I’ve been writing a book. It’s a book of letters addressed to new book coaches on the ups and downs of transitioning from a corporate career to solopreneurship.
It’s about coaching and business and the small joys and the temporary frustrations, and it’s about fear and envy, too.
It’s for coaches, but for coaches who help writers and so, if you are a writer who is also setting up in business to sell your books, you might find some of it interesting too.
It’s called Dear New Book Coach – A Quiet Companion, and it will be emerging into the world at the beginning of 2025.
I’m currently making an audio version, which is fun, and when I was reading this letter out, I thought I’d share the written version with you here. Everyone grapples with the question of how active they should be on social media, writers and coaches alike.
So here it is. My present to you.
🎁
Stepping away from Instagram
Dear New Book Coach,
I had an Instagram account for years before I began to book coach. I used it when I traveled, to post pictures of things that I loved, with very little, or no, captioning.
I didn’t care who engaged with it but it was a bonus when old friends liked or commented. It was another way of keeping in touch but that wasn’t the primary motivation.
I can’t explain why I wanted to post pictures of trees or sunrises or icebergs or summer flowers. I just liked to be able to share a flash of inspiration with a few swipes of the screen. Done and forgotten but my moment of joy, or curiosity, or laughter is Out There.
Once I got my book coaching certification, it seemed a no-brainer to simply adapt my Instagram account. I took the courses and invented content systems and built time into my schedule to create eye-catching visuals on Canva, in my brand-of-the-moment. I labored to draft authoritative and useful copy.
It was exhausting.
I began to ease the exhaustion by re-using the posts I’d created for LinkedIn. I never felt good about the repetition. That feeling of sharing genuine moments of joy had been wiped out, and by a dirty dishcloth at that.
I was cheating on Instagram. It no longer felt like me who was putting up posts.
I’m not expressing bitterness—well, OK, maybe I am, just a bit—but I was getting no payback at all. As I got more experienced in defining the type of writer I wanted to work with, it became clear that they didn’t generally hang around on IG.
The benefits I did accrue were a pretty set of pictures in my profile (showing the speed of development of my “brand experiments” over the months) and four sign-ups to my lead magnet. Two of those unsubscribed after they’d downloaded the magnet.
I was attracting an awful lot of handsome doctors and surgeons as Followers. I know they were medical types because they were flourishing stethoscopes, usually against their bare chests. Quite a lot of them were clearly thoughtful, sensitive characters who proffered imaginative, though ill-judged, invitations by DM that had nothing to do with writing books.
It kills your soul to Unfollow all the flotsam and jetsam every week, knowing that if you don’t, the algorithm downgrades the visibility of your posts. Does that feel like time well spent?
Good Lord. I had more interesting things to do that didn’t routinely make me feel squeamish.
The thing is, when you’re working in the front line like we do, wearing all the hats at once, it’s not possible to spot, diagnose, and solve problems in one graceful step. And we’re diligent, by nature. We build our systems and commit to making them work. We don’t give up goals at the drop of a hat.
All I knew was, I felt uncomfortable about Instagram. The bot-led DMs had got more intrusive. By now, I wasn’t even opening it up, let alone posting.
But neglecting IG felt like a guilty secret I was hiding in the corner. Of course, no-one but the monkey on my shoulder watched how often I posted but I was breaking the rules I’d made for myself.
It took some time to be able to face the problem and then I asked around some fellow coaches. To a woman, they pointed out what should have been obvious to me all along: Why on earth would you force yourself to do something that is so painful?
The answer, of course, is the same as the one my daughters innocently used to give me as children, when they wanted fancy pencil cases, or Disneyfied lunchboxes: “Because everyone else has got one.”
I’d been behaving just the same. Everyone else is doing it.
But they weren’t, were they? Asking the question opened the floodgates. It turns out many book coaches have reduced their social media presence to just one platform.
There’s an increasing trend to give up broadcasting on social media altogether and focus on building the newsletter mailing list. It saves Introvert Energy and reaches the people you want to reach.
What was I going to do with IG, then?
Now I’d articulated the problem (I felt it was a waste of my time and emotional energy for zero business return) some options began to open up. I’d pretty much decided I wasn’t going to be active. So, should I delete my profile and be shot of it? Or hibernate it? I could put a note to say, “Taking a break,” and have a link to my website should anyone stumble over it.
I deleted it, and, Friend, it felt like the best decision I’d made that business quarter. A year-and-a-half later, it still feels like a great decision.
It was a clean solution. The amount of time it took me to reach the solution was significant, but, dear Book Coach, I’ve told you about this in all its raw detail because I want you to know that it’s normal to go through whole cycles of discomfort and doubt before you can even grapple with the problem.
Take time to work out what the problem is before trying to solve it.
And don’t try to solve it alone. Find your trusted group of friends who can bring their thoughts to the issue and help you find your own way to the solution that makes you comfortable.