How Does a Book Coach Help a Writer with Deep and Specific Expertise In a Subject the Coach Knows Little About?
Today’s blog post comes to us from Author Accelerator CEO Jennie Nash. If you enjoy today’s content, you can sign up for Jennie's weekly newsletter here.
One of the big misconceptions about being a book coach is that people think it is more akin to writing and ghostwriting than to editing and project management. This misconception leads to myths such as the belief that a book coach needs to have an MFA or an English degree or that they need to have an agent and a bestselling book deal. These degrees and experiences can help a book coach to be sure, but they are not a prerequisite by any means.
A book coach is not an expert in the story or the content of the book being written. We are experts in the process of developing a book.
The reason is that a book coach is not an expert in the story or the content of the book being written. We are experts in the process of developing a book. We guide the writer in how best to design and structure the content to appeal to the target audience, how to write in such a way that will hold a reader’s attention, how to move the project from start to finish in the desired timeframe, how to handle the editorial and emotional hurdles of a long-term intellectual and creative project, and how to approach the marketplace in such a way that will best meet the writer’s goals.
It’s a very different thing from actual writing and when a writer hires a book coach, they are leveraging a totally different set of skills. It’s a combination that can be like rocket-fuel to a project: the writer doing the creative work of pinning their idea to the page and the book coach doing the strategic work of guiding the writing and the editorial work of honing the writing.
In the Book Coach Certification Program at Author Accelerator, we teach this strategic framework. One of the examples that is woven throughout the nonfiction course is a young anatomy and kinesthesiology professor who came to me to seek guidance on a book about repetitive concussions, subconcussive impacts, chronic traumatic encephalopathy and the consequences of repetitive brain trauma in youth sports. Her book, The Brain on Youth Sports: The Science, the Myths, and the Future, is being published today, and this milestone for author Dr. Julie Stamm gives me a chance to reflect on the experience of coaching someone in a topic that is very far from my area of expertise.
What I knew about this topic before I began coaching Julie is very close to zero.
That is to say: it was whatever I picked up from the chatter I heard on the pool deck when my children played water polo 10 years ago and what I may have gleaned in the headlines from what has been going on in the NFL around concussions. So knew next to nothing. Julie is a scientist, a scholar, a researcher, and an evangelist for safety in youth sports; she has devoted her life’s work to studying this topic. So how could I have possibly helped her?
I walked Julie through the strategic framework I call Blueprint for a Book. I created a Blueprint for fiction, one for nonfiction, and a combination of them for memoir. All the Blueprints share a series of steps designed to get the writer to define their goals, their audience, their message, and their motivation.
All the Blueprints share a common DNA.
The Blueprint has 14 steps, but these are the basic book coaching tenants on which the Blueprint is built:
Listen to what the writer is saying — and what they are not saying. Writers often know that they want to write a book but if they are new to the process, they will have a lot of questions and probably confusion about how an idea becomes a book. The best way to help them is to ask a lot of questions about their goals, their motivations, their work in the world, and then listen to what they say – and what they don’t say. Sometimes a big smile, a look of despair, or even tears indicates where the real heat is around an idea and it’s the book coaches’ job to recognize it and reflect back to the writer what they are hearing.
In Julie’s case, her mission was clear: she wanted to write a book to get people to see the danger of repetitive brain injury in young brains. She wanted to sound the alarm. She loves sports and loves the benefit it brings to kids, but she could no longer stand by and do nothing. What wasn’t clear was how to get people to listen.
Ask good questions about who the writer is hoping to impact. Knowing exactly who the writer is hoping to impact is a pillar of a good book proposal. A book coach helps a writer define the target reader.
As a scholar and a scientist, Julie wanted there to be evidence and science everywhere in the book. So I asked questions about her audience. Was it other scientists and scholars who already speak this language? Was it naysayers who needed convincing? Adults who had time to spend digging deep into this topic? Parents of young athletes who had barely any time? Kids themselves?Julie was clear that her number one goal was to speak to parents because she felt as though they were the ones with the most power to make a change. This led to a decision for her to include less science than was her inclination – not because parents don’t like science, but because they are busy.
Ask good questions about the universe the book will be born into. Books are products that enter a marketplace where other books are being bought and sold. Helping a writer understand this marketplace and their place in it is a key part of what a book coach does. We start by looking at the other books the core audience is already reading.
Julie knew all the books about concussion in athletes – and many of the authors of these books and the studies behind them. They were her colleagues. I asked a lot of questions about the books and what she saw as the strengths and weaknesses of them. Through this inquiry, we circled around what she wanted to do in her book, and what she didn’t. We found how her book could be unique and powerful.
Ask good questions about the point of the book. Every book is an argument for something. A writer who knows the point she is making before she starts to write is going to make a stronger argument. A book coach helps the writer define their message.
Julie’s point is to get parents to change their behavior. To get them to stop allowing their kids to do things that damage their brains. She is all in for cultural change in youth sports. It’s a big message – but the trick is to make the big message palatable to the people who need to hear it most. A preachy lecture is usually not the way.
Through my edits of her drafts, I helped Julie hone the tone of her writing so that it was friendly and approachable while also being authoritative.
Find a form to fit the function. Structure can be the difference between a book that falls flat and one that soars, and a book coach helps a writer select a structure that best serves the message they are trying to convey for the audience they are targeting. We do this by “trying on” common structures, “borrowing” structures from other genres, or finding a brand-new container for the material.
I helped Julie come up with a table of contents to showcase her material and worked with her to hone and refine it. Having a clear shape you can “see” makes it easier to envision the finished book, easier to pitch it, and easier to write it.
The beauty of a framework that you follow with every writer is that you are not making things up as you go. Using the same steps of the Blueprint, I can help a Wall Street Journal reporter whose beat is an industry totally unfamiliar to me, or an executive business coach who works with C-Suite execs who breathe a far more rarified air than I breathe, or a chef who deals with global food production on a scale I still can hardly even fathom.
It works like that on the fiction side, too. I can help a middle grade writer developing a story about dragons or an historical fiction writer revising a novel set in 17th century France or someone writing a dystopian fiction set in the near future, not because I know anything about those settings but because I know the right questions to ask.
If book coaching sounds like work you would love to do, you can sign up for our Book Coach Certification Program here. You can also sign up to talk with one of our team members here. And if you want to learn more about how it all works, we have a series of videos for you at this link.
