This is Part 1 of Author Accelerator CEO Jennie Nash’s series, How I Built My Six-Figure Book Coaching Business.

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When I was in Croatia with Author Accelerator Certified Book Coach Lidija Hilje (which I wrote about here), she asked me how I built my book coaching business from zero to making multiple six figures a year. 

I told her the story over a dinner of fresh seafood and Croatian delicacies, but I thought many of my newsletter readers might like to hear about it, too, so I’m going to write a mini series about it, and because it’s my inclination to teach and to coach, I’m going to frame it by talking about the lessons I learned.

Note that this is a story about me and my book coaching business, not the story of my starting Author Accelerator. Next year is our 10th (!) year in business, so perhaps I will tell that story sometime in 2023!

Teaching Is a Fabulous Way to Learn

In 2000, I published a book called The Victoria’s Secret Catalog Never Stops Coming and Other Lessons I Learned From Breast Cancer. I had been diagnosed at the age of 35 because a dear friend from high school had been diagnosed with lung cancer and I was convinced that I had cancer, too. Turns out I was right, and as my friend was dying, I was given the chance to treat an early-stage cancer and live. I knew within a few days of being diagnosed that I would write about the way that being faced with your mortality can open your eyes to the beauty and brutality of the world.

I did a cross-promotion with Ford Motor Company, who at the time was a national sponsor of Komen Race for the Cure and focused on young survivors; I was a perfect spokesperson for their cause. They purchased 100,000 copies of my memoir and I spent three years working with Ford on speeches, appearances, events, a website, and other material — including a beautiful little book called My Grandma’s Bandana that was packaged with a pink and green Lily Pulitzer scarf.

As a result of that book’s success, I was invited to write about cancer all the time. One invitation came from the Los Angeles Times for a special insert related to the Revlon Run/Walk. A woman teaching at the UCLA Extension Writers Program — the largest adult education writing program in the country — saw the piece in the paper and invited me to come speak to her class about writing personal essays. The teacher’s name was Barbara Abercrombie, a beloved member of the Los Angeles writing community who passed away in August.

I spoke in Barbara’s class that semester and the next and the next and then the Writer’s Program invited me to teach a class of my own. Barbara helped me develop my curriculum for a course in memoir, and it was there that I began to hone my philosophies about the teaching of writing, which would become the foundation of my book coaching career — key tenants such as know your goal, think before you write, and the often-ignored reality that form is function as much for a book as it is for a building or a piece of clothing or technology.

When writing memoir, many people want to do it for the therapeutic value or for a legacy. I wanted writers to decide what their intention was, because writing for publication is a whole different ball game. I very quickly became known as the instructor you go to when you are serious about writing a book-length work for publication and not the instructor you go to when you are just dipping your toes in the water of writing or needing to learn basic skills and improve your craft. We had incredible teachers on staff who were gifted in those important areas, but that wasn’t me.

As I developed my ideas and presented them to class after class of students — I taught at UCLA for 13 years — I learned more about the process of developing books, and became somewhat obsessed with it. I became a student of the creative process.

I audited a bunch of courses taught by my UCLA colleagues, read all the writing books, and ruined myself for reading: I was always reading for structure and writer intent rather than for content or story. I couldn't get lost in a book if you paid me! I wanted to learn the machinery of how books were written and how we could best teach writers to bring their visions to life. 

There are Inherent Problems with the Traditional Way Writing Is Taught—and There Is a Better Way

 I loved my time teaching at UCLA and I loved my colleagues and students, but it was also an exercise in total frustration.

Our classes had 15, 20, or more students in them, and lasted anywhere from 4 intensive days to 10 weeks. How can you teach 20 people who have jobs and kids and commute on the Los Angeles freeway to write a book in 10 weeks? 

You can’t — which is why so often writing is taught on a scale that is manageable for everyone involved: scenes or short stories or single-issue craft topics that can be covered in a group setting in an hour or two chunk of time. There was not room to think holistically about book writing, and this struck me as a serious flaw.

Many times, writing programs use the workshopping model of critique, wherein one student is in the spotlight or the hot seat and the other students weigh in on the work. This model comes from the academy — a tradition I did not participate in when I was in school. I was an English major at Wellesley College, where we wrote a lot and had small classes and shared our work, but the focus was on understanding books, articles, and poems, not producing them. 

I took one creative writing workshop course. It was when I spent my junior year at Amherst College and the writer Marilyn Robison was a visiting lecturer. Although I loved her and the whole concept of writing with intention and with other people who were taking it seriously, I did not love the way the workshop seemed to be a popularity contest, or a competition for the teacher’s attention. I also did not love that as a writer you had to listen to the opinions the other student writers had about your work. Were they my ideal readers?? 

I knew that I was a good writer — and felt that I had something unique I might have called voice and now I might call authority — and I was worried about that voice getting squeezed out of me by a committee of my peers.

I wanted to spend my career in the world of writing, but I did not seek to get an MFA in writing, or an advanced degree of any kind. I went to New York after college and got a job at Random House, working for a fiction and a nonfiction editor, and published my first book at age 25. 

I have since learned, from books like The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom by Felicia Rose Chavez, and Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping by Matthew Salesses, that many of the academy-based writing workshops are problematic for writers or color and women writers. These thinkers have shown me skewed power dynamics and racist practices that often exist in the academic workshop model. They have articulated some of what I must have sensed — and a lot that I did not begin to understand — and why I shied away from those programs.

In teaching at UCLA, I came to see that what my students really wanted when they enrolled in a writing course was to find their own voice. They wanted someone to show them with evidence and compassion where their words were working and where they were not. They didn’t want the opinions of their peers and they didn’t want theory – well, I mean, they DID want both those things but in limited doses. What they really wanted was a process for practicing and improving their own work — for learning how to trust it and bringing it fully to life. They wanted to know if their work was subjectively good (meaning, in this case, the kind of book that could be pitched to an agent or a publisher and have a reasonable chance of gaining an audience) and what they had to do to get closer to that goal. 

It was impossible to deliver what they wanted in the time we had, and for what I was being paid.
I kept dreaming about a better way. I kept thinking about what I would do if there were no constraints on time — if I could give a writer exactly what they needed.

Say Yes!

And then one day, one of my colleagues whose course I had audited, and who was an expert in story analysis, asked if I would help her write a book about writing a novel. She said, “Will you coach me all the way through the process?” She was willing to invest the time, the energy, and the money she would need to do her best work, and she had picked me because of my marketplace focus and my systematic way of looking at the creative process. It felt like a gift from the universe to get to do exactly what I wanted and what I had been inadvertently preparing for.

I worked with her for a year, helping her to define her goal and her audience, describe her method of how to write a novel, and write it all down in a compelling way. I set deadlines, gave her feedback on every line she wrote, and engaged in deep conversation with her. It was among the most thrilling experiences of my professional career — to be at the white-hot center of the creative process with a brilliant and ambitious mind. We developed a book proposal for her project, I helped her research agents and strategize her pitch process — and she sold it in a two-book deal to Ten Speed, a division of Random House.

That writer was Lisa Cron and that first book was Wired for Story. The book became an instant classic in the writing world, Lisa became a popular speaker at writing events, and suddenly I was inundated with other people who wanted me to coach them through their books, too. And that was the beginning of something really special.

Next week: An English major who knows nothing about business starts a book coaching business.