What does it take to be a book coach? Do you have to be a writer to understand writing? Jennie Nash doesn’t think so. After teaching writing for years as a professor, Jennie decided the way we teach writing.
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TRANSCRIPT STARTS HERE:
Kat
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Pencils & Lipstick. Today, I’m very excited to have with me, Jennie Nash. She is the one and only who started Author Accelerator, and that is how I found her. I found her by looking for a way to become a book coach or study more about stories. So we’re going to pull Jennie’s story out of her today. Hello, Jennie. How are you doing?
Jennie
Hi. It’s really great to be here. I’m well, thank you.
Kat
So I wanted to have you on because I think I learn a lot from you on all of the teachings that you do over on Author Accelerator. I think they’re really great. I think your program is amazing. I tell my listeners all the time I’m so pleased that I found it. I want to know just a little bit more about Jennie. How did you become a person in the book world? And then we’ll get into how you created Author Accelerator. So who are you? Where are you from?
Jennie
Who am I? Well, it’s a long story, which I will try to make very short. I always wanted to be in the book world from the time I was in fourth grade. I remember in our fourth grade class, we made a book of poems. We physically made the book with a cardboard cover, and it was, back in the day, mimeographed pages. And you could contribute a poem. And I think I had half of the book because I just thought it was the coolest thing, that we were going to write things and give them to people in a package that they could consume. It was just the coolest thing in my mind ever. And from that moment on, I wanted to be in that world. And for a very long time, I thought I wanted to be a writer. And I was a writer. I had an incredible career as a writer. My first job out of college was actually at a Random House, and I worked for both a fiction and a nonfiction editor. And I worked at magazines. I was all over the world of writing. And when I said I had a career, I published seven books with Big Five publishers in two different areas. And I was a solid mid-list writer, I was no big debut, no big breakthrough book. I was doing just fine. And in order to support myself as a writer, I started teaching at the UCLA Writers Program, which I loved. I loved being in the classroom. I loved teaching. It turned out I was really good at it. And I just had a great time. I taught there for 12 years. But I also became increasingly frustrated. And the reason is that the way we teach writing typically isn’t very helpful to the writer. You go into a class and you have 10 weeks at the most, usually sometimes shorter, if you’re doing a weekend thing or a four-week thing or a little workshop or what have you. And so what happens is you default to being able to teach what is possible. So what is possible is, well, we’ll learn how to write a scene, or we’ll learn how to write dialog, or we’ll learn a lot of craft focused things. Or the other side is, we’ll talk about how to get an agent or how to pitch. There is almost nothing in the middle. How do you actually write a book? How do you actually go from beginning to end? What is the process? And as the instructor, it was frustrating because everyone’s pressing their pages into your hands and what they want is for someone to pay attention, and you can’t. For what they’re paying you in the time that you have, you can’t with that many people. So I had an incredible opportunity fall into my lap, which was that one of my colleagues who knew me as a very strategic and market focused teacher. I was always talking about the meta parts of the book process and always thinking about how do we write something that people want to read? How do we make something for the commercial marketplace? And she asked if I would help her. She was an agent and she asked if I would help her write a book from zero. She actually had never written a book, even though she was an agent. And so I had the chance to say, well, can I do exactly what I want to do? And I began. And she said yes. And I began to develop the tools that became the blueprint framework for starting a book and the processes that I used to coach somebody all the way through and to help them prepare for the marketplace. And that writer and that book turned out to be Lisa Cron’s Wired for Story.
Kat
I love that book.
Jennie
She got a two-book deal at Ten Speed and wrote Story Genius after that. And suddenly people were lined up at my door wanting the same thing.
Kat
Oh, so they heard that you helped her do it? Ok.
Jennie
Yeah. And my next two clients got book deals at Big Five Publishers. So the first three writers I worked with landed book deals. And I suddenly began to think, maybe I’m actually better at this than I am at writing. And certainly, this feels more impactful and effective than being in the classroom. Because one of the things we saw in the classroom, and we would all laugh about it, the instructors, is that students would cycle through. They’d take all my classes, and then they’d take all this next person’s classes, and then they’d take the other person’s classes, and then they might come back to me. And they were eager to learn, and they were engaged, and they were committed, but they were not getting anywhere. So I began helping people, actually pull them through the process, guide them through the process, coach them through the whole process. And that’s how I became a book coach.
