Would You Make a Good Book Coach?
Many people drawn to become writing coaches and book coaches are already doing this work (coaching writers) in some form or another: They’re just not doing it in an organized or systematic way, and they’re not asking to be paid for it. Do any of these scenarios seem familiar to you?
Everyone in your writers’ group asks you to read their pages. People slip you stacks of paper-clipped pages and email you their revisions, their updates, their tweaks. You come home with hours of extra work, and somehow you are the only one doing more than your fair share. People just seem to know that you are the go-to reader, the one who will give wise, careful, and detailed feedback, the one who will say “yes” because you care so much about all the stories.
When you watch Netflix, you spend the entire time talking about plot holes until your family tells you to zip it. You can’t help it – you hold the movie’s plot strings in your head the way a weaver holds threads as she makes a tapestry. You can see it all, clear as day – what’s working and what’s not. Moreover, you can see how it might have been done better. And you can’t stand it that other people can just sit there consuming the story without picking it apart.
Your book club friends can’t believe how quickly you read everything, and during discussions they sometimes need to gently tell you to let other people have a chance to speak. It’s not that you don’t value robust discussion. You love robust discussion. It’s that you have so many thoughts, so many things to say, so many ideas about the way the book was structured and the characters and the message and the voice that you want to share.
At the bookstore, you pick up a new release, read the jacket copy, snap a picture of the cover, and send it to your critique partner with the text: Possible comp title? Later that day, when reading the newspaper, you see an article on the exact topic that the woman you met at a writing conference is writing about, so you dig up her email and send it her way. You see in story and you default to helping people.
At work, or in your volunteer position, you are the go-to person to organize a project. You are the one with the timelines, the spreadsheets, the goals, and the overview of how to make this project work. You are good with details and good with the big picture, are good with messaging, and, on top of it, you do all this work with good cheer.
You have more books on your TBR pile than any human could possibly ever read – and you don’t care. You want to be surrounded by books. They comfort and sustain you. They make you feel that the world is a place of hope and possibility.
What we do in our Book Coach Certification program is take people who love stories, ideas, and the creative process, and teach them a systematized approach to helping and coaching writers.
We give you the systems, tools, and processes to effectively evaluate fiction or nonfiction work and give excellent, evidence-based feedback.
We show you how to manage projects, how to bring on clients, how to give tough news, how to understand the marketplace, and how to ask great questions so you can support the writer at every stage of the writing process.
Since the best way to learn how to coach writers is to actually DO it, our Book Coach Certification program gives you the chance to coach writers in three practicums. These are carefully designed practice-coaching sessions, where you find the kinds of writers you can serve; guide them through a specific exercise; and give written and in-person (video or phone) feedback. The book coaching practicums are designed to give you experience at the start of a project, when it is “whole,” and when it is ready to pitch.
Wondering if you have what it takes to be a book coach?
This short quiz will reveal how many of the top 10 characteristics we see in great book coaches you have, so you can start to envision what becoming a book coach could look like for you.
