What Is a Book Coach? (And Why You Might Need One)

When I first heard of book coaching, my first thought admittedly was, “this sounds like a fake job.” The concept of coaches outside of sports has always been a bit of a mocked profession (life coach, I’m talking about you). What does a life coach do that a trained therapist cannot? What does a book coach do that an editor cannot? A coach, by definition, is “one who instructs or trains.” Do editors or therapists do that? Honestly, though, life is hard. Writing a book is hard. Who wouldn’t want somebody to instruct (or train) them through either of those processes?

I discovered book coaching when I heard an ad for the Author Accelerator Book Coach Certification Program on the #AmWriting podcast. Author Accelerator trains and certifies book coaches and helps their coaches learn how to build their business. They also match authors with compatible coaches. When I discovered them, I had been out of the publishing world for a couple of years at that point, and was looking for anything to get me back to writing, editing, and books. Again, book coaching sounded like a dream job, totally unreal. Help writers with their books all day, make my own schedule, and most students end up hired by their practice clients before they are even certified? No way. This must be a scam, I thought.

After weeks of Googling, scanning TrustPilot, and various other business and publishing sites, I determined that no, this was not, in fact, a scam. Author Accelerator, according to my amateur research, was a legitimate and highly regarded business. I was invested. I signed up for the emails, watched the free video series, bought the books, and eventually signed up for the rigorous nonfiction certification course.

As I worked through the self-study portion of the program, I felt more and more like this was a job made for me. In my previous editorial work, I was a jack of all trades, master of none: I edited, did office work, proofread, babysat authors; I essentially witnessed every stage of the publication process. However, when the company closed and I applied to full-time editing positions, I had no concrete editing samples to use in my applications. I could flip open a book and point out every little detail I worked on, but I couldn’t actually say “I edited this book.”

Book coaching is the perfect middle ground for my level of expertise: it’s project management, author cheerleading, developmental editing, publication/pitch guidance, and more. I already had the experience in author cheerleading: encouraging authors over long phone calls to meet their editing deadlines before worrying about book awards, to not feel discouraged when their book sales were low, and assuring them that yes, their book, their message is important. My editing fundamentals were strong enough to do the work of a book coach, as a book coach is more bigger picture stuff, less line editing.

Looking back, I can see now that the authors I worked with in my time in publishing could really have used their own book coaches. A book coach can help the writer through any stage of the book writing process, whether it’s developing a main idea and narrative structure from scratch, evaluating a manuscript that’s been rejected over twenty-five times, helping a writer develop their book proposal and pitch strategy, or even just keeping the writer accountable throughout the book writing process. Having someone to keep you on track is invaluable.

So why might you need a book coach? There could be plenty of reasons. Perhaps you’re an expert on something or have a great story to tell but have never written anything since college, and you need someone to guide you as to how to actually structure a book. Maybe you’ve written a book but you don’t know how or where to publish it, or you’ve submitted that book to your top ten agents and gotten standard rejections every time. Or, you’re a busy parent working a full-time job but you have a book just itching to come out and you need someone to keep you on track and tell you if any of your sleep-deprived sentences are making any sense. All these reasons and more are why you may need a book coach.

Do you have an idea for a book and would like to chat about it? Feel free to send me a message. For more information about book coaches, check out Author Accelerator.

Featured Image by Sumit Mathur.