Becoming a Book Coach In Uncertain Economic Times
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.
I recently met the wife of an old friend and we quickly learned that we had both worked at large publishing companies in New York in our first jobs out of college, many decades ago, at almost exactly the same time. I was at Random House and she was at Simon & Schuster. We laughed about the manuscripts sealed in manila envelopes that were stacked on our desk and the floppy disks we carefully slid into those early PCs.
We started our publishing careers in the middle of the ‘80s — boom times, when many of our friends graduated from college with multiple offers from investment banks who wined and dined them and dangled fat signing bonuses. They were boom times, but not for us, because we chose a path that barely paid us enough to get by.
I remember fat cockroaches in my below-ground apartment and the strategic use of happy hours to feed myself on a totally inadequate salary. There were a lot of cocktail weenies.
I also remember not really caring about the money. I worked as an assistant to a fiction editor and a nonfiction editor, and I got to be in the place where books were born and made. I soaked it up like a sponge and knew I wanted to spend my career in that world, in one way or another. I loved everything about it.
I believed that an inadequate salary was a small price to pay for being right where I wanted to be, and perhaps the go-go ‘80s lulled me into thinking that all the riches swirling around me would somehow stick to me, too.
I was wrong on both counts.
In my role now as the coach of coaches, at a time when the economy is teetering, I cannot risk being quite so naïve about money or business.
Loving Your Work Is Only the Start
I know that there are a lot of people who sign up for our training to become a book coach because they want to work with writers and with words and ideas, and because they believe that making money is secondary to that joy.
We hear all the time from people who discover book coaching and feel a great rush of belonging – like this is the work they were always meant to do, and this is the community they were always meant to be part of.
But I don’t just want the book coaches we train at Author Accelerator to love their work.
I also want them to have sustainable careers as book coaches, which means, among other things, being adequately paid for their time and talent, and for the value they bring to writers.
This means learning how to price your work, how to efficiently and effectively deliver it, how to set up processes and systems to support it, and how to set boundaries around it.
It means working on the mindset required to ask for what you are worth — which is ongoing work for many women, including me. Those early days of my career trained me to believe that English majors were never going to make as much as lawyers or bankers. I have had to spend a lot of time unwinding that narrative and proving to myself that it was a story I no longer needed to live.
Building a sustainable career as a book coach means going into this work with your eyes wide open to what it takes. You are becoming an entrepreneur – and not incidentally, so are the writers you are helping, if they want to write books that will be read.
If the uncertain times we find ourselves in are motivating you to make a change – to start a side gig as a book coach, or to leave a shaky job to go all-in on book coaching – I want you to know exactly what you are getting into.
I want you to do the math and understand the costs and the benefits.
In 2019, I wrote a book about the nuts and bolts of running a book coaching business. It’s called Read Books All Day and Get Paid For It: The Business of Book Coaching and it walks you through some of the fundamental questions about running a book coaching business.
You can download the first chapter to see if it speaks to you and your desire to become a book coach.
You can also watch our All About Book Coaching video series to get a holistic understanding of the book coaching industry and what it’s like to be a book coach and go through our Book Coach Certification program.
