Episode 56: Jennie Nash, Book Coach
Jennie Nash started Author Accelerator when she realized there was a need for more personalized, ongoing coaching to assist through the often isolating writing process. In this episode, get answers to common queries: What do writers need to excel? Is my story idea good enough? How can I better position my book in the market? Can AI help me write a book? Learn her keys to effective book coaching, giving and getting writing feedback, and the benefit of catering to your creative impulses.
transcript for episode 56 with Jennie Nash
Mary Kole (00:00:23):
Fantastic. Welcome, welcome to our Thriving Writers presentation with Jennie Nash. Jennie, why don't you tell our audience a little bit about yourself?
Jennie Nash (00:00:35):
Thank you. Thanks for having me. I am the founder and CEO of Author Accelerator, which is a company that is striving to lead the emerging book coaching industry. We train, certify, and support book coaches and we have 320 certified book coaches who are working all over the world with all different kinds of writers in all different kinds of genres. I'm also the author of 12 books in three genres and have been a book coach myself for about 15 years now.
Mary Kole (00:01:07):
Wow, fantastic. So we are seeing you after you have built basically this writing-coaching empire and you called it emerging. So maybe we can start talking about why this field exists and why you felt like this was a need in the market and take us back in time to how everything started.
Jennie Nash (00:01:34):
Yeah, it's a really interesting question because what we're talking about is just the vast changes that are happening in publishing where so much of the responsibility for creating good work and publisher-ready work falls on the writer. It's much like we hear about with marketing where the writer is responsible for connecting with their reader and direct reader to writer … the expectation that their reader's going to be able to connect with the writer and talk with them and follow them and interact with them is really new actually in the entire history of publishing. So all of this is still very new, and I started my company because I was teaching in a traditional writing program. It was a UCLA writer's program, which is a fantastic, fantastic place. I taught there for 13 years and it's actually the largest adult education writing program in the country, or it was at the time.
(00:02:41):
And that's largely because of the TV/movie—there's a lot of TV/movie writing. I was on the print writing for print side and the frustrations of teaching writing in that environment were vast for me, and I felt for my students. Everything had to be fit into either a six or 10 week semester or sometimes we did these sprint four-day bootcamp type things and they were fun and they were good and good things were taught, but it was never enough; the writers were always pressing pages into the instructor's hands. Please, will you read this? Please? Will you let me know if this is working? Please, should I bother? That deep sense of support over time, which is what a writer needs is just missing from that entire structure. And I began to dream about what it would be like to teach somebody how to write a book outside of those constraints.
(00:03:52):
And as luck would have it, one of my colleagues came to me and said, would you help me write a book from zero? I've never done it. She was actually a story analyst, she was a literary agent and she just had never written a book, but she had so many ideas for what she wanted to say. And so she asked for my help and I was able to begin to design tools and systems and processes like, okay. She said, I'll do whatever you want. I'll do whatever you say. Oh, it was a dream. And so we worked together and we did that work and that book turned out to be Lisa Cron’s Wired for Story, which is beloved in the writing community, as is Lisa.
Mary Kole (00:04:43):
I was going to say, you factor prominently as a case study.
Jennie Nash (00:04:49):
In Lisa’s book. Yeah, well, and that particularly is in Story Genius, her second book because she was trying so desperately to figure out how to showcase this work she was doing. And while I was coaching her, I said, well, I'll do it while I'm coaching you. I'll do it. So it was all very meta, but it was such a thrill and such a thrill to see it work, to get to do it. And after that, really, I had people lined up at my door and my next two clients also got big five publishing success. And so I realized that I was onto something and I didn't intend to start a company. I was very happy teaching and book coaching and writing and doing all that, but somebody else gave me the idea of expanding it out. It was an entrepreneur at UCLA, and so I did begin to build it out, and it took a while to figure out exactly what we were going to do, but at first our idea was let's give everybody cheap book coaching.
(00:06:03):
Everybody should have a coach. Let's make it really cheap and accessible to a lot of people. Turns out that doesn't work. The whole point is long, deep, intimate interaction, having somebody in your creative process with you, knowing what it is, supporting you along the way through the ups and downs, and it's an inefficient process and ultimately it does cost money. It's an investment for the writer. So we pivoted from that “let's make it cheap for everyone” model, and eventually we landed on let's teach people how to be book coaches and run their own businesses and charge their own money and teach them how to do that work. And that is a model we have now been running for about six years. And so when I say that book coaching is emerging, it's still really brand new. I mean, everybody that's doing it now is I think a pioneer. And we are at the very beginning of a lot of changes in publishing and it continues to put more and more pressure on the writer. And so I see no end to the efficacy of book coaching.
