Nothing Cheap Here, Folks
Let’s say there’s a new highway going in, and it’s going to cross an inlet. Means we need to build a bridge, right?
I have no idea how to build a bridge. I mean, I know what a bridge looks like, and I know what it feels like to drive across it, and I’ve driven loads and loads of bridges over my lifetime, but I don’t really know how to go about making one by myself. I never trained as an engineer.
I don’t know how to go about selecting the most suitable crossing point.
I don’t know how to assess the area’s hydrology and geology, nor the seismic considerations.
I wouldn’t know how to pick the right type of bridge: Should it be suspension? Cable-stayed? Arch? Beam?
Not sure how to calculate loads, model water flow and flood risks, nor drill boreholes to figure out soil conditions. Or figure out shipping logistics.
Don’t ask me to produce construction drawings, are you kidding me?
I guess we’d need to build temporary roads for heavy equipment, and maybe set up some floating cranes. Might need to move some power lines, but I don’t know how to do that.
Beats me how to install deep foundations into bedrock, and I really hope there’s somebody who can pour the reinforced concrete bases for the abutments, because that’s not my zone of genius.
I don’t know how to barge in and install steel girders, set up cables and then lift the bridge deck pieces into place. What if I get the jigsaw pattern wrong? And I’m just not quite sure how to handle the post-tensioning of the cables.
As for installing expansion joints? Fucking clueless.
Yeah, books are complex, too.
Building a large highway bridge across a span of water is a massive engineering and construction effort, usually carried out in phases over several years. Typically the project requires a ton of people with expertise in different areas. A bridge is not something that an inexperienced person can just, you know, whip off, then raise the gates and tell drivers to have at ‘er.
Books aren’t any different.
They require proper siting in the marketplace. Which shelf will your book sit on?
They require a clean, clear throughline—a point for why the reader should pick it up. Do you even understand why you’re writing this book? At the deepest level?
Books require deep knowledge of who’s going to be reading. Like, forensic knowledge. Who is that one person you’re writing for? Who needs to understand your message? And how are you going to reach them?
Books require a blueprint that maps the reader’s journey from here to there.
They require a bitchin strong marketing plan so they’ll actually sell—to an agent, to an editor, to a publisher AND THEN to the reader.
Especially to the reader.
From there, the book itself needs to be written. And I don’t know about you, but all the people I’ve worked with so far over the years haven’t been writers by trade. They’ve been ecologists, mystics, coaches, business owners, social workers, retired IT guys, therapists, CEOs, motivational speakers, physical trainers, entrepreneurs, nomads and program directors.
Not one of them showed up at my door as a deeply skilled writer.
So there’s a bit of coaching involved in that, because a book that’s poorly written—hell, even a book that’s decently written—just won’t succeed in today’s publishing landscape without help from an expert.
They had to learn how to write better. WAY better.
The job’s not done there, though. There’s still the revision process (maybe two or three revisions, maybe seven), the copy editing, the pitching, the publishing.
Do all my writers aim for traditional publishing?
No. That’s a high bar. Sometimes they want to get to market faster, and sometimes they’ve already got a broad audience to whom they know they can sell hundreds and hundreds of copies.
But I aim them for traditional publishing. First, because I can’t do anything less. It’s just not fair when I know the truth about what makes a commercially viable book. And second, because no matter how they choose to publish, a book that’s been written to meet the calibre of a traditional house will flatten a half-assed book in the marketplace any day of the week.
You wouldn’t want your province or state to build a half-assed bridge.
I don’t want my writers to write a half-assed book.
So there’s that.
What do you mean, thousands of dollars?
People’s eyebrows shoot skyward at the cost of working with a book coach. And with me in particular, because my fees seem to them to be very high.
For me, it's really important that people understand that I grind hard on these projects. My moon is in Capricorn and I’ve got Gates 16, 9 and a defined sacral in Human Design, and what that means is I work hard.
I have 25 years of direct experience as a professional writer, as an author of 15 published books, and as a freelance editor. I was even in a relationship with a publisher for more years than you can count on one hand, and all we talked about was publishing: what’s easy to sell, what’s hard, what’s profitable, what’s needed to stay in the black, the shock of paper costs, finding good employees, what’s just a fad, where the winds of the zeitgeist are taking us next. Which authors are a pain in the ass to work with, and which are a delight.
