What Exactly IS a Book Coach?
And Is It Something You Might Want to Use or Become?
At holiday cocktail parties and get-togethers, questions that might seem easy and basic to most people often send me into a panic.
When I was primarily a writer and people would ask what I was writing, I would have no idea what to say. I felt unsure of myself as a writer, unclear about what I was writing, anxious about the fact that the only metric people seemed to accept for writerly success had to do with being on Oprah or the New York Times bestseller list. It was one of the worst parts of my chosen profession, and one of the reasons I am now such an evangelist for helping writers define the point of their books and helping them understand the value in raising their voice no matter how the world responds to what they have written.
Now that I am a book coach and run a book coaching company, those parties are not a whole lot better. People ask what I do, and I tell and them, and I get funny looks — people clearly wondering what the heck a book coach is and how someone could make a living doing it. I flounder around with answers — It’s like a personal trainer but for writers. It’s like a project manager but for writers — but these explanations don’t often help anyone understand what book coaching is really all about.
The Myth That Writing Is Easy
Part of the problem is that there is such a pervasive myth in our culture that writers write because they have been struck by lightning. It’s the lone genius myth. The genius in the attic myth. The myth that telling a story is so easy that anyone could do it if they just had a little extra time. (People often say, “Oh, a book coach — I’ve always wanted to write a book, but I just don’t have the time.” Newsflash: it takes a lot more than time to write a book worth reading.)
These myths undermine the truth, which is that writing a book is a complex, long-term intellectual undertaking that demands the mastery of many skills, and that is done by people with intention who commit to the task, and who persist. Oftentimes that persistence includes seeking the help of someone to help them see their work more clearly.
The Myth That Writing Is Lonely
Another problem is that people assume that writers work in total isolation. They picture Shakespeare or Jo March (Little Women — what a brilliant idea for a holiday movie!) stealing time away in a little room. The idea of a book coach — someone with them throughout the journey — ruins the romantic ideal.
But writers almost always bring other people into the process of bringing their vision to life. Open any book and look at the acknowledgments. You will see dozens and dozens of people the writer is thanking — for brainstorming, for reading, for editing, for proofreading, for cheering, for correcting, for encouraging, for nagging, for giving them literal space to write, helping them build the confidence to write, and for believing in what they do.
The Truth About the Work of a Book Coach
A book coach is a professional who helps a writer bring their dream to life by offering support, feedback, and accountability while they are writing. We are indeed like personal trainers and project managers, but the work we do is so much more nuanced than helping a writer get their book in shape or get it to the finish line. To give you insight into what the work is really like, and why I believe it is so effective for writers and such a privilege for the coaches who serve them, I want to tell four inspiring stories from the past six weeks of my work as a book coach.
If these stories make you feel like you could use a coach in your corner, Author Accelerator has a roster of highly trained and committed coaches, and we hand-match you with a coach we think would be best for your project. You can learn more at authoraccelerator.com. January is the perfect time to commit to working with a coach. You can ride the wave of resolutions and resolve to start, finish, or publish a book in 2020.
If these stories make you feel like you’d like to become a book coach as a side gig or a career pivot, please join me on January 20 for a FREE online book coaching summit. I’m interviewing 15 top experts in the field about mindset, money, marketing, and more. You are welcome to join us for any or all of the interviews. Many of them are as applicable to writers and other creative professionals as they are to book coaches — especially the discussions about taking a risk to start something new and the ones about marketing being a practice in connecting to people in an authentic way.
A Book Coach Is… a project manager and a cheerleader
I have been working with a writer named Kimmy on a book about dads and daughters that involves a great deal of research, dozens of expert interviews, and hundreds of dad + daughter interviews. I helped her develop a book proposal and land an agent, who in turn helped her refine the proposal and land a publisher. She sold her book the same week she found out she was pregnant. The book and the baby are due at the same time, and Kimmy also works a demanding job. It’s a lot to juggle.
Should she sketch out the architecture of each chapter before she did the research? Should she do expert interviews first or last? Should she aim to get the book written a month before the baby comes or two months? Together, we developed a master plan for getting all the work done, and I was empowered to check in with her weekly on her progress. Every other week, she would send me what we called “skeletons” of each chapter — her ideas laid out, the experts she was going to speak to penciled in, the citations for her research, the flow of the chapter there in rough form. I would comment on what I saw on the page — problems with the plan, gaps in the logic, places where she seemed to be heading off-topic — and cheer her on. On any given week, if she felt too nauseous to write or too tired to conduct any interviews, I would help her revise the schedule and help her see that she was still going to get everything done.
Once she is finished with all the drafting, she will begin fleshing out the chapters and turning those in to me for feedback based on a carefully calibrated schedule. I will comment on what I see and cheer her on to the finish line.
Kimmy’s mom had a baby shower for her just before Christmas that they very kindly invited me to attend. I have not yet seen Kimmy pregnant — the shower was not far from where I live, but Kimmy herself lives in another state — and I was unable to attend because my own children were coming to town. I sent a gift of my favorite baby books — Owl Babies, Good Night, Gorilla and the new classic Goodnight, Goodnight Construction Site, along with Jim Trelease’s The Read Aloud Handbook, which should be on every parent’s bookshelf because it is a powerful tool in helping to bring books into a child’s life at every stage.