Mary Kole (00:07:27):
Yeah, I mean, when I left agenting in 2013, I was at a natural break point in my career because I was leaving New York City, and so I felt like I couldn't be the best advocate without having kind of boots on the ground—that has since shattered a little bit post pandemic. A lot of people have gone remote. But I started my editorial practice in 2013 for a lot of the same reasons that you've identified, which is the pressure, the onus is really on writers to come in with this perfectly polished project that is basically submission-ready. And one of the things a lot of writers who haven't really been in that environment say is, well, they're editorial agents and they are literal editors working at this publishing house, so why can't I hand them a fixer upper and see them take it across the finish line with me? And that is just not the reality of the market right now because there's pressure on everybody from the acquisitions editor to the literary agents, and there's nowhere for it to go, but on the shoulders of the author.
Jennie Nash (00:08:40):
Yeah, I mean, in fact, I have been very recently horrified at how little editorial input big publishers are having on their manuscripts. And I have had clients who submit their manuscript thinking, well, it's going to go through a whole other round of edits or a whole other support process and it doesn't. And they say, thank goodness I worked with you. Thank goodness I got it to the place where we got it, that it was so far, so far down the road because they just don't have time anymore. They don't have the manpower or womanpower, they don't have the time, and it really is up to the writer. And unfortunately what we're seeing across the board are a lot of bad books being published because there's no barriers to entry for self-publishing. There are also, unfortunately, some bad actor companies who will publish anything by anybody hybrid-type models. And some of them, I'm certainly not saying there aren’t some fantastic hybrid publishers, but there's just a lot of bad stuff being pumped out because there's so little to stop a writer from just publishing anything.
Mary Kole (00:10:08):
Mm-hmm. And I wanted to kind of circle back to the frustration that you felt when you were at UCLA and I have to say, UCLA … I see people who have gone through that program all the time. It is a well-known fantastic program, but as the author of writing reference books, somebody who tries to teach writing in a general sense outside of my individual practice, it's very frustrating to try and teach writing because everybody is different. The writer, every story is different. So we can put out a book like Story Genius and cover the broad strokes and try to be everything to everybody and address general writing structure and character growth and all of that. But at a certain point, that breaks down because there's only so much that you can do in a general sense before you really need to get into the writer's individual situation, their imagination, their specific story.
Jennie Nash (00:11:14):
Yeah, that's exactly right. And I find the whole thing fascinating. I'm somewhat obsessed with this because, with this meaning what do writers need to excel? What do they need to do their best work? And why is it that it is so helpful to a writer to have somebody right there saying yes, no, what about this, could you do this better? Is that what you really meant line by line, word by word to be in there with them? Because the reason I'm obsessed by it is that we think about writing, and writing is often portrayed as this thing that you do alone. I'm alone in my coffee shop with my headphones on, or I'm alone in the attic writing my poems. Or I am alone, and then I emerge with this product that nobody else has touched. And that's the romantic fantasy of it, but it doesn't actually work that way. Almost never works that way. And the thing I have come to understand is that writing isn't finished until somebody reads it, at least for a certain kind of writer.
(00:12:32):
If we're talking about journal writing or therapeutic writing or trying to capture something for your family legacy or that sort of thing, not talking about that. But when you're writing for readers, the work isn't done until somebody reads it. And there's an energetic, I think of it as an open loop. It's like a electrical circuit, and there's an open loop that doesn't get closed until the reader clocks in and engages with that work. And so the writer working totally in isolation is yearning for that. Like, well, how is this landing? How is this working? What does another human think of this? Do they get it? Is my vision coming through in what I'm writing? And it's just impossible to do that in these type of academic settings. And so your comment that writing in general, there's much that we can say that's the same about writing in general. But what people want is, well, what about my story? What about my opening chapter? What about my character? What about my idea? The general becomes totally useless at a certain point. And it is fascinating to me because it is so, there's no way to make it efficient, that work. There's just no way. It's long, it's slow, it's laborious to do the work of the writer and to do the work of the assessor, I guess.
Mary Kole (00:14:20):
Yeah, and I think that there's something in our culture right now that really resists that because everything that we see is about making things more efficient. We use AI to summarize or to cut out all of the work, but when we talk about creative writing, especially creative writing, as you mentioned, meant for an audience, there is no way to optimize, hack it.
Jennie Nash (00:14:51):
Yeah, and it's interesting because I mean, AI is posing such an interesting pressure on that notion. Can you hack it? Can you make it easier? Can you get there faster? And more and more, the answer is, sure, you can absolutely. But do you want to? And at what cost? At what cost? We talk a lot about, well, the regular reader might not be able to tell if it was written by AI or AI-assisted or what have you, but the writer can tell and the writer knows, and it's kind of like eating fast food where you have a meal, but you're not nourished, you're not satisfied, you're not filled up. And I think the same is true. Writers want to write. As painful as it is, writers want to write.
Mary Kole (00:15:54):
Well, I think everybody's different, and it has to do with what you want out of the process and why you're writing. So I think intention really plays into it. There are people who are churning out Kindle Unlimited projects that are just meant to be released every three months, and they may use tools in order to do that because that's their business model or whatever, but that's not necessarily the type of writer that would avail themselves of coaching, editorial services, this kind of deep learning, because some people do eat fast food every day, and that's just their life. Some people want to experience a three star Michelin meal and they want to really get into the terroir of where each turnip came from, and they're not necessarily the same people.
