Saying Yes Can Lead to Chaos: How I Started My Book Coaching Business Part 3
This is the third in a series from Author Accelerator CEO Jennie Nash on how she built a six-figure book coaching business. You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
If you enjoy today’s content, you can sign up for Jennie's weekly newsletter here.
Saying Yes Can Lead to Chaos
Word of mouth kept bringing me new book coaching clients and as I was getting busier and busier, I did not stop to vet clients or filter them or choose them in any way. I had no strategy whatsoever for who I was serving or why or how. I would do anything for anyone who knocked on my door—from reviewing a finished manuscript to editing a query letter to helping someone sort out their path to publishing. If someone demanded a fast turnaround or extra attention beyond what they were paying for, I would give it.
I felt obligated to take any client I could get, because now that I was doing this venture, I was invested in having it succeed. I had an irrational fear that every client would be the last client.
I also felt obligated to over-deliver—because what if someone didn’t reach their goal of landing that big book deal at a Big 5 Publisher? Would they blame me? And if they did, would they be right that there was more I could have done?
I would not have called myself a book coach in those days; I was a hired hand. What had started out as a great experiment in breaking free of the constraints of the classroom to give writers what they really needed to write good books turned into a run-of-the-mill freelance editing business that was not very fulfilling or satisfying.
I scrambled from project to project, hampered by inefficient document filing systems, nonexistent time-tracking practices, and demanding clients who would turn in 40 pages when I had asked for 20. I kept making embarrassing mistakes, like charging a client twice or not charging them at all—and having them have to remind me.
Frustrated by the chaos and beginning to resent the business I had built, I made a bold move I was sure would make everything instantly better: I raised my hourly rates to more than double — $120/hour.
Higher Hourly Rates Don’t Solve Business Problems
I thought that if I charged what seemed to me to be a ridiculously high rate, I would automatically get better clients and better projects. I thought that making more money would bring me the satisfaction I knew was missing and that it would somehow magically make my work life peaceful and smooth.
It soon became clear, however, that charging more didn’t solve any of my problems. I was forced to look at what was really going on with my business.
The first thing I focused on was the very idea of the hourly rate, which is a stepchild of the per-page or per-word rate. I started tracking time spent and results achieved and I learned that I was giving away enormous value in an hour.
In an hour, I could:
Solve someone’s confusion about the various (confusing!) paths to publishing and help them realize they absolutely wanted to try for an agent—or not
Save someone from pitching with a query letter that would never get the attention of an agent and give them a strategy that helped them retain their power in the pitch process
Help someone determine that they were not actually writing about being bullied, say, but about a series of addictions, ending with the most taboo one—money—that was ruining their life even still
Teach someone the role of a book proposal in the publishing process and sorting out for them the elements they were executing well and the ones that were not serving their business care for the book
Edit two chapters that were fine but not dazzling, and teach them the skills to make them dazzling
Listen to someone experiencing the stinging pain of rejection and talk them out of not giving up on their dream
Talk someone into quitting because they simply didn’t have the fire in the belly for their project anymore.
I began to realize that I was selling myself short. And in doing so, I was actually selling the writer short, too.
What Do Book Writers Want?
What had frustrated me about the writer education industry was that it is built on giving writers what can be easily delivered. Classes are largely focused on things you can teach in a group setting in a relatively short amount of time—topics of craft, scene writing, anything related to pitching or marketing. That is effective for a certain writer at a certain point in their skill development but it is not what a serious writer needs to learn how to write a commercially viable book.
What was frustrating about my business was that I was not doing anything better. Yes, I was giving writers the 1:1 attention they craved, but I was allowing the writers to dictate what we would do with that attention, and most of the time, what we did was not work that would actually help them get what they wanted.
This was a typical scenario: a writer would ask me to do a polish edit on their finished manuscript so that they could begin to pitch to agents. I would start editing pages at my hourly rate of $120/hour — and quickly realize that the work was nowhere near ready for pitching. The writers didn’t need a polish edit; they needed to build basic skills in how to tell a story, how to write a scene, or how to develop a nonfiction table of contents.
I felt horrible to keep taking people’s money to do a task I knew wasn’t going to get them what they wanted. Sometimes I would contact them after 50 pages to let them know my thoughts and to suggest that I stop, but this felt even worse. They often felt like I was quitting on them or that they had somehow failed, when in fact, the problem was that they had asked for the wrong service at the wrong time, and I had welcomed it.
What Book Writers Actually Need Is a Whole Solution
I thought back to what had worked so well with Lisa Cron and Sam Polk and Tracy Tynan: it was that I had worked with them from zero all the way to the end. I had designed a framework to give them everything they needed to write a good book:
Strategic thinking about their goals and their content
Marketplace intelligence so they understood the ecosystem they were seeking to enter
Deadlines and accountability to keep them on track
A feedback loop so they could catch mistakes before they got baked into the manuscript – and build confidence by seeing what was working well
Emotional support for the inevitable ups and downs of the creative process
A coach who was devoted to their success
The key characteristic of this book coaching framework was that it was a whole solution. I immediately recognized it as such, because I had experienced it as a writer with an agent and an editor at a traditional publishing house invested in my projects.
But the satisfaction I experienced coaching my writers wasn’t predicated on the fact that those writers landed big book deals. It came from being invited into their creative process and trusted to guide it all the way through.
I once worked with a former ad executive who wanted to write about a cross country trip he had taken in the ‘60s when he was sixteen years old, hitchhiking home to Cleveland, Ohio from a summer job in California. He came to me for help for two reasons:
He was an ad exec. He was fantastic at writing a sentence, but had no idea how to write a memoir, and he wanted to write a good book.
He had a hard and fast deadline. His goal was to finish the book and print enough copies to give to everyone at his 50th high school reunion. It turned out that his companion from that summer and that cross country trip had taken his own life soon after they returned home. The death of his friend and classmate had haunted the ad exec his whole life and he wanted to share the story with the people who could best remember.
I helped him meet his goal, pushing him to turn in pages that were very painful for him to write both for the memories they stirred up and for the fact that writing more than a sentence felt unnatural—until it didn’t. Our work together was deeply satisfying.
What all these projects had in common was that the writer entered into a process designed to help them succeed. They turned themselves over to my expertise.
I knew that the way out of chaos was to design a business around a whole solution and invite writers into it rather than doing whatever it was the writers thought they needed. I needed to describe the process, define the outcome, and put a price on it that was not about how many hours I spent, but was a value exchange for the deep value I was offering.
This became the basis of my book coaching business, the next step in my codifying the Blueprint for a Book process, and the move that led to my helping a lot more writers and making a lot more money.
But before I made six figures—and then multiple six figures—I had to learn a critical lesson: how to say no.
In Part 4: How saying no is the key to coaching success.