High-Quality Book Coaching is an Investment

I love smart people. I gravitate toward them, hopping and skittering like some weird little collection of iron filings toward a magnet.

Jennie Nash is one such smart person. She’s a longtime book coach and a multi-published author herself. She’s also CEO of Author Accelerator, a company that standardizes training for book coaches. It’s like the ICF of book coaching.

Jennie puts out a monthly newsletter that’s so good, so jam-packed with excellent thinking that I never fail to open it. (That’s saying a lot, since I let most of my newsletters and Substack subscriptions slide. Even Charles Eisenstein doesn’t get read on the regular around here. But Jennie’s newsletters? They’re among the three I will always read. The other two come from the fire-beautiful brains of Eleanor Beaton, who trains the living sh*t out of women entrepreneurs as they scale their businesses, and Tarzan Kay, who’s an expert in email marketing.)

In one of Jennie’s recent emails, she spoke so eloquently to the cost of quality book coaching that I realized I couldn’t improve on it. So in this post, I’m going to share her words and just weave in additional context as we go.

Let’s first start with Jennie’s assessment of a tough truth in the writing world:

In our industry (the writer education / publishing education industry), there is a pervasive myth that learning to write a book that might be accepted in the marketplace should be free or very inexpensive. There is an expectation that agents and editors will help writers bring their work up to publish-ready standards, and while it might have been true back in the day, it no longer is very common. It happens, but these recent posts from an agent and an editor show how overworked and overwhelmed most people in this industry are; they don’t have time to nurture a book-length work of writing, let alone the two or three books it might take a writer to get ready for prime time. It is up to the writer to do what they need to do to nurture their work and their careers themselves.

This heralds a significant shift in publishing. I see it, too: writers can no longer expect to make it over the bar without investing in the right kind of structural and page-level support for their books. Competition for agents is fierce right now, given all the Covid manuscripts flooding the market. I sense that in a few years’ time, your average writer won’t stand a chance unless they’ve got the focused support of a publishing expert like a book coach. Here’s Jennie again:

Can writers do this work on their own? Of course. They have been doing it on their own since the advent of publishing—a book is, after all, a creative product that springs from the writer’s mind.

We live in an information age, which is a boon for writers. You can get good free information about writing in a million places, including blogs and newsletters, online courses and communities, webinars and summits, lectures and videos, and books themselves (those that are about writing and those that are about stories and ideas). You can learn everything you need to know for very little cost.

You can now even ask AI software to edit your work for you—to find the grammatical errors, the repetitions, and the ways to say things more concisely or with more flair. You don’t need anyone else.

But if you want someone to spend time giving detailed, professional feedback on your work, and to teach you the elements of narrative design, and to coach you through your goals and choices, and to help you with your doubts and resistance, it’s going to be expensive. That’s because it takes time and effort to get someone qualified to pay this kind of attention. It’s terribly inefficient. 

I love this last line: It’s terribly inefficient.

And it’s true. Cultivating excellence is almost always an inefficient process. In fact, one of my clients—an expert on mentorship—has written an entire chapter in his forthcoming book about this, titled Be Inefficient. It’s all about how this kind of development takes time, and space, and iteration, and patience, and an understanding that there are no quick fixes.

Notice how I used commas after each noun in that section? The commas slow you down, helping you hear the pause that your ear would register if I were to speak the words out loud. They underline the fact that working with a book coach is…inefficient.

Journalist Daniel Coyle has written a whole book on this. The Talent Code goes deep on practice, and repetition, and the hours and hours and hours it takes to get GOOD at something.

Jennie goes on to explore the question of value—and what this kind of support is worth:

The writer gets to decide what kind of value they place on this kind of training and what they are willing to risk for it in terms of money they pay that they might not earn back. 

The day that writers don’t value that work is the day that book coaches go out of business. But we are not seeing that trend in the fledgling book coaching industry. We are seeing the opposite: writers who deeply value the creative support we offer. They recognize that there is a lot to learn and they seek trained professionals who can help them learn it. They are willing to pay, regardless of whether they make their money back.

In a recent meeting of book coaches, one of my colleagues mused that her husband’s clients don’t bat an eye at dropping $20,000 to master their craft—learning to fly airplanes.

They don’t expect to get rich doing it. They don’t imagine they’re going to be flying long-haul for Qantas or Cathay Pacific anytime soon. They just want to check this item off their bucket list and feel a sense of satisfaction that they pushed themselves to try something new. They want that sense of accomplishment, of completion, of mastery.

It’s a fabulous lens for writers to help them decide whether their writing is worth investing in.