Jennie Nash (00:16:51):
Yeah, no, it's really true. It's really true. And that brings up something that I also think about a lot, which is when you walk into a bookstore, there’s all the books. And it's easy to think if you're a writer that all the books are the same, meaning they're all books, they all kind of went through the same process, they went through the same path to be in that bookstore. But the books have such vastly different functions. That's the thing I think about a lot. I know you coach a lot of children's work. You go into a bookstore and you're looking for whatever, a middle grade nonfiction, or you go into a bookstore and you're looking for a cookbook, or you go in a bookstore and you're looking for a memoir about raising twins. Those three things have nothing to do with each other, the experience of the reader, whatever the writer's conveying, there are perhaps skills and craft elements and habits that those writers needed to deploy to make that thing.
(00:18:07):
And again, they went through the same publishing paths and whatever, but their function is completely different. It's like, I've never said this metaphor before, so we'll see if it works. It's like a toolbox where there's a wrench and a hammer and a screwdriver. They're all in the toolbox and they're all tools, and you might use them for different things, but you're never going to pick one up to do the other thing. So the reason that I say all that is that the writer has to know: what experience am I creating for my reader? What is it that I'm intending to do here for them? And how is that going to look in the world? Meaning that middle grade writer, for example, might be going to schools to give a presentation. The cookbook writer might be opening a restaurant. The books are, they deliver different experiences and they lead to different outcomes for the creator and the receiver. I mean, that may all just sound super obvious, but it's something I think about.
Mary Kole (00:19:21):
Not at all. I do think it has to go back to intention. If we go to picture books, this is a very easy example, but a parent could be going into a store and they need Diapers Are Not Forever, which is a book that is all about potty training and getting their kid ready. They're on a mission. They want to find a book that will serve a function, but sometimes there's a book that's just about delight and silliness like Dragons Love Tacos. Who knows why that blew up in the way that it did. But people were like, this is fun and it meets a cultural moment, and it's just for pure pleasure. And there's something about knowing what you're putting out there and thinking about what audience member it's going to meet.
Jennie Nash (00:20:07):
Yeah, it's so true. It's so true. And I know that I have a grandchild, so that book has been on my radar for sure. It's so delightful and so charming. And that makes me think then about the creator as well, where there's that decision-making moment. I bet that that creator did not say, I'm going to make a delightful thing for the people. I bet it was dragons and tacos, this kind of lightning bolt thing. And then maybe, I mean, I'm making all this up, maybe it was a joke, and then it was like, no, I'm going to draw that dragon with a taco. And then it's like, wait, this could be a thing.
(00:20:51):
So there's a creative impulse, and then there's what am I going to make and who am I going to make it for? And those, I just love thinking about that work of the writer and how we can be better at it, be better at capturing our own creative impulses and figuring out do they fit in the marketplace? Where do they fit in the marketplace? How should I proceed with this thing? And I agree that the more intention we can bring to all of those things, that's going to reduce the frustration of the writer for sure, and also probably increase their success.
Mary Kole (00:21:37):
So I'm dying to ask you how you transitioned from this early kind of pressure testing of your framework, your coaching mentality, to then turning around and inspiring other coaches and empowering those coaches and providing a platform for them. However, this is the perfect jumping off point for something I'm dying to know, which is, how do you, if you do, help writers who come to you sift through their ideas and identify what has legs, what is the rubric for that? If somebody comes to you with two ideas, how do you pick through or help them to identify which one to run with?
Jennie Nash (00:22:22):
It's a great question, and it happens a lot. I find that people who are creative are not just creative once. If you're good at having ideas, you're going to have a lot of ideas. If you have the impulse to tell stories, you're going to have a lot of stories. Oftentimes, nonfiction writers come in and they have five books. It's like, well, I want to write this and that and the other thing, whatever. So that is a question that a book coach has to help answer a lot. And there have several tools that I teach for doing this, and the main one is called The Blueprint, and I've written three books. There's Blueprint for a Book, which is fiction. Blueprint for a Nonfiction Book and Blueprint for Memoir.
(00:23:16):
And each one is, it's a 14 step method of inquiry, and it's designed to answer these questions that we've talked about for the writer themselves to go through. Why am I doing this? Who am I doing it for? What is my intention? What is the structure and shape of this book? So it's not plotting out the book, it's before that, it comes before all that. And so working through somebody's ideas with this blueprint is an incredibly effective way to know, is this the right book? And if somebody has a bunch of ideas, then we'll use a version of that that's called a mini blueprint, but it's basically just a condensed, short, fast form of it. And you might do five mini blueprints and see, which of these has the most heat? Which am I most excited about? Which do I have? Which can I catch a vision for?