Kat
I love that story. That’s so cool. Because you’re thinking of this question, and I love it because, partly, I was thinking of that question. We always like it when somebody else is thinking of the same thing. I’m like, how do you get through this, sometimes? When we were talking before we were recording, it’s like you write a book and suddenly people come and ask you questions, right? How do you do it? Can you help me do it? I mean, you found the process because I’m always like, well, there are so many pieces and I have no idea. Trying to figure out that whole process is huge. I mean, you’ve put together a really well developed, there are lots of little pieces, but it all goes together and it all really makes sense. You must have spent a lot of time thinking of where you would put different pieces because is this exactly what you would do with your seven novels, or did you have to sit down and really think about how you would do it if you were going to actually teach somebody else?
Jennie
I did not come up with these processes as a writer. As a writer, I did what everybody does, which is flounder around, write 300 pages that didn’t work and throw them out. I had one book I wrote a novel where I turned it into my editor and she said everything is great up until the very last scene, and I think your last scene is wrong. And if you change that last scene, you’re going to have to change the whole story, which I actually did because she was absolutely right. So I was just floundering around. And what I realized is that that’s the way most people get to writing a book. And there’s not one single solitary thing wrong with that process. It’s what so many creators and writers go through. It’s the creative process. It’s trying, it’s failing, it’s iterating, it’s thinking, it’s figuring. It’s a good process. But as a teacher of writers, that’s what forced me to think there’s got to be a way to organize this process, to contain it. There are patterns that everybody goes through. Everyone’s creative process is totally different, but there are patterns. There are things that you have to hit certain milestones in order to produce this book. And it just was very surprising to me that nobody was talking about that in that very big picture way. And when you look around at where do you go to learn to write a novel? Well, you go to these types of classes like I’m talking about, where you go for a week with a famous writer, or you take a 10-week class and learn a craft thing, or you go to a conference and you hear whatever can be taught in a 45-minute panel, or you’re in a writers group with other writers who are also trying to figure it out, or you go get an MFA, which is actually not focused on developing a book for the market at all, or you go get a certificate in copywriting, which is a totally different thing. So there’s nowhere to go to actually learn how to do this thing. And it’s an incredibly complex undertaking to write a book that holds together. So you can tell when I start talking about it, I’m such an evangelist for book coaching because A, I absolutely know without a doubt that it works. And then B, there’s nothing else that does that does what it does.
Kat
No, it’s true. I’ve had some people ask me, why would I pay for a book coach if I can find the information out there? And my answer is, you can if you gather all the books. Definitely start with Lisa Cron’s book, start there. But even as somebody who had written a few books when I picked up Lisa’s book, it made sense. And yet when you sit down to follow her instructions, you still feel like, okay, what? I really think that the beauty of book coaching is you’re talking to somebody else. You’re actually going through the process of what is this story? Because it starts from maybe a scene that you’ve thought of or a question that you want to answer. But that’s not a book. That’s not a whole story. It can become an anecdote without any of the other pieces. And so I think book coaching is talking it through until you get to the point where you’re like, oh, I don’t actually have a lot, or, oh, that’s actually not going to work, or, maybe it will work. But I think it’s that exchange out loud that is worth every penny.