So I bring a lot of industry experience to the table. Much in the way that Malcolm Gladwell talks about 10,000 hours as being necessary to have a base of expertise, I've actually calculated that I've got about 25,000 hours, if not more. So that's a lot of expertise that I'm able to bring to people when they come to me for help writing their book.
That explains my pricing. You just can’t get this depth, range, skill and inside knowledge anywhere else.
Don’t cheap out on your dreams.
Publishing a book is a very big dream for a lot of people. Somewhere on the order of 90% of humans wish to write a book in their lifetime. It’s a persistent, popular, super big dream. And a really big dream should be seen as something that's worth investing energy, time and money into.
A lot of people hold the dream of learning how to fly an airplane. That's a very big, important dream for a lot of people, including my eldest child.
The cost for getting your pilot's license is about $20,000—and that's just table stakes. That's the basic cost of just getting your private pilot's license so that you can fly your friends around. If you actually want to work as an airline pilot, you need hundreds more hours beyond the basic number that you need for your private pilot's license.
He pays $200 per hour for flying around in that little piece of tin. And he works his nards off at the airport, loading bags onto planes, so that he can keep doing it.
Yet people don't question the cost of learning to fly. They may say, “That's really expensive to spend $20,000 to get your private pilot's license,” but they don't question the value of that investment. They just take it in stride. They understand, Okay, I want to capture this dream I’ve held for a long time, and it's going to cost me a lot of money.
And that’s kind of the end of the conversation.
Nobody’s running around looking for a cheaper way to learn how to fly a plane. Can I find a discount flight school? Maybe skip a few steps and just challenge the exam?
I would like people to look at writing a book in much the same way. It's going to take a lot of hours. It takes a lot more hours, actually, to write a book than it does to learn how to fly an airplane.
Writing a book also takes an incredible array of skills. It's not just about the words you put on the page. It's not just about the quality of the language you use. It’s not just about the stories you pick to make your point. It’s not just about the feeling your book creates in the reader as they leaf through the pages.
There are a great number of considerations that go into writing a book that will be saleable in the marketplace. That's where I always come from. I'm always working with my writers from the standpoint of: I want you to end up with a book that you could get picked up by a traditional publisher. That's the calibre that I want to bring them to.
But that takes time. It takes money. It takes investment.
You cannot get to the Olympics without a good coach.
You cannot play for the symphony orchestra without a good music teacher.
You cannot learn how to fly an airplane without a good instructor.
There’s dense value packed into this work. Like, osmium dense.
I see my skills as comparable to that bridge engineer, or a lawyer. My fees represent a lifetime of experience in a field that most people don’t understand. We don't question paying a lawyer $300, $400, $500 an hour.
Nine hundred and fifty an hour over in New York City.
Yet we seem to be stuck in this place of thinking that an editor or somebody who works with books should be paid much, much lower than, say, a lawyer or an engineer or an accountant or a business coach.
I want to dispel that. That is outdated thinking.
Sure, you can still find cut-rate help out there. It’s everywhere. But you’ve got to cobble together a lot of bits and pieces, and hope to hell each person in the complicated chain you’re building knows what they’re doing.
So many writers waste time and money on courses, workshops, retreats, masterclasses and writing memberships, and never end up with a book that’ll sell.
A truly experienced book coach will deliver much more value over the lifetime of your book than would somebody who's not actually trained in the specific art of helping writers plan and develop a commercially viable book.
Publishing a book is a dream that many people carry with them throughout their whole lifetime. It’s one of the biggest dreams.
Yet most people are running around thinking that you can publish a good book for five grand.
And we just shouldn't think this way.
Publishing a book is not just:
writing a draft
having it copy edited
hiring a proofreader
sending it to an agent and then [POOF]
getting it published.
That's completely unrealistic.
I mean, people do this all the time, with the exception of step 4. They’re the ones whose books sit on Amazon and gather dust. And people are bitterly disappointed when this happens!
As a book coach, I bring a huge amount more to the table than this simple formula. I know how words work, how stories work, how agents work, and how the industry works. I know how marketing works, how characters work, how memoir works, and how editors work. I know how an outline works, how jacket copy works, how subtext works, how the human brain works, how our adrenal and pituitary glands work, and what scares the shit out of us that we can’t make go away (and so we read about how other people make it go away).