This is also a tool that I use very effectively. I just did it my own self for a book that I'm writing where it's one book, but there were three different ways that I could approach it. Which way is going to be the way that I decide to approach it? And doing an actual exercise where you're putting down this is what the title would be, this is what it's going to look like, this is the function, how it's going to function. And then really it's an exercise in tapping into your desire and your vision. Do I want to write that book? Can I see that book? Do I love that book? So often it really does come down to love. I've had the experience many times of coaching writers who think that they should do one type of book usually because it's going to be more commercial. It's selling right now, it's going to be good for my business. It's going to piggyback on some other success I've just had. And this is true in fiction, nonfiction, or memoir. There's usually some, I should do this one.
(00:25:38):
And then there's often, and then there's this other thing that I'm not, I'm thinking of three examples right now where this happened, and you can see the huge desire and pull and magnetic attraction to the idea for the writer and that they're resisting it because, well, this other one is a safer bet. This other one is more mainstream, this other one makes more sense, but it's creativity. It's the thing that you are is bubbling up in you and you want to make. And so I try to look for that heat. And what's fascinating to me is when you're talking to somebody, so let's say you've come to me and you have five book ideas, and we did this, and we're talking them through on a Zoom, just like we're talking here sort of right now, and you can see the writer sit up, light up their face lights, they get animated, their eyes get, they're like, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.
(00:26:44):
And then they're going to go back down when they're talking about the one they're supposed to do. And it's like, well, come on. So I just get to reflect back to them. Did you just hear yourself? Did you just hear the way you were talking, how energized you were, that? I talked at the beginning about that energetic or electrical loop. It's energy that we're capturing and that we're connecting to our readers around. And so if you have that energy for the idea, you're going to get to tap into these wellsprings of, I don't know, light that you get to then deliver to somebody else. So that's usually my process is, it just is a little bit of time to stop and think and discern before racing ahead.
Mary Kole (00:27:36):
And a lot of what I imagine you do, and I find myself doing is, like you said, mirroring back to the client what they might not be aware of. Now, this is a big question and there are a million answers, but I found that writers actually do have great instincts and they have intuition. They just don't listen to it. They sometimes don't know what to do with it. So why do writers doubt themselves?
Jennie Nash (00:28:10):
Wow, that is the big one. Well, first of all, I think we can't ignore the context in which we write, which is the culture, our history, the time in which we find ourselves, what the world says about writing. In many ways, we deeply value books, but we don't value the creative process that it takes to deliver them. We love the end product. But what about supporting those writers while they do that work? We deeply do not value that. And for the most part, we don't pay our writers that much. The whole movement of giving my book for 99 cents or free or why do I have to pay or whatever it is that we love the book, but we don't love the writer, in some ways. We love the celebrity writer, but the sort of, I would say regular writer. So that message from the culture is prevalent in most people's lives from the very beginning.
(00:29:32):
And then there are going to be, if you come down a step, familial pressures or context where perhaps in your family it was seen as something frivolous to sit and write like, oh, you're daydreaming, or do a college major that's going to actually pay. Something more realistic. And they're not wrong, but the message that comes through over and over and over again is this is a side thing that you do. It's a hobby. Don't take it that seriously. Don't depend on it, that whole thing. And then there may also be in the family or the context, you individual person are not worthy of speaking. And a lot of women have that experience in general in the world. Don't take up too much space, don't be too loud, don't disrupt, don't be bossy. All of those things, we don't want to hear from you.
(00:30:52):
If anybody comes from any sort of marginalized population, they're having that multiplied many, many times over. So all of those things we have to fight against, and they're not all ours. It's not just, oh, I don't think I can do this, or Who am I to do this? That's not just me. That's all of that context that or has been funneled into me. So people have to fight against that for one thing. Then for another thing, it's a really long process, most of the time, to write a good book. It takes a lot of time. And the ROI (the return on investment) on that time is usually not going to be very high. So then that compounds those messages as everyone, oh yeah, everybody told me, do something practical. This doesn't pay. And then it's, it's a self perpetuating engine that it's just really easy to not honor the creative impulse. And I mean, I could talk about this for days.
Mary Kole (00:32:18):
I think there's the larger issue of commercial potential, which is its own type of pressure. So you've already mentioned, oh, I am going to write this because I feel like I should. It's more marketable. Do you counsel your writers to pay attention to the market, pay attention to trends? A lot of that is outside of our control. How big of a role does that usually play in this thinking from the idea stage and into the execution stage?
Jennie Nash (00:32:51):
Yeah, I do counsel on that often, and there are things that you can do to tweak an idea or to position an idea for selling that make it more marketable. There are certain people who have an easier time marketing things. I am talking with my clients all the time about that and talking to teaching my book coaches how to think about that all the time as well. Because let's say for example, and again, it depends on the writer's goal. So let's say that somebody comes, and this was an actual book somebody wanted to write one time. They said, I want to write a book about my 23 bad boyfriends. And it's like, okay, interesting material. What is this 23 bad boyfriends book going to be? Is it going to be a memoir where you just are talking about all these bad boyfriends? That's going to be hard to sell because it's going to sound like a whiny—
Mary Kole (00:34:05):
A burn book, right? Yeah. Is the intention to kind of name and shame these people that were bad actors in your life? Well, that's relevant to 24 people, you and the 23 boyfriends.
