Three real life book journeys
When you discover the relatively new concept of book coaching, it’s helpful to know what it actually entails. This is how three clients have worked with me in 2023.
I’d like to introduce you to Josh, Yvonne, and Pamela, three very different writers but who are united by their pluck and perseverance – necessary qualities when you set out to write and publish your book.
These are real writers, each of them great communicators, and each keen to find out what they need to know to finish their journey.
We meet our writers as they chart a course through the choppy waters they, individually, face:
- a lack of knowledge of the facts of the publishing industry, or
- searing self-doubt, or
- an over-complex plot line.
I have changed their names to protect their confidentiality. Just as the best journeys are made either alone or with a trusted friend, no writer likes the world to know about their book before it is finished and headed for the shelves. That’s why the relationship between Writer and Book Coach is so special.
Meet three different writers
Josh, who had written his book and was in need of publishing advice
Josh came to me with his nonfiction manuscript pretty well finished.
He was already clear about his reason for writing: he had specialist knowledge, born of his own experience, and he was determined to share the lessons he had learned so his reader did not suffer needless pain.
There was nothing much I could teach Josh about finding his deep ‘why’ for writing his book. He already knew one of the most important ‘compass points’ of a book’s journey, which is to know your true reason for writing, and he had got on and written the book.
He wanted to get the book published and he asked me which publishers he should approach. And this was the nub of the problem.
If you want to publish a nonfiction book, as Josh did, through a traditional publisher, you need to submit a book proposal before you write the book.
It’s like pitching to submit an article or essay to a journal. You’re seeking a commission to write the book, not presenting the finished work.
Josh and I talked through his options. He had always assumed that he’d be looking for a publisher willing to publish his book, but what he didn’t know was that he couldn’t just email them a query letter and a copy of the manuscript as a proof of concept and see how it landed.
I walked him through the three main types of publishing routes, and the pros and cons, relative to his own situation of each: the royalty structures, the cost of non-traditional publishing, the hidden cost of marketing, the emotional kick of being selected for a contract.
With the data he needed, Josh was now equipped with a roadmap to make good, informed decisions about his route to publishing.
He could see he had one big decision to make, and he needed time to consider it. He wanted to publish his book, but until we talked, he was unaware of the options that were open to him, nor of the implications of choosing any one of these options.
He was keen to know what he’d been missing, so we ran through the publishing landscape.
There are, broadly, three business models in publishing: traditional, hybrid, and independent.
Traditional publishing
The books you see on the shelves in book shops, by and large, are traditionally published. Publishing houses like Penguin, or Bloomsbury, were the manufacturers and distributors of these books. They selected the books from submitting authors because they thought there was a good chance they would sell.
Indie, or self-publishing
Contrast independent, or self-publishing, where the author organises the whole production process themselves: the typesetting, the cover, the printing maybe; they set the price and they find their own readers.
They are most likely to distribute through Amazon, or one of a number of other electronic platforms, or they may sell direct from their own website.
Hybrid publishing
It takes a lot of effort to self-publish, so some writers opt for a middle way: hybrid publishing.
A good hybrid press is selective, some of them fiercely so, but by taking payment from the writer they defray production costs.
A book coach acts as your strategic advisor
Josh was faced with a decision: should he put even more work into writing a proposal, which is a well-researched and carefully crafted business proposal for your book, or should he cut his losses and publish independently instead?
The downside of indie publishing, I showed him, was that as a full-time working professional, he had little time to learn the skills needed to produce his book, let alone to give much attention to distributing it.
Under my guidance, Josh decided his best course of action was to make a project plan.
Plan to publish
Josh agreed to work on his book proposal and identify a dozen key publishers of the type of book he had to offer.
He would set a time limit to executing this plan, so that by a given date, he would know if any publisher was interested.
If not, he could move to Plan B: indie publishing, knowing he had given the traditional route his best shot.
So, by working with me, Josh reached his destination: he was well informed about his options in the publishing world and he had the peace of mind that comes from a well-thought out plan to aim for his primary goal of traditional publishing.
But if that failed, he had a clear, alternative route to getting his book out into the world.
If you would like to be as well informed as Josh about how you get paid for your books, whichever route to publishing you take, download my free note here. (If you get frustrated by any gremlins lurking in the works, use this Contact form to ask me for it, direct).
Yvonne, who wanted to write a technical book with a heart
Yvonne had specialised knowledge but she was earlier on in the process than Josh. She was motivated to share her knowledge with the highly specific group of readers who would benefit from it but she faced two distinct challenges.
The first was that she suspected a simple download of all she knew on the topic would make for dry reading.
The second was that she suffered the scars of vicious, negative feedback on her written work from decades ago.
This is one of the reasons why I believe writers’ groups, where feedback is given by fellow writers who are untrained in feedback skills, let alone writing craft, are so dangerous to emerging writers.
Separate ideas from fears
To get Yvonne’s writing plans launched, I showed her how to separate her ideas from her fears.
Under my guidance, she worked out who she was writing this book for and as she did that, she discovered a deeper truth.
She wasn’t simply going to show people how to do what she did: she was going to show them how it helped to develop a deeper sense of connection with the people around them.
Next, Yvonne needed help to get the wind into her sails to start writing.
Yvonne was motivated to share her expert knowledge of a business process with managers in her industry sector but she faced two distinct challenges: how to make her instruction exciting and appealing to read, and her own self-doubt about her ability to write well.
Both are serious matters. Her subject matter, in itself, could be dry. And she’d had a tough time with feedback, early on, and she bore the scars.