Jennie
Absolutely. It’s collaborative, you’re bringing in somebody else’s brain, and that doesn’t mean that you’re giving away your story or you’re giving away your ownership or your authority. It just means you’re bringing in, I think of it as a mirror to hold up to you, does this work? Is this holding together? Is this doing what I think I’m doing? Am I bringing forth the thing that I can see in my head? Can another human see what I’m trying to do? And that intimate exchange is what it’s about, and it’s inherently inefficient. That’s the thing about it. It is not an efficient process. And so when people and writers think, why would I pay all this money when I could do this by myself? You can do by yourself. There’s no doubt that it is possible. But doing it with somebody else is… Well, first of all, it’s way less lonely, because you have somebody else pulling for you, with you, cheering you on, holding you up when things fall apart, really paying attention to you and your work. And you’re giving money in exchange for that. But what writers usually give in exchange for that is their attention on somebody else’s work. So if you’re in a writers group or a critique group, you have to pay with your time and your attention. I did that for many, many years, and I found it very frustrating. I would get very resentful. I was really good at it. So I was often the person that would be asked in whatever group. I was also that person in a book group. I can’t be in a book group because I become, by default, the person everyone turns to or looks to because that’s how my brain thinks. And even back in the day before I did this professionally. So I would be spending a lot of time, energy, talent, money, not money, time, energy, talent on other people’s work to help them in exchange for them to look at my work in a way that wasn’t actually very helpful or satisfying. It would be, well, here’s a chapter that I read, or maybe they read your whole manuscript in exchange for you reading theirs, but then you’ve got all these notes and ideas and processes and things for them, and they have a few comments for you. And you’re like, oh. So I like the, I guess you would call it more pure exchange of here’s my money. I want you to pay attention to my words and my ideas and my work without distraction because I need you to. I’m actually in the middle right now of being coached my own self on two books. I have a coach helping me with two nonfiction books. I love it when I get on the calls with her. I don’t have to ask her how she’s doing or how her work is going or split the time. It’s like, this is all about me and I got some questions and we got to hash some things out and solve some problems. And it’s not therapy, absolutely, but it’s kind of like therapy in that I’ve been in therapy and what I love about it is, again, I don’t have to care about how that person is doing. It’s not my responsibility. They’re there for me because I’m paying.
Kat
Yes. I think it’s a lot like everyone gets a job review, except for us writers when we wait till the reviews come in. And then I think avoiding that moment like you got with your editor, okay, change the ending. I just spent all this time. But if I’m working with a book coach, it’s a business exchange, like you said. It’s a little more pure. I’m paying you to pay attention to me. Tell me if I got on the page what I wanted. Here’s what I wanted. Give me feedback as I’m going through it. I’ve been there with my first book. I gave it to an editor, and thank god she told me, cut 40,000 words. And I think that’s great. But she didn’t tell me how. She was like, here you go, on your way. And you go, okay, two and a half years later.
Jennie
Well, and it turns out that a lot of editors these days don’t actually edit. Some do. There are some for sure that do. Most don’t, and agents most don’t edit either. And they say incredibly unhelpful things. Here are two recent things I’ve heard from agents to writers that they literally said these words, I wish it were a little more sparkly. What does that mean? And then the second one, it was so crazy. It was, oh, it was, this writing feels a little self-centered. Could you do another pass on the manuscript? That was her editing feedback.
Kat
What does that mean?
Jennie
And so then the writer, right, to your point is, what does that mean? And then what am I supposed to do with it? And that’s where a book coach comes in is we’ve… I mean, in that case, try to decipher what the agent means, but all along…
Kat
Maybe move on to another agent.
Jennie
Yeah, actually. But a book coach is there to both analyze and strategize with you what’s working and then help you to actually execute and fix it. And to me, what that does is it creates a safe space for failure. I just told you that I’m working with my own book coach, and in my last deadline with her feedback was, you’re not doing the thing that you said you wanted to do. You’re absolutely not doing it on the page. Try again. And it was like, oh. And so my job as the writer in that situation is to think, do I agree? Why do I agree? What do I feel in my gut? Is she right? If she’s right, what does that mean for me? So my job is to use her feedback as a measuring mechanism against what I want for my own self. Now, I could well say, I don’t think you’re right, coach, and let’s have a discussion about that. I want to argue my point. And a lot of writers will do that. And what they’re actually doing is they’re saying, this is the vision in my head. But what the coach is saying is great, but it’s not on the page. But if a writer comes back and they’re arguing for their case for why what’s on the page is holding together, the mere fact of them having to articulate that and argue it and voice it helps them to refine it and do what they’re doing and make it better. So it’s not that the writer has to do what the coach thinks or what the coach says, or the coach doesn’t say things like, this romance that you’re writing really should be a mystery. It’s not like that. It’s more asking questions and curious, did you mean for this to come across this way? Was this the mood you were going for? Is this the impact you wanted to have on your reader? And this is my experience of being in your story or in your idea. Is that what you meant? Did it hit me the right way? It’s more that thing. I think writers sometimes think the coach is going to become their story, and that’s not at all.