Jennie Nash (00:34:21):
You can take that same material and it's like, okay, do you have anything to share or to teach or to help other folks who might be having a lot of bad boyfriends? That might be a book, how you could take that content and make it more sellable. The writer might not want to write that. So it's a question of that creative impulse with the commercial aspect, and let's say that then they say, yes, I do want to do that. I want to write a book about dating or how to, I don't know, making this up, how to get out of a relationship quickly that you see is not working and move on to the next one. Let's say that's the thing. So okay, we're going to write that book. That's cool. Now the content has a sort of marketability to it, but is that writer going to be in a position to be able to sell that book?
Mary Kole (00:35:17):
Are you a therapist? Will you do research, do you have a platform?
Jennie Nash (00:35:25):
What is a publisher going to see in that where they will say, well, we want that book from that person? Because writers often forget that the conversation, it's not just that's a cool book. It's like that book from that person, that person's ability to talk about it, to connect with the reader, to get media to sell that book, and all of those things play into it.
Mary Kole (00:35:57):
Especially nonfiction, and I know prescriptive nonfiction memoir, your platform is you lived it, right? That it's a little bit looser, but prescriptive.
Jennie Nash (00:36:08):
Yeah, for sure. And fiction, do we need another romantasy with dragons, whatever? Maybe we do. I mean, who knows how far the market for that is going to go and the appetite of readers for it. And sometimes there's a situation where that market is saturated. You can't sell that book. Maybe you try and you can't wait three years. It'll probably come back around and be different. So some of those conversations do play into which book should I write next? Which book should I market next? It's kind of a whole dance.
(00:37:15):
And there are so many examples all the time, every day of projects that make no sense that shouldn't sell. You mentioned the dragons and tacos book. It's delightful, and the art is incredible, and the whole thing, it's a fantastic book, but there could be a universe in which people were like, that's weird, and it never got traction, or we've seen this before, or whatever. You don't know. Sometimes you just don't know and you can't really control it. So for that situation, meaning I have something I want to write, it makes no sense for the market, it sort of makes no sense for me. I'm still going to roll the dice or I'm still going to write it, I'm going to bring it out my own self, or I'm going to do whatever because I must. And there's gazillions of examples where then it works. I was just reading about, it's not a book, but it's the same idea. I'm now blanking on the person's name, who I'm also blanking on the name of the play. Oh my gosh. It's the play about Mary Lincoln, the sort of madcap play where …
Mary Kole (00:38:23):
I'll find it and I'll add it in. [Note: It’s Oh, Mary!]
Jennie Nash (00:38:25):
It just won a Tony. I mean, it's like a big deal. And it's this ridiculous scenario where Mary Todd Lincoln, who was the wife of Abraham Lincoln, the premise of the writer was, what if Lincoln's assassination was actually great for the wife? And she's this sort of drunk cabaret singer, and the play is just, it's just wackadoodle. And I think it might be a one person show, and it's just bringing down the house, and people are just mad for it, and it's great. And it's like on paper, that makes no sense.
(00:39:04):
And the creator of that play, and again, I'm sorry, I can't remember their name, but they were saying in this thing I was reading, they were saying the whole thing started as this email that I sent myself because I had this wacko idea. And the fact that they saw it through, despite people probably saying to them, okay, that's going to be on Broadway, and that again, that roll the dice, like, no, I'm doing it. I feel it. I'm doing it. It maybe makes no sense. And the world is full of that. So we have to balance being prudent, being wise about the marketplace, understanding what we're getting into, blah, blah, blah. And maybe you do it anyway.
Mary Kole (00:39:55):
I should know this play because my name is Mary and my husband's name is Todd, so our couple name is Lincoln.
Jennie Nash (00:40:03):
Oh, that’s cute.
Mary Kole (00:40:05):
I'll figure it out and post it here. So is there something to following your weird and how do you know?
Jennie Nash (00:40:13):
Yeah, I mean that is the whole thing right there. How do you know what idea is good? That question is just huge, and in some ways there's no knowing, but in other ways, again, that's where I think having a book coach who could have a dedicated conversation with you about that, it's like, okay, that's weird, but tell me what you love about it. Tell me why. Tell me why it's sticking in your brain. Show me your vision. What do you see? Well, there's going to be singing and dancing, and it reflects our time in this way of X, Y, and Z. If you have that conviction and you can talk about it, there's a difference between, well, I just want to write it. It’s just what I want to write. That's sort of don't talk to me. I just want to write it. And well, let's think about does this connect with anything happening?
