandra Postma.
Sandra has chronic fatigue syndrome. She can only work three days a week, and only for a few hours on each of those days. She simply does not have the energy to do anything more. And she got through our course relatively quickly.
I asked her how on earth that happened.
“The course gave me so much energy,” she said, “It’s all I wanted to do.”
So when she had time, she did another lesson. She watched another video. She did one more thing to help her practicum client.
She made it through one step at a time, and now she is building a coaching practice around helping other writers with chronic illness. No one understands better what they need.
You can chip away at the course on the weekends or holidays. You can do an hour a couple nights a week.
You can build a new skill that can quickly become a side gig that allows you to earn a little extra income or turns into a whole new career.
The thing that is so empowering about starting a book coaching business is that all the hard work is for you. You get to decide what your business looks like, how much time you want to spend on it, and how much you want to make doing it.
We have coaches in our community who just want to make $1,000 extra a month and coaches who are about to break multiple six figures. There is no one way to do this work.
We’re here to guide and support you, to train and certify you, and to cheer you on.
For More Inspiration
Watch this interview I did with Jill Smith, director of the Denver Publishing Institute. People come from all over the country to DPI each summer to learn about how to pivot into publishing, many of them at mid-career. Our conversation touches on what someone with experience in another industry can bring to a new role in publishing, the skills that English majors and other humanities majors bring to business, and the joy people feel in finally being able to work in a field they love. I’ll be speaking about book coaching at DPI this summer.