And I’ve built that expertise over the 30 years I’ve been a writer. Add in my psychology degree and three years of learning alongside the world’s foremost experts in human behaviour, and you’ve got somebody who’s gonna ask for a fee in exchange for that amount of expertise.
Just like a lawyer with 30 years’ experience sifting through complex case law and drawing up the arguments that win. She knows what it takes to get your ass over the line. And she’s billing you $125K, hoss, not thirty bucks an hour.
(It’s chill. Your book’s not going to cost you a hundred grand.)
So it's not really reasonable for people to think that they can do a book on the cheap.
Building a beautiful house is also a dream that a lot of people have, and they don't bat an eye at the fact that it's going to cost them $300,000 or $400,000 or $600,000 or a million dollars. They know that a general contractor is needed to oversee the project. They know that the materials are going to be important and costly. They know they're going to have an architect. They know they're going to have a designer, and a builder, and a landscaper, and at the end, they're going to have an amazing house. They don't even question that that's going to cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Big dream. Takes a long time. Lasts a long time. Forms part of your identity.
Worth the investment.
In building a house, similar to building a bridge, you’ve got lots of different people fulfilling the different jobs required. Whereas a book coach understands, advises on, and often even does the work of all the roles: geological surveyor, architect, excavator, concrete pourer, carpenter, drywaller, plumber, electrician, interior designer, and definitely the general contractor.
Hiring a book coach is kind of like hiring a jack of all trades to help you build that entire house. It’s planning the book, positioning it, researching and advising on the industry, improving the writer’s actual work, keeping the writer from jumping off a cliff, figuring out the marketing and helping them get it out into the world.
Be not fooled by what worked for that guy.
So I’ve established that we're not looking at the value of a book in the correct way. We're still thinking that writing a book should just be kind of free. I think in part that's because books are cheap to buy. And also, it’s true that we’re fooled by the many, many people who are published but who didn’t work with a book coach and just did it on their own time and then got picked up by a publisher. (Those writers usually spent ten years writing their book and then being rejected for another three, btw.)
But the market has changed sharply in the last few years, and the writers who make it through the pinhole to the big houses nowadays without support, a) are often celebrities who hire ghostwriters or b) are ultra-talented and c) have hit the market with something that’s timely and entirely fresh.
We're labouring under outdated understandings of what the literary marketplace is like and what it will respond to. It's very competitive now—I just can’t tell you enough how crowded and competitive it is out there—and it takes a great deal more polish to stand out to an acquiring editor or to a publisher than it ever did before.
Agents and editors are absolutely inundated with pitches, which lets them be choosier than ever.
And readers are absolutely inundated with choice on Amazon, which lets them be choosier than ever.
That's what I would like people to understand.
So yeah, so working with a book coach is going to cost money, and working with certain book coaches is going to cost more money because of the expertise they bring. I am priced at the higher end of book coaching services. Part of that is because I only work 1:1 with people. I only do high-touch, super customized work, and I only work with a few people at a time. I do that because I don't feel like I can deliver the same value in a group setting, because books are like fingerprints. They're so unique to each person, and each person's problems and issues and troubles and bad habits as a writer are going to differ. I mean, some of them are common between writers, but everybody's going to have their own problems to deal with, and everybody's got their own story that I want to help them pull forward onto the page, and it’s quite often the stories behind the stories that gets things to resonate with readers (and thus with publishers).
A life coach, a business coach or a therapist can help to make huge changes in a person's life over the course of the time they work with their client. And a book coach can make huge changes in a person's book over the course of time that they work with a client.
We don't bat an eye at paying a life coach a whole bunch of money to make our lives better, or a whole bunch of money to help us work better in a business environment.
Yet we're really resistant to paying a book coach to make our book competitive in the marketplace and to make it the best it can be. We really want to go cheap, and spend as little money as possible on this big dream we’ve been holding since we were eight years old.
People want to have cheap results. But a book is the worst thing to cheap out on, because it lives forever, has your name all over it, and is public.
Writing a book is a big dream, and it can also cost a lot of money.
And it's worth every nickel.