(00:41:19):
I'm working with a writer right now that I can't say very much about the story, but this kind of a weird idea. And what we keep talking about is that there's a particular kind of resonance to the political divide in our country right now, and it's not a political story at all, but there's a piece of it that sort of feels a little bit reflective of it. Maybe this story could actually only be written at this time. Maybe it only came into her head in this way because of the context of where we are and what have you. And could there be a way of thinking about it that it's not about the political divide, but could there be a way of thinking about it that my reader might really feel something or experience something that would be important right now to feel that makes this weird idea less weird? Because again, we are living in the times we're living in. We're not coming up with these ideas in a vacuum, so how can they make some sense? And in nonfiction, that is also a thing where you can back into a reason why this makes sense now or this has some widespread appeal now.
Mary Kole (00:42:48):
Well, let's leave the idea stage behind, as interesting and fascinating as it is. What about coaching somebody who either comes to you with a draft or maybe they come to you kind of in the middle, they're like, ooh, I'm working on something. Maybe I've stalled out, or maybe I need support to push past it. What is a coaching relationship look like beyond the brainstorming part?
Jennie Nash (00:43:22):
Well, I've talked about how a book coach is in it with the writer over time, and what that typically looks like is you make a container for that writer to a safe space to receive feedback over time. So that might be two times a month, the writer's turning in work and getting feedback, and they're getting used to feedback. They're getting used to this person's feedback. I think that's a really important part of coaching is, I will often ask my clients to stop showing their work to other people when they're working with me, not because I have the answers or I'm so great, but because if somebody is saying, well, my husband said this and my colleagues said that and I showed it to my mom and dah, dah, dah, dah, and they're just all this input, they're not tuning into their own self. So part of what we're doing is helping that writer build an understanding of their work and confidence in their work by that repeated, I call it a feedback loop, that it's not just feedback one time, it's feedback over time. And I talked about a safe space, there's a trust that becomes built up where the writer is learning to trust themselves by trusting the coach kind of in proxy. And so it becomes very emotional, is what I would say. And I don't mean that like, dramatic emotion. It oftentimes, the writing is sometimes secondary in many ways. We're working on the writing, that's what we're doing, but we're working on that writer becoming the kind of person who can write the book that they want to write, if that makes sense.
(00:45:23):
And it's very powerful work, and it's very nurturing work. And oftentimes when someone's experienced it, they don't want to not experience it. And that's happening with me right now on this book that I'm writing, and I'm working with one of my coaches who I hired, and I find myself doing that thing. I mean, I have a lot of colleagues in the writing space, a lot of highly influential people that I can just say, hey, will you read these chapters and they will. And I was doing that, and I was a little bit, I was doing that thing, and I was getting really caught up in responding to people's feedback. And this is in an early stage of the book, and I had to tell myself, stop.
(00:46:10):
Just trust the relationship with the book coach. Learn to trust yourself, which is the whole point. And so that's what we're doing is we're building that container. Then we can take the writer all the way through the entire process. It just makes it less lonely. It's my book. I'm writing it, it's my idea, it's my decisions. But it makes it less lonely to be able to have somebody who, I mean, there is a particular frustration that writers have that also as an entrepreneur, I have it where I'll go to my husband and maybe he'll say, oh, how was your day? And I'll say, oh, I was dealing with this thing and blah, blah, blah, and I have to explain my problem or my challenge or whatever I was in that day. And it's kind of so exhausting that you don't even want to start or you say something sort of, oh, it's fine, blah, blah, blah. Or I was dealing with this thing, blah, blah, blah. But when you have somebody that knows your work inside and out, you can then say to them, oh my gosh, I rewrote that chapter 14 times, and then I decided to go back to the way that it was. And the person will be like, they'll know exactly what you're talking about, and there's no preamble or there's no, let me tell you why this matters to me or tell me why I spent five days rewriting that 14 times. They know. And there's something so comforting about that, just this is what it is. And oftentimes that person knows you as a writer much better than anybody else in your family. So it's quite powerful.
Mary Kole (00:48:09):
Yeah, I mean, Todd doesn't know much about much that I do on a daily basis because you're right, it is so much context to just try and bring somebody up to speed.
Let's talk about the elephant in the room. So you rejected an early idea to offer book coaching for everybody. The benefits are obvious, almost incalculable, but maybe you found that people who don't pay money or invest in themselves don't take it as seriously, and it also burns the provider out because book coaching is not a business that you can really scale unless you do what you did with Author Accelerator. You only have so many hours in a day, and it's a one-on-one deeply personal relationship. So how do you structure fees and what is the time scope of a relationship usually? And going back to that sticky issue of ROI, how does a writer make the decision for themselves, whether it's worth it or not?
Jennie Nash (00:49:20):
Yeah. Well, first of all, I don't consider money to be a taboo topic at all. I'm out here talking about money all the time, and I'm talking with my coaches about money all the time, and I'm talking to writers about money all the time because I'm trying to change the conversation around money and writing and an ROI, because investing in your writing, investing in doing a better job with your writing, becoming a better writer, making your writing more satisfying for you and potentially more impactful for your reader is not necessarily about how much money you are going to make on this particular project. It might be an investment that helps you make money three books down the road, or it might be an investment, an emotional investment that helps the writer do the thing that they've always wanted to do and achieve something that is literally one of their life goals.
