Today’s 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 was listening to the How I Built This podcast with Guy Raz—an interview with brothers Hank Green and John Green whose company Complexly has grown to be quite large and sprawling. John Green is the author of The Fault in Our Stars—among other books—which has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide, and early in the interview, he spoke about the six years he spent doing data entry and then reviewing books for the magazine Booklist. “It was an amazing job for that period of my life,” Green said, and cited many reasons, but among them was that he wrote his first novel, Looking for Alaska, while on staff there. 

“It does take a certain amount of confidence to think, `Well I could write a book,’” he says, “and I think what gave me that confidence was working at a magazine that reviewed 400 books every two weeks. I would think, `You know, I’m not that good of a writer but 400 of these things did come out in the last two weeks, so maybe…?’ And a lot of them weren’t that good, but the thing about books that aren’t that good is you can see the strings of the puppet a little easier.” 

I think the exact same thing often happens for book coaches. It’s not that we are reading or editing bad books, and certainly not hundreds and hundreds of them at a time, but we are often helping people when their books are new and fragile and not yet what they are going to become, so we get to see the strings of the puppet. We get a first-row seat to how books are made, and how they move from shaky to whole.

It’s an enormous privilege to get to operate in that space.

The ideas are often fuzzy and the writers are often scared—of their own power and of the judgment that the world is waiting to throw down on what they created. We get to make a safe container where the writers can formulate their ideas and help them move closer to what they envision.

In that process of becoming, we can learn so much.

Teach In Order to Learn

By having to articulate what we are seeing on the page and what it means to the story or the argument, we are training ourselves, too.

 There is a big difference between knowing what we like as a reader—which is often a snap judgment or an unformed feeling—and having to show evidence as a book coach for why something isn’t resonating. The book coach has to be much more precise and also help the writer come up with a way to solve whatever the problem is. 

It’s not our job to come up with an actual solution, but it is our job to come up with a process for helping the writer figure it out.

If they are struggling with the trajectory of their plot, maybe we work on an Inside Outline.

 If they are trying to figure out what transformation they want to walk their readers through, maybe we dig into who those readers are and what else they are reading.

If after hundreds of pages, they still don’t understand what show don’t tell means, or what it looks like for a scene or a chapter to have emotional resonance, we have to figure out a different way to explain it, to show them, to help them see. 

We may turn to examples of writers who have done an excellent job with this particular skill, or to a different creative endeavor like music or movies or photography, or to a metaphor based on something they understand on a more visceral level like baking bread or growing vegetables or playing pickleball.

This careful attention to the creative process and this insistence on having to articulate it helps us when it’s our turn to plot a novel or plan out a nonfiction book that has a chance of making an impact.

If we slip into telling instead of showing, it’s so much easier to spot. We are used to seeing that pattern. We have a toolbox we can look around in to figure out how to fix it.

Eyes On the Horizon

I often say that a good book coach needs to have their eyes on the page but they also have to periodically lift their eyes and look at the horizon—meaning the marketplace. If their writer’s goal is to write something that is commercially viable, we have to know what that means for their genre and for this moment in time.

What this means is that we are frequently scanning the landscape of the industry to understand new publishing models, new players on the field, and lately, new software. We are working to understand what it all means and how it all works and how a writer can find their place in that universe.

Having our eyes on the horizon is enormously helpful to us as writers too.

I don’t believe it’s possible to try to figure out what the marketplace wants and then write it. The marketplace moves too fast, and is too fickle, and no one knows if vampires are selling today that they will also sell tomorrow. I also don’t believe that’s very satisfying for the creator to try to outwit the marketplace in that way. A writer needs to write what they are called to write, but if we want readers to engage with our books, we have to understand what those readers are buying and where they are hearing about the books they purchase, and why they tell their friends about them.

We have to understand the elements of success and the rules of the game.

Book coaching gives us practical training in how to pay attention at the micro and the macro level.

The Unvarnished Truth

When I turn to my own writing after helping so many other people with theirs, I often find that I have internalized all the lessons I have taught—not only the specific lessons about structure and craft, or the practical lessons about the marketplace but the lessons about what it really takes to write a book.