You can’t write forward if you beat yourself up about your writing at every sentence.
And even if you overcome that obstacle, you get no joy from your writing if you feel you are simply writing a How-To manual.
So in our early work together, Yvonne and I went deep into her purpose for writing, at all. She took my online mini-course, Reboot Your Book, to help her to dig into her ideas for this book. (This mini-course can be bought for $47 on its own, or as part of an introductory coaching session that I offer writers.)
When we met up to discuss what she had discovered, I was struck by her energy and enthusiasm for communication. This is a woman who is a natural communicator: empathetic, generous and articulate. Her desire to enable others in her industry to solve the problems they’re faced with, by using her knowledge, shone through.
There we had her deep Why? It was her need to help others make and nurture a sense of connection, by applying this business process, that drove her to write this unique book.
Having found her ‘Why?’, she found the intrinsic joy in working out what she was going to say by her book.
The next thing we did was to map out her book. We looked at its essential building blocks, such as who needed to read it, how she would describe it, what other books were out there like it, and more. Map Out Your Book is a great tool for any writer writing any book.
By gathering the fundamentals of her book in one place, Yvonne was able to map out the book’s place in the world before she wasted months writing pages and pages to ‘feel her way in’.
After getting the book mapped out, Yvonne knew exactly why she was writing, and who she was writing for. Now she could address the What.
What did she want to say? I helped her begin to work on the outline structure of the book by using a tool I call the Chapter Map to test the internal logic of the content. The key is to ask, at every decision point, does this chapter support my Why (am I writing this), and my Who (am I writing it for)?
And then the problem of her self-doubt took its rightful place, right at the back of her mind where it’s taking a long nap ever since.
At the end of her Navigation phase, Yvonne was in a really good place. She had left far behind the anxiety that comes from wanting to write a book but not knowing how to start, or what to put in it.
She had organised her thoughts, found her deepest reasons for writing the book (to enable people to make more profound connections with each other, and to donate the sales proceeds to an organisation with the same aims) and she knew exactly who she was writing for.
Most importantly of all, she had let go of her self-doubt.
She knew that if she wrote to follow her Chapter Map, she could write freely in the knowledge that she was writing on point. Any rewording or grammatical errors could be dealt with once the first draft weighed in at her target number of words.
She had reached her destination. She was ready to write.
Pamela, who had made multiple false starts on her book and despaired of ever finishing it
Unlike Josh and Yvonne, Pamela, a retired academic with a wealth of factual knowledge and expertise herself, is writing fiction.
This is a book she has felt driven to write for years but has been struggling to find a way to structure that feels right to her.
Pamela needs to write this book so that she can make sense of her past, and create beauty from pain. It has an unusual setting, in an interesting culture that is not often talked of.
She has written—and discarded—multiple drafts and her confidence was at a low ebb when she asked me for an initial consultation.
We needed to look harder at the challenges Pamela faced, in trying to decide whether or not her book could be rescued from years of effort.
Pamela had felt driven to write her story, a novel, for years but has struggled to find a structure that feels right to her.
She had many colourful and interesting characters vying with each other for dominance in multiple plot lines.
She’s taken online courses and absorbed the nuts and bolts of good novel writing but the essential quality of learning information about writing craft from a course, or a book, is that you then have to apply it to your own work.
And that is very hard. You’re absorbing the advice, which is general or abstract by nature, and trying to work out, objectively, how to use it.
You try to analyse your own work objectively, but you are never quite sure that you’ve identified the right problem.
A coaching conversation, where a coach has intimate knowledge of your writing goal, helps you to work out what the problems are.
The coach helps you articulate the question that needs answering – which often isn’t the one you thought it was, when you were struggling alone with your unwieldy manuscript.
How Pamela began her story for the last time
Pamela and I worked on her story in four sessions that brought Pamela relief, emotional and mental, as she worked out the theme of her book that was most important to her, and why her readers would be interested in it.
She discovered which of her characters best carried that theme and what her story really was.
Here was where the Chapter Map came into its own again. It showed Pamela what decisions she had to make about building or dropping scenes, and how the story should flow from start to finish.
The Chapter Map showed her which characters and scenes needed building up, which should be dropped, so that the story followed a clean and compelling line that would entrance the reader, not confuse them.
Now, she knew what the shape of her story truly was. She’d found its true heart.
And in doing so, she identified the one, whopping obstacle that had made it so difficult to write her book in the first place.
Demons lurked in Pamela’s past that the act of writing her book was bringing to the surface. The circumstances were different to those experienced by Yvonne, but the same fear of judgement lurked.
Judgement laid down by the people who are closest to us has much more power to hurt than that of strangers.
Pamela discovered that by working through the internal logic of her story, in the Chapter Map, she was able to prove, to herself, the worth of what she was writing.
The process of testing and discarding fortified her to repel the judgement she feared. She could feel secure that she wasn’t needlessly ‘baiting the lion’.
When she has finished her second draft, she will have written a story to fascinate her readers, connoisseurs of human behaviour and armchair travellers, for the subtle complexity of its characters’ interactions in an unusual setting.
Every day they write, both Yvonne and Pamela face the damage done by past criticism, but with support, and true and honest feedback, they will each get their books finished.
They are now writing forward, with strength and enthusiasm and the wind in their sails.
Having reached their first destination, they are now travelling through the next phase of their journey: turning in their pages to deadline for feedback from me, so they can feel encouraged, ask questions and course correct as they need.
Your next step
If you would like to find out how I can help your writing project, your next step is to book a free call with me.
Tell me about your book and what you need. Then I can tell you if I can add value to your project.