(00:50:23):
And there are so many other realms where we are happy to invest a ton of money and not get a direct ROI. An easy example is the golf industry, the billions and billions of dollars that are spent on golf and golf lessons and better golf clubs and a golf coach and golf trips and all the things. And it's like, are those golfers going to make money from their golf? And it's no, they're not, but they're happy to pay all the money. And I'm not saying that writing is a leisure activity. For most people, there is an overlay of seriousness where they want to be a writer who is paid, but still, what business do you start where you don't have to invest money? None. That is the definition of starting a business is you are going to spend some money in order to make some money, right?
(00:51:27):
So when I say I'm out here talking about it all the time, I would like writers to think of themselves as entrepreneurs. And we talk about this in a soft way a lot like, oh, every writer, the author, entrepreneur, and I am selling my book. But it's like you are starting a business. You are making a product that you wish to sell, and you're starting a business. What are you going to invest in that? You're going to be investing a lot of time, so why not invest some money to be better at it, to be more supported at it, to do a better job at it? So it is about a belief in the investment of education that you are making for your own self. And there's nothing that makes me crazier than the universe of writer education in which you can buy a $25 video or even a conference.
(00:52:33):
You can go to a conference and you can spend whatever you spend, $500, $800, and what do you get for their $25 video? You get 50 minutes of something, which is potentially useful, but it's not helping you with your long-term work. Or you go to a conference and it's inspiring and you're with your people and it's great, and maybe you get some tidbits and whatever. But the focus so often is on how do I get an agent? How do I write a query letter? How do I dah, dah, dah, dah, dah? And the conversation is not again, about you and your work and how you get better, but so much money is spent on these small, ineffective outcomes. And so I am on a mission to say, invest in the big outcome. Invest the big money in the big outcome. And so I am talking about that to writers, and I'm talking about that to coaches, and I'm constantly saying, charge more because it is not a transactional thing that we're doing.
(00:53:44):
It is transformative, and it is highly valuable. And you mentioned the burnout. It is really hard work to be in it with somebody at that level and to that amount of time and that amount of energy that you're spending. And so in order to be sustainable as a business for the book coach, they must charge. So I am all about that it's going to take money. So then the inevitable question is, well, what about the people who can't pay? And then we're boxing out precisely some of the people that I was talking about before have the hardest time having their voices heard and the hardest time getting a seat at the table. And that is a terrible reality of this dance that I'm taking, is that I need the money to do what I'm talking about. And so the only solution that I've been able to come up just in my own business and in what I teach is that if me as a business person or a book coach makes a lot of money, I can then be in a position to offer scholarships, to offer some sort of program that is more mission driven, that reaches more writers. I could do self-study videos, I could write books. I could do these sort of things that could try to lift up folks who can't pay, or I can help people learn how to make the money in order to invest in the thing that they need. They're imperfect solutions, but that's the best I can do.
(00:55:31):
So in terms of what a writer can expect to pay, you asked about how long, it depends on what you're doing. If you're doing the blueprint work that I talked about, the method of inquiry at the very start of a project, a lot of coaches have six or eight week programs to do that work, which if anybody has a small amount of money to spend, that's where I would spend it. It is so valuable to have somebody's help at the very beginning of your project. Getting a draft written is typically six months would be fast, nine months, maybe a year. So you're looking at a pretty long-term investment, and then you're looking at anywhere from, I don't know, $500 a month would be quite low, and it goes stratospherically high. So it's not an inexpensive investment.
Mary Kole (00:56:34):
And I also want to just really lay it all out there because there is no guaranteed return on that investment. In terms of a book deal, in terms of getting on the New York Times bestseller list, but like you were saying, it's transformational work. And the reality of it is you have to decide whether your personal growth, your craft growth, your deeper understanding of yourself, your pride in the project that you produce is what's worth it, because none of that other stuff is guaranteed even if you go through a program such as yours.
Jennie Nash (00:57:14):
Yeah, I'm into that. Yeah, there's a lot you get out of it. I have coached quite a lot of writers who did not get what they set out to get, and I would say almost without exception, they're still really happy they did it.
Mary Kole (00:57:32):
Because one of the questions that I personally hate being asked by writers who are impatient, they go on TikTok, they see that somebody got an astronomical book deal in two weeks or whatever. They say, you mean I have to write an entire novel? It's going to take me five years, and then it could mean nothing? If it's going to mean nothing to you to go through that process, then perhaps writing is not for you because those five years will still be spent learning, growing, understanding yourself, understanding the market, understanding your craft. If that's nothing because you didn't get the end result you were hoping for, you're maybe not in the right mindset.
Jennie Nash (00:58:17):
Yeah, you're not in the right industry.
Mary Kole (00:58:22):
Our time has flown. Flown by. Absolutely. Oh, we have a great comment here. I look at this investing in a college degree because there is no guaranteed outcome, but you have to make something of the degree. It's not just going to be handed to you just because you went to class most days. You believe that that piece of paper is worth something. And if you believe that, then you sign up, you pay the tuition, and you go and you learn.
