The Casserole Equation

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.

Last week, my husband had a COVID exposure at his workplace. He is still going to his office, alongside a small number of people in a healthcare setting where everyone is following the rules, and we have deemed it to be relatively low-risk in terms of exposure. In the rest of our lives, we live in a bubble with a very small number of people we see in person. But someone in his workplace tested positive and they had to launch into all the protocols and reporting and testing and contact tracing. He was deemed not to have primary exposure, but we still operated as if he had. About five days into this, he got sick. He is not a guy who gets sick, so we immediately assumed that he’d gotten COVID and that I had been exposed, too. It was quickly proved that he had experienced a badly timed and short-lived bout of food poisoning — but in that gap between not knowing and knowing, I was making plans in my mind for how we would quarantine for the next two weeks.

My work is 100% virtual and always has been, so that is not an issue — and is one of the blessings of being a book coach. It’s mobile, it’s home-based, it’s completely in my control how much I work, when, and how. As long as there is Internet service, I can keep working.

The issue had to do with food. We would need food. And this thought — how to best use Doordash and UberEats and grocery store deliveries, and how much we could lean on our friends here to bring us fresh veggies or a comforting casserole of the kind people always make when someone is sick (cheesy things like lasagne, enchiladas, turkey and broccoli au gratin) — led me to think about social media and marketing for book coaches.

I know, I know — big leap there. But stay with me….

So many of the students in Author Accelerator’s Book Coach Certification program are worried about marketing their businesses, and tied up in that worry is a fear or dislike of social media. They don’t want to have to be on it or to figure it out (and there’s always something new to figure out.) They worry that telling people about the services they offer (to help those people with things those people really need help with) will make it seem like they are a slimy salesperson. 

It’s something we talk about all the time — how to reach the writers you want to serve, how to market your business in a way that will be effective but will not suck your soul dry, how to convince yourself that you do in fact have something of value that is worth paying for.

These are big questions and not incidentally, they are the same questions the writers that the book coaches serve must ask themselves, as well.

My answers have been honed over many years, and over many conversations, especially with Dan Blank of wegrowmedia and author of Be the Gateway. Dan is a book marketing and platform building expert who shares my philosophy that you have to focus on the social part of social media. You have to understand that you are simply seeking to connect to people — people who are interested in what you do, and what you think, and what you create, and what you stand for and what you sell, and people who do things and think things and create things and stand for things and sell things that you are, in turn, interested in yourself.

If all you consider are the tactics of social media — how to run Pinterest ads or increase your followers on Instagram — you are missing the point. And if all you consider is the technology — how to repost your newsletter on Medium or how to simulcast on Zoom and Facebook (something KJ Dell’Antonia and I struggled to figure out yesterday morning when we were doing a show about her decision whether to become a book coach) you are also missing the point.

Technology and tactics are just the how of it all; the why of it is people. If we want to serve people by offering them the chance to learn from us or work with us or read what we have written, we can’t escape the people part. And social media happens to be where the people are right now in the year 2020. So you really do have to find a way to get comfortable with it and comfortable with yourself as someone who has something worth paying attention to, or you probably have to consider another kind of business.

The Dark Side

I get that there are big downsides to social media. The dangerous dark side has been much in the news lately with the election and the persistence of violence and the question of what is true and who gets to decide about that truth. The danger was summed up in the documentary, The Social Dilemma, a harrowing peek into the way social media manipulates us and uses us and fools us and divides us and perhaps becomes the end of us. While watching, I was ready to pull the plug on all of it and opt-out completely, but then I remembered that I make my living in a virtual world, and teach others to make a living in the virtual world, and since I am not about to become, say, a dentist or a tennis pro or the owner of a vegetable stand (things one does locally and in-person), I will have to engage social media. It is therefore up to me to navigate it in a way that I believe will not ruin me or the people I serve or the democracy I live in.

The Way Forward

The only way I know how to do this, at the moment, is to be intentional about how I use social media, how much I use it, and why I use it, and to keep learning about the ways that it uses me. It’s not a terribly elegant answer, but it’s what I’ve got right now.

