Today’s blog post comes to us from Author Accelerator CEO Jennie Nash. To learn more about our Book Coach Certification program, click here. To sign up for our newsletter and stay up to date on events for writers and anyone interested in book coaching, head here!

Author Accelerator certified our 100th book coach this week!

I wanted to take a moment to enjoy the milestone and to celebrate with the community of people who read and follow this newsletter. One hundred certified coaches!! WOW!

I launched Author Accelerator in 2013 with a mission to better nurture writers through every step of the creative process. Changes in the publishing industry left writers to figure out the writing and publishing process on their own, and I could see the pain it was causing.

In my own writing life, I had benefited from the wisdom and skill of a wonderful editor at a Big 5 publishing house, but you only got that kind of attention once you were “in,” and it was getting harder and harder to get in without it. It was a classic Catch-22.

I landed on a solution to offer writers that level of accountability, feedback, and support before they got through the gate.

I believed that it would make all the difference and soon got the chance to prove it. My very first book coaching client was Lisa Cron, of Wired for Story, Story Genius, and Story or Die fame. Lisa, who is a brilliant story analyst, had never written a book, and she asked if I would coach her. I jumped at the chance to test out my ideas about the best way to support a writer all the way through from beginning to end.

Right from the start of working with Lisa, I was building systems and processes, and thinking about patterns in the creative process — the places where writers always stumble, the predictable steps every writer takes on the road to publication, the best ways to help. 

The biggest surprise of the whole endeavor was that when Lisa achieved her dream — she landed a fabulous agent and a two-book deal at Ten Speed/Random House — I was as thrilled and satisfied as if it had been my own achievement. I loved coaching and wanting to teach others to do it. I wanted to help as many writers as we could.

When you are creating anything — a book or a business — it takes so long for the project to get off the ground, and longer still for it to become what you imagine it can be. Author Accelerator went through some twists and turns — pivots is the business term for it — but today it feels like the business I imagined.

Our community has reached a critical mass. These book coaches are on fire!

They are devoted to their clients and to each other and to this industry, and they are making big things happen. They are building communities of their own around important conversations: fiction that focuses on social justice, writers in the LQBTQ+ community, experts who want to share their teachings in the health and wellness fields, veterans who want to tell their stories, and fantasy writers whose work touches on magic, among many other topics. We strive to support them as they support writers with their unique genius.

Most days, I just sit here in awe! What a magnificent thing it is to see all these smart and ambitious book coaches helping writers do their best work so they have the best chance of making an impact. What luck I have to get to do this every day! That satisfaction I felt that very first time is something I feel all the time now when one of our coaches or one of their writers succeeds.

Plus I work with a team of kind, smart, and dedicated people who help me run Author Accelerator, and that is a blessing every day.

I keep thinking what it will be like to have 200 certified coaches. I keep thinking of all those writers who don’t have to struggle alone, who don’t have to scramble to figure out what to do, who can focus on raising their voices and telling their stories.

So who was the 100th book coach?

A woman named Stacy Frazer, who will be focusing her coaching business on helping fiction writers who are scared but determined to proceed anyway. She’ll be taking over our Instagram on March 8. Be sure to tune in!