So Author Accelerator is your platform for uplifting other writing coaches. You have developed a framework, you train these people, they get certified, and then they go out and they run their own businesses. Now, editorial work and coaching is all about fit. So as somebody is maybe perusing the offerings of certified, how can one maybe gauge whether a specific coach is going to be a fit for them?
Jennie Nash (00:59:28):
That's a great question. I really think, well, first of all, I counsel my coaches to be extremely specific about who they coach, to choose very narrow niches that they can serve in a really specific and particular way. There's a lot of reasons for that that I won't get into. But from the writer's side, you want somebody that's doing exactly what you are writing, that is focused their attention and energy on the thing that you are writing. Well, it can be the genre, but it can also be the type of writer. So it could be a writer who's chronically ill, a writer with ADHD, a writer who's LGBTQ+, and or it can be exactly what their writing, and or what phase of the writing process they're in. So to find a good fit, you have to start with your identity as a writer.
(01:00:42):
What is this project and what particular support are you looking for? And then I think there's a real vibe check thing going on here. I just had somebody reach out to me in the last few days who wanted to work with me. And I like to think I'm a nice person, but I am a very tough book coach. And so right from the start, I just come in hot. It's like, you're going to have to do this. You're going to have to do that. You're going to have to do the other thing. It's going to take a really long time. It's going to cost a ton of money. You still want to do it, I'll talk to you. I come in hot like that, mainly because I don't want somebody, that's how I am. So don't even talk to me if that's not what you want. And there's a lot of people that are like, oh, yeah, no, I do not want that. I want somebody who's going to be gentle and nurturing and kind and not push me. So you have to know what you are looking for so that that vibe, fit is good. So I mean, I know that's really vague.
Mary Kole (01:01:54):
It does take some trial and error because everybody, as we were saying at the beginning of our talk, everybody's different. Every project is different. Every book coach, every editor, every agent is different. It is a very subjective business. So sometimes it does take a little bit to make that connection.
Jennie Nash (01:02:10):
Yeah, yeah, it's really true. And don't be afraid to talk to a few people and check it out. We actually have a directory of certified coaches. It's at authoraccelerator.com/matchme. And the directory is searchable on a whole bunch of different criteria. I mean everything from time zone to do, you coach horror to all different kinds of things. So you can go in there and play around and talk to people and see what fits and give it a go.
Mary Kole (01:02:38):
Is it important to work with a book coach who has published themselves? Some people have strong feelings one way or the other.
Jennie Nash (01:02:42):
Yes. I have very strong feelings that it is not important. I think the skills of book coaching are totally different from the skills of writing, and I think they can be learned and taught. I have so many incredible examples of actually most of our most successful book coaches who are getting their clients the biggest results are not published their own selves. So when I hear people say, oh, you should only work with somebody who's been through it their own selves, I mean, for one thing, maybe they went through it 20 years ago and things are totally different. Or maybe they were published by a university press and you want to be published by a trade publisher, or maybe they were published by—why is one person's experience with one book the most relevant thing that we look at? I think it's nuts.
And some of the examples of coaches that we have that are not published that are doing incredible work are, for example, a woman who’s worked her whole career as a pediatrician, and she is working with other doctors to help them write their novels. She knows exactly how they think. She knows how their days go, she knows how they learn. She's a perfect coach for them, and she hasn't published. Why should, should you not go with somebody like her if that's the right fit for you? Or another example would be a coach who is a specialist in helping writers with ADHD. They're working with so many different things then to help that writer and to prepare that writer. Why is it relevant if they were published or not? We teach the things that people need to know to help writers make good decisions about publishing, but I think it's wrong. So I would say, look for the coach who can give you what you need, including can you counsel me on paths to publishing? Can you help me make decisions about the best path for me? Because again, if somebody has only had one path and they haven't learned or studied or been taught about the other paths, how can they tell you about what it's like to go this way or that way or this other direction? So you want somebody who can have the conversation with you, help you make your best decision to get what you want.
Mary Kole (01:05:19):
And on the traditional side, agents acquiring editors, it isn't a prerequisite that they are published themselves. They are different skill sets.
Jennie Nash (01:05:29):
Totally. Totally. Yeah. So it is a good question. I'm glad it was asked.
Mary Kole (01:05:35):
Aside from Author Accelerator, where can people find you? You're taking on very few clients yourself because you are an entrepreneur and there are a lot of demands on your time. But is there anything else that you want to tell people about your offerings and where to get on your train?
Jennie Nash (01:03:13):
Well, folks can find me at jennienash.com if they are interested in me as a coach. And if they're interested in becoming a coach, the best place to go is bookcoaches.com. There's a lot of information there. There's a free webinar, there's all kinds of content there to show you about coaching and what you can do to become part of our program.
Mary Kole (01:03:40):
Jennie Nash, thank you so much for joining us here at Thriving Writers.
Jennie Nash (01:03:45):
Thank you for having me.
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