I'm a Book Coach!

What that means and how I got here.

I’ve been undergoing a transformation this past year. More like, a transfer of energy of sorts.

I’m part of that midlife contingent of parents where my role has been that of encouraging a tiny human to develop and thrive. No small feat, as he blew his first birthday candle in the pandemic while we all wondered what future we had to hold.

Photo by Shayna Douglas on Unsplash

I described in a previous post how I wrapped my life around my child for those early years and have only recently reemerged:

How a LEGO Competition Reframed My Writing

That tiny human has since blown a fistful of candles and can do things like carry a backpack, lunchbox, and xylophone set to school. (Bonus points to all of us if he remembers to carry all of those items home again, plus or minus the twigs and stones he’s accumulated in his pockets.)

As miraculous and poignant it is to watch him breeze into the school building, the far more miraculous experience for me is to feel my day telescope into possibility. No longer am I attempting to get every life detail accomplished during the span of a nap, or a half-day preschool session. I’ve got almost eight hours, which feel expansive after these past five years of efficiency training.

During those five years, in addition to keeping our household running, I was a gig worker; I assented to a company-installed time tracker on my desktop that counted my keystrokes, followed my mouse movements, and made me uncertain if I really should take the three minutes to run to the bathroom or just keep typing. I was paid to edit content, a job that in no sense of the description should be considered an emergency setting, and yet, fairly regularly, the spin that accompanied an assignment was that this work was super-important, and could I please put everything else aside (but not too far aside so that I forget about it) and focus on this?

Yes, yes I could, and I was very, very good at completing assignments with speed and accuracy. But just like the scattered focus that modern parenting seems to require, where we toss a whole bunch of water balloons (er, tasks) in the air and then spend the rest of the day scrambling for one and then the next and the next just before they explode on the pavement, gig work kicked my hyper-vigilance and task-switching capabilities into overdrive at the expense of my long-range planning, thinking, and creativity. By the time my child faced the kindergarten hallway, I was more than ready to let those balloons fall where they might.

I don’t remember how I first encountered the #AmWriting: A Groupstack podcast. What I do remember is it was last fall, and I was piecing together a throw blanket made of multicolored crocheted flowers. (If anything is the antithesis of the parenting/gig economy sprint, it might be stitching together hundreds of crocheted flowers, stitch by infinitesimal stitch.) Arranging the flowers row by row on my wood-paneled floor, I listened to the encouraging voices of hosts KJ, Sarina Bowen, Jessica Lahey and Jennie Nash discuss writing tips, interview authors, and share what they’ve learned as they’ve written and published their work. And as I binged through their backlist, the intro/outro music and the farewell refrain of keep your butt in your chair and your head in the game convinced me that not only could I write again, but that thanks to the hours of thinking time I had recently reclaimed, I knew what I wanted to write, and I was actually itching to finish the crochet project in my hands so that I could turn my creative forces to the page.

I started writing in earnest last November, along with the other novel-writing hopefuls. I kept the bar low; just get to the desk and write some words. I needed the easy win to get back into the discipline of creating without a time tracker determining my worth. Top of mind was the acknowledgement that I needed a new career too; because as we know, writing a book is a long and twisty process with no immediate kickback.

Through #AmWriting, I was introduced to Jennie Nash’s company, Author Accelerator, and the idea of becoming a book coach. To me, the description of a book coach being a mentor, a partner, a sounding board during the creative process, a person who walks alongside a writer offering encouragement and experience, well, that sounded like the bits I liked best about being a teacher and a parent, and something I could definitely get into. Back when I was new to my teaching degree, the thing that burned me out was my desire to connect with and fully understand each of my students and dig into each of their writing assignments as though it was their life’s work. That’s simply not possible in a classroom of 25+ with a short turnaround on their homework. And so I was faced with the decision of dialing back my desire to care or assigning less intensive writing assignments, and I struggled to do either.

But this is what a book coach does, I realized, as I read the explanatory material. It’s the opportunity to go deep with a hand-picked selection of clients, to walk with them through a long-range project, to practice deep focus, care, inquiry, and to come out the other side of it all having witnessed a person open to and embrace their own story.

I was in.

I joined the Author Accelerator certification program and completed a rigorous 100-hour training in narrative structure, editorial craft, client care, and marketplace systems. I sourced practicum clients who I coached through three critical stages of the writing and publication process. This past August I received my certification in memoir, and now I am hanging out my shingle as a book coach!

But what’s a book coach? Like, what do they do?

A book coach is a writer’s companion on their path to publication. A writer can hire a book coach’s services at a variety of entry points during their writing process. The book coach leverages their experience and knowledge to assist the writer in meeting their goals.

For example, a book coach can:

• listen to a writer explain their book concept and help that writer become even clearer on what they are writing about

• help a writer determine the best publication path for their project, based on the writer’s goals and audience

• provide feedback and inquiry that drives a writer to create a solid outline prior to writing, or shore up a faltering outline mid-process

• be an accountability partner who provides deadlines for chapters so that the writer shows up and writes the book they are envisioning

• create a prioritized revision sequence for the writer, based on a review of their manuscript

• research possible agents and help the writer develop a pitch package for submission

• offer mindset coaching, be the encourager, or just be another human who knows the writer is out there doing the difficult thing of getting words on a page, because writing is difficult and scary, and writing memoir where the requirement to be real is even more difficult, scary, and disorienting at times, and it can be helpful to have a person who is your rememberer, pointing you back towards the thing you said you wanted to do

Of these very many tasks, the ideation, long-range planning, and the deep reads and manuscript revisions suit my natural inclination to ruminate over ideas at length.

How is a book coach different from an editor?

In my role as a developmental editor, I dove into writer’s projects and made revisions directly in their work. I rewrote short sections as a model and then sent the writer forth to go and do likewise. I polished their prose to help them create a better product. My focus was primarily on creating the best writing possible because I had to turn clean copy over to my managing editor on deadline.

As a book coach, the writing and revision responsibilities rest with the writer. It’s their story; I’m coming alongside to ask questions, point out sections that could use improvement, identify gaps in the story, and celebrate well-crafted characters. I am paying attention to the text and to the writer. This is more of a mentor/mentee relationship. As a result of the time spent with the book coach, the writer and the text will likely have improved. My main goal as a book coach is to help a writer bring their creative vision to life.

What kinds of books do you want to coach?

My certification is in memoir writing, so I am going to start there.

I am especially interested in stories of (dis)connection, a search for belonging, a longing for home, or an urge to treat everyone as a possible friend. I come to coaching with the experience of having lived most of my 20s and early 30s abroad in East Africa, so stories of people gaining insights and making connections across what might be assumed differences have a special place in my heart. I believe we need more of these breakthrough stories these days because we are increasingly siloed with people who hold the same thoughts as we do and polarized against those who seem too “other” to be understandable.

The story doesn’t have to primarily focus on a journey, or on travel writing in that sense. The physical distance you travel in your story might be negligible; we can encounter difference at our own kitchen tables. My interest comes in what happens next. If you’ve got a story where you encountered that difference and leaned in to understand more—about yourself, about the people around you, about the world—you’ve got me.

If you are thinking about writing about your life, or have started the process but would appreciate a partner, check out my website and book a complimentary call with me. I would love to learn more about your project.

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Esther Harder is an Author Accelerator certified book coach in memoir.