The History of Author Accelerator
As Author Accelerator has just certified our 100th book coach, we wanted to share a look back at how we’ve gotten to this point. While the company looked very different at its start—and has gone through many iterations since—we’ve always worked toward the same mission: to better nurture writers through every step of the creative process.
Just some of our 100 certified book coaches at our 2021 Goal-Setting Retreat in Santa Barbara, CA.
That goal came to Author Accelerator founder Jennie Nash when she was teaching writers through the UCLA Extension Writer's’ Program. She noticed many repeat students who kept rotating through the classes but didn’t seem to improve much. It wasn’t the writers’ fault, she concluded; it was a problem with the whole system. One instructor simply couldn’t provide the support each writer needed.
Jennie suspected that to really grow as writers and achieve their goals, her students needed personalized feedback. They also needed a process.
“That's actually where I began to develop the [Blueprint for a Book]. Here are the things everybody needs to do when they start to write a book. And I was so struck that these are not the things we were teaching in our classes. We were teaching craft, we were not teaching how to write a book,” Jennie remembered.
When a fellow UCLA teacher, Lisa Cron, approached Jennie for help with a book, it gave Jennie a chance to try out her system. As she coached Lisa through the proposal for Wired for Story, Jennie was able to test and tweak her theory. Ultimately, Lisa got a two-book deal, and Jennie got more inquiries for coaching. This was the very start of Jennie’s book coaching career and the foundation for Author Accelerator.
Over the next few years, Jennie worked one-on-one with writers, all the while taking note of patterns. The most notable takeaway she had from her early coaching experiences was that most writers went through the same set of challenges and consistently needed help with project management. She noticed that systems were just as important to writers’ success as creativity–maybe even more so.
“I probably would have stayed in that space, to be perfectly honest, forever, if somebody else hadn't recognized what I was doing. So that's the true beginning of Author Accelerator; I was invited to give a talk at the UCLA Center for Entrepreneurial Studies.”
At that talk, Jennie met start-up specialist Matt Sand. He approached her after the talk and pointed out that given her emphasis on systems, she could scale the work she was doing. Jennie, having no expectation or interest at that point in building her coaching business bigger, thought nothing of the suggestion.
But Matt kept nudging Jennie, who finally agreed to get coffee with him after a friend prompted her to. There was no reason not to hear him out.
Of course, Jennie found herself intrigued by the prospect of scaling because it aligned with her original theory: Writing any book came back to a repeatable process.
It could also help Jennie further her mission of helping writers by allowing her to reach more of them.
As Jennie and Matt formed the new company, they still weren’t sure about the best way to get Jennie’s writing system into the world. Initially, Author Accelerator was a product: a self-study course that would guide writers through the system Jennie had developed.
The idea felt good but not great. Jennie kept going back to her first instinct that writers really needed one-on-one support and feedback, which wasn’t a part of the course and would be hard to scale given that Jennie is just one person.
Enter: Laura Franzini. Jennie went into another coffee meeting on the advice of a mutual acquaintance with the expectation that she’d help Laura learn more about the publishing industry. Instead, she came away with a commitment from Laura to help her grow Author Accelerator further.
The next iteration of the company involved hiring coaches to help guide writers through Jennie’s process and provide individualized feedback. As Jennie hired the first coaches, she expected to train people one-on-one, until that also became unsustainable.
That was problem number one. Problem number two came from the fact that Jennie’s goal in scaling was to help as many people as possible and to do that, she felt that she couldn’t charge much for her program or coaching.
Jennie was stretched thin, the coaches weren’t making much, and the writers didn’t have a lot of incentive to stick with their projects because they hadn’t made much of an investment in themselves.
To solve one problem, Laura and Jennie began to create a course to train the book coaches they hired, but they also needed to fix the disconnect between what Author Accelerator was offering and what writers really needed. Inspiration came at a conference where they had the chance to talk with writers and see patterns in the questions and objections those writers had to getting coached.
“It was so interesting,” Jennie said. “People really wanted that accountability.” From that experience, Author Accelerator launched the Manuscript Accelerator, a six-month commitment for book coaching, which was marketed as a program to hold writers’ feet to the fire so they could finally follow through and finish their books. It was also offered at a higher price point.
“Coaching really is a commitment. It's an investment. It's a process to deepen your understanding of your own writing. And we were finally able to offer that. And, and we did that for quite some time pretty effectively.”
While the Manuscript Accelerator program ran, something else surprising happened: More and more people wanted to get hired on as coaches. Again, this presented a challenge: Jennie and Laura now had a course that could train all those interested coaches, but they couldn’t provide enough writers for the coaches to help.
In 2018, they had to re-evaluate what the future for the company would hold. How could Author Accelerator best support writers with processes and individualized attention, while also ensuring that coaches had the training and stability they needed?
This is when we pivoted to the business model that Author Accelerator has in place today: Instead of hiring book coaches to work under the company, we would train those coaches to coach writers, and also find their own clients and build their own coaching businesses.
“I think we finally were at the place where what I really had originally wanted to do could come to fruition, which was to give writers the one-on-one support they need to write their best books. And it turned out that the best way to do that was to empower book coaches, and to have them find the writers…. It was the coaches know: the best way for the kinds of writers that they want to coach and that they're best suited to coach. And we are best served by helping them do that by giving them the training of how to be a book coach supporting them as they grow their businesses.”
Additionally, Jennie saw her role change. She shifted from managing book coaches to being an evangelist for coaching. She wanted to set a high bar for what book coaching could look like and how impactful coaches could be.
“This is the way to nurture writers. I have an absolutely unshakable belief that that is true, that this is the best way to teach somebody to write a book and to teach them how to write the best book they can.”
Furthermore, Jennie feels like the business is now in alignment with what Author Accelerator stands for, what we’re offering, what we’re charging, and what outcomes this work can achieve. Of course, as she looks forward, Jennie knows there will be more experimentation and change to come. Building a business always requires constant iteration and a willingness to try new things, but with Author Accelerator’s foundation and growing network of coaches, we can only grow the book coaching industry bigger and better from here.