The writer that I showcased a few months ago—Renee Guilbault—worked with me for almost three years. I was deep in the creative process with her, and I got to witness exactly what it looks like to hold a vision in your mind and work to reach for it. Renee got up every morning at 4 am to work before her toddler awoke. She would write pages and pages and then throw them out. She was relentless in her effort to write a book she considered useful and good. She just kept doing the work, day after day. There was little that was glamorous about it. It was work. When I held her book in my hand, I felt such incredible admiration for her.

With my own books, I might feel pride or a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment, but it’s also mixed up with anxiety and dread and exhaustion. I both love and hate my books, because I made them and am proud of that fact, and because I am keenly aware of the ways in which they don’t measure up to the perfect vision in my head. I am the creator, whereas with a client like Renee, I am the witness. I can see more plainly the work that was done. It’s stripped of ego since it wasn’t me doing the work. So when it’s my turn to get up early or stay up late to get work done on my writing—when I am deep in the creative muck—I have a model that feels less ego-based and fraught. I can think of Renee, just getting up and getting the work done.

Another writer I worked with, whom I don’t want to name for reasons of privacy, has a book coming out very soon. When I was helping them on it, they suffered a terrible accident. Not long after, a family member fell into a dark depression. Not long after that, they got very sick. It was thing after thing after thing, any one of which would have derailed most writers. This writer persisted with quiet strength, and I supported them through those times—by being patient, by being understanding, by setting small deadlines and keeping the project on track, by giving that writer the grace they found hard to give themselves.

Now the book they wrote is here and it feels like a miracle, in a way I don’t think I have ever felt for writer friends and colleagues I have watched go through similar hurdles. I lived it in a way that feels more personal and so the outcome feels more personal too.

These experiences galvanize me. They inspire me. They make me want to continue to do this work, both coaching writers and continuing to write myself.

Deepening Your Practice

One of the things we most often hear from Author Accelerator book coaches is how much our course helped them with their own writing practice. This praise comes from people who have MFAs and advanced degrees in English. It comes from people who have written a lot of books and taken a lot of courses and read all the writing books. It has been one of the biggest surprises of my career, because I didn’t set out to design a program that would do that. I was focused on a framework to help people become book coaches who could help other writers write.

But now that I have heard it so many dozens of time, I understand why. What we are doing in our course is helping people look at writing from a different perspective. We are giving them a framework for coaching, which is a different skill altogether from writing. And the view from this different place is entirely new for many writers. Rather than reading to understand a text the way you do in school, or learning how to write the way you do as the creator, you are reading to help someone else understand their own writing process.

Now when people ask me if taking our course would be good for their writing, I know without a doubt that it can be true. I think of it the way I think of yoga teacher training—those courses where you spend 200 or 300 hours going deeper into your own yoga practice so that you can teach others. Our course takes several hundred hours to complete, as well. It’s quite rigorous. And when you get to the other side, you have a different relationship to your writing.

Most people want to use that knowledge and coach others. A growing number, however, just want to take their knowledge and apply it to their own work. They get so fired up about seeing their work in a new light—seeing the patterns and the problems they have been trained to see in other people’s books– that they just want to go back to writing.

A Resonant Mix

Most people who finish our course don’t actually choose one or the other. They want to do both things.

I had the chance to interview Jessica Bull about this decision she recently made. It so happened that the same week she was certified as an Author Accelerator Book Coach, she announced that she had sold her first novel, Miss Austen Investigates: The Hapless Milliner, in a multi-book six-figure deal to Penguin.

I tossed out everything I know about the satisfactions of book coaching and guessed that Jessica would not want to keep coaching—after all, she has a big new career as a writer. But the opposite is true. Jessica, who was herself coached (and inspired!) by Author Accelerator Book Coach Suzy Vadori, one of our founding coaches, is excited and committed to doing both. 

The way she explains why is just so beautiful and I am delighted to offer you the chance to hear for yourself. You can listen to our conversation here or by clicking the button below.