I am so honored to have been a part of what will surely prove to be one of the most pivotal years in Kimmy’s life — the year she created a book and a baby, all at the same time!
A Book Coach Is … a seeker and a guide
I have been working with a writer named Carla, who has had a long career as a journalist. In 2019, she came out with a nonfiction book for parents, but she was feeling deeply drawn to writing middle-grade fiction and sought me out to help her make the shift.
Journalists, lawyers, doctors, and business professionals often have trouble writing fiction because the commandment of one kind of writing — tell the facts in an impartial way — is diametrically opposite to the commandment of the other — let us feel the emotion as the protagonist makes sense of the challenge she faces. I have helped a number of nonfiction writers master the skills of novel writing and I love it, because I know there are going to be lightbulbs going off all the time.
Not long before Hannukuh, Carla had one such revelation. Her book involves a young girl who is wrestling with some difficult family dynamics and whose story happens to also involve some discovery around her Jewish heritage. Carla and I had a deep and intense discussion about religion and what it meant to this girl, and indeed to any of us.
It began when I asked a question that betrayed my misunderstanding of a basic tenet of one of the world’s major religions. I asked about Carla’s character’s faith. Was this a book really about faith? Carla explained to me that in the Jewish religion, there is no concept of faith. The religion is about identity and community. I learned something important, and by inadvertently pushing her to have to explain it to me, we were able to dig deep into what her story was really about — not faith, in fact, but identity. The conversation unlocked several new layers of Carla’s story.
I think we both hung up from that call feeling the power of what books can teach us all but especially in middle school, when kids are just beginning to ask all the really big questions.
A Book Coach Is … someone who helps a writer find her voice
DJ Lee came to me several years ago seeking help on a memoir about her relationship with her family and with the Bitterroot Wilderness — a wild part of our country in the Pacific Northwest. A professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Washington State University, Lee was struggling with the structure of her book and was wise enough to know she couldn’t see the flaws in her own work.
Lee’s writing was gorgeous, but her story was rambling and confusing. We worked to find the right shape for it, the point of it, and Lee revised and re-jigged and re-imagined. When she was finished, she sent the manuscript to an agent who had expressed keen interest in the work — and heard nothing. She sent it out to 20 more agents and did not find a home for her work. She stopped pitching.
She slipped back to her academic work, and I slipped back to my book coaching work, thinking of her from time to time when something would remind me of walking in the woods, flying small planes into remote places, bears, and family secrets.
Years passed. Out of the blue, just before Christmas, Lee wrote to tell me that her memoir, Remote: Finding Home in the Bitterroots, is coming out from the Oregon State University Press this spring and has was featured as one of the best seven upcoming books for the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Conference. Here is the story in her words:
“In 2017, I met an editor at a conference by chance who was in love with the wilderness, and particularly my wilderness, the Selway-Bitterroot. I was a bit jaded by then, and she actually had to call me to let me know she was serious. I sent her the book proposal I’d developed with you (with a little fine-tuning and updating) and then pulled out the manuscript and started to revise. When I was finished revising in fall 2018, I realized that one of my major themes was disappearance, what is lost. At that very moment, October 2018, my friend and mentor Connie, who was a major character in my book, disappeared in the wilderness. Tragically, her body has still not been found. So I had to revise yet again to include this event, which was hard, but necessary.”
DJ’s story is dark, but I was instantly filled with joy for her success — and so thrilled she had not given up, that her book found a home at last. Writing this now, I can’t help but smile and smile.
A Book Coach Is … a truth-teller
At Author Accelerator, we bring all the writers working with all our coaches together in a community where they can chat and interact and lift each other up. Each month, I do an Ask Me Anything session in this group and people can ask me anything about writing, publishing, and the writing life. Sometimes I have answers, and sometimes I don’t, but we always have good discussions.
In mid-December, one of the questions was from a writer I’ll call Sherri, who had written a novel and landed an agent. Her agent had taken the book out on submission to traditional publishers and the news coming back was not good. It was rejection after rejection, and so now the agent was working on a list of small and hybrid presses. Sherri was asking about this move — was it smart, was it good, was it the best next step?
What she was really asking about, of course, was what you do when the big dream you have for your book doesn’t work out. It is not something people often talk about in publishing circles — the crushing disappointment after the first big win of landing an agent. Similarly, people don’t often talk about the crushing disappointment after a book is published — when the book doesn’t get traction, when it doesn’t sell, or when the publisher lets you down and the relationship goes sour.
I was able to assure Sherri that an agent who sticks with her in the way hers seemed to be doing was a marvelous thing.
I was able to help her see how much she had already accomplished, even in the face of this disappointment.
I was able to help her see that not everyone gets the big win, the splashy accolades, the kind of money that changes their life.
I was able to remind her that writing is often a very, very long game, where the book that “hits” is not the first one, or even the second, or the third, and that writers have to find a way to persist, knowing that you can only control what you can control. And what you can control is your own writing — the skills and the habit, the commitment and the belief that it matters.
This part of the work of a book coach is not fun by any means, but what was beautiful was the way the other writers present on that call lifted Sherri up, and helped her feel good about what she has to feel good about — which is so much.
We all have much to feel good about. What a blessing and a privilege it is to be involved in helping bring stories and ideas to life. What a fantastic way to start a new decade — not necessarily with new resolutions, but with renewed devotion.