It helps me to think about the big goals of the work I am doing, my deep level why for running a book coach training business and working as a book coach. To wit:

• I am working to empower people — mostly women — to launch and run businesses that will sustain them financially, satisfy them intellectually, and enrich their lives.

• I am working to help establish an industry — book coaching — that has not existed before.

• I am trying to make a change in the way writing is taught and writers are supported.

• I am trying to shift the way we think about creative pursuits and money — to end the narrative that writers don’t make money — by teaching book coaches to teach writers to think of their work as an investment, as a business, and to think of themselves as worthy of being paid for it.

• I am trying to build a business that is a good place for my employees to work.

• I am trying to lead the way as a book coach myself, and serve my clients in the most excellent way I can.

• I am trying to earn more money than I have ever earned before because money is the proof of many of the concepts I am teaching and also because money will allow me to do the things I want to do for myself and my family and the world.

So yes, social media is terribly frustrating to figure out and it can be overwhelming and there is the conglomerate on the other side of the screen that we must never forget. But if I am using it in service of all these good things, I think I can sleep at night.

My Personal Worry (We’re Finally Getting to the Casserole Part!)

My biggest worry about building a virtual business with virtual connections all over the world (I have students and clients in Rome and England, Croatia and Zimbabwe, Switzerland and Singapore, and Boston and Florida and all over the United States) has to do with the fear about what you do when you really just need a hug and someone to bring a casserole. 

If all my friends and connections and business associates are scattered around the world, and if I only connect to them by social media or through phones and screens, who comes to help me if my husband and I are locked in our house for two weeks — or if, say, something terrible happened like a dire illness or accident. What good are those virtual “friends” in a catastrophe???

That is where my brain goes — and where it went when I thought I was going to need to plan a two-week quarantine. We have moved back to a town where we have some very dear friends and family, but we don’t have a broad in-person social network here and COVID has ruined all chances of building one.

So what good will my online virtual social world do me when what I really need is someone to show up at my door with lasagne?

What if, when the chips are down, the world I have built myself to live and work in turns out to be a hollow shell of nothingness? That is the Casserole Equation — this calculation I have made about my work and my life and social media that makes total sense except for the question of the casserole. How do I account for the casserole problem?

Ijeoma Oluo’s Tragedy Gave Me an Answer

I follow Ijeoma Oluo, the author of So You Want to Talk About Race and the forthcoming Mediocre, on Instagram. I don’t spend a lot of time on Instagram — it’s my newest social media platform and I am still working to understand it — so when I saw “follow,” I mean that lightly. But she has built a community on Instagram of 410,000 people, which is impressive and worth studying — what is she doing on there? How does she engage with people? How is she connecting?

One day (September 18) I saw a picture of her that did not look Instagrammy. It looked like someone who had been devastated. It looked like someone crying. Intrigued, I clicked on the video and learned that Ijeoma’s family’s home had burned down. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and it wasn’t the wildfires — it was a house fire. An electrical short of some kind. They barely got out and they lost everything. 

In this post, she is sharing her story with this community of humans who have gathered around her. It’s so raw it is painful to watch. But she explains why she is sharing, why she is crying, why she is grateful for everything she does have in her life and her world.

Over the following weeks, she posted about people who had sent her ice cream and makeup (which she loves), and jewelry and gift cards and food and clothing and pajamas and hair wraps, and people who had offered her money and rooms to sleep in, among other things.

It was such an outpouring of love and support. And all I could think of was IT’S THE CASSEROLE!!!!!! She got the casserole!!!!! And all from people on her Instagram feed.

A month later, she wrote this post:

This whole gorgeous and moving thing — her post, her photo, her recovery from this horrible event — stopped me cold. She had the catastrophic thing happen and the generosity she had put into the world — into social media — came back to her tenfold.

I consider this an argument for social media, an argument for generosity as a business practice, and an argument that humanity is going to be OK.