Kat
No, and that’s such a strange thing that we’ve gotten into in the last probably 30 years. We really think we’re supposed to do it all by ourselves, even though every other art doesn’t do that. Every other artist has a mentor, they take classes, they get feedback, and yet here we are trying to do this all by ourselves. And I think it’s really silly. One of the books that you recommend we read the Artful Edit, that was really insightful to me to think that… Now I can’t think of his name. What’s the writer’s name?
Jennie
F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Kat
Fitzgerald, yes. His editor was a coach. The letters that they write back and forth, and it’s just like, that’s how it used to be. The editor was on his side and telling him, no, Daisy’s not coming across like that. No, or yes, or whatever it is, can you do this? That was just so eye opening to me to think, okay, all of the greats had a coach. So why don’t we do that? We need coaches. It’s okay to need a coach and to have somebody just work it through with you.
Jennie
Well, it’s so normalized to have a coach in athletics, or you mentioned the other arts, ballet dancers go to class every day, or in the singing realm, or if you play violin, you’re going to have a coach, you’re going to have a teacher for your entire career. I’ve heard Yo-Yo Ma talk about this, one of the greatest cellists of all time, still taking classes. And that’s because you can’t hear your own voice in playing. Obviously, your ear is trained over time to be a nuanced, incredible machine to hear, but it’s impossible to get outside of your own self and see what it’s like in the world. And that’s how it’s impacting or hitting the reader. And that’s what a coach provides for a writer. I literally can’t imagine how anybody would or why body would do it without a coach. And just because you can, now that I just am so immersed in the coaching world, if I run into somebody and they’re struggling and they’re going in circles or it hasn’t worked, or they’ve gotten rejected, or they’ve written and written and written and put their book in a drawer, all those things, I just think it doesn’t have to be that way.
Kat
Yeah, it’s difficult. You put together a program, you have a nonfiction side and you have a fiction side, which I think is amazing. So I finished the fiction side, but I’m doing the nonfiction because a friend came to me with his manuscript and I didn’t know how to help him. But I did know, probably like many agents, this isn’t it. This is too much childhood. It’s not it. So it’s that gut feeling. And so I sent him to find a coach. But it’s like, if you don’t have somebody who is educated in a certain way, they actually can’t help you. It doesn’t matter how many books they’ve written because they haven’t found that process that you found to actually bring together this step by step process. Because at least I didn’t. I don’t know. Maybe…
Jennie
Well, most writers, when you think about it, it’s obvious. Most writers are learning their own process. That’s what they’re doing. It’s like, how do I write a book? How do I get this done? How do I figure it out? And when we go to listen to those writers talk about their process, I remember once hearing Harlan Coben speak. He’s a very big selling thriller writer. And he was talking about his process. And I can’t remember it precisely. It was a long time ago, but I remember very clearly my reaction. He said something like, And then at a certain point, I just sit down and I write 50 pages a day. And everyone in the audience was like, what? That’s superhuman. That’s crazy sauce. What is that? And you all walk out of there going, oh, I must not be doing this right because I don’t write 50 pages a day. And for me, as the developer of this system, that is not the important piece. The important piece is where in the process did he do that generative work? What did he do before he could write those 50 pages? What did he do with those 50 pages? Because that’s the part of the process when I said every writer has to hit certain milestones. Every writer has to get the words on the page. And however you do that is how you do that. But for the coach, the important part is how is the writer getting the words on the page, over what period of time. At what point are they sharing them with you? What are they looking for? I once worked with a… he was a Wall Street Journal reporter. He was writing a book and I helped him with the blueprint. We hashed out what it was going to be and he wanted to just put his head down and write. And he did not want to turn pages in. He just wanted to get it done. But he said, I want you to know that I’m doing it. I want that accountability. So we made a spreadsheet that every day, it was a Google Doc, every day he would write down how many words he wrote, and I had a column and I would literally put a check in the column. That was my whole job. My whole job was just, I see you doing this. I see that you’re making progress. I’m holding you accountable. And that was what I did. And it worked for him. So that’s what I mean by there’s a part of the process that’s unique to a writer. But for the coach, seeing them make progress is what we need to do. That has to happen. So my processes and systems came out of thinking not of my own process as a writer, but how do I help these other people to do this thing in a way that is helpful and efficient and makes them a better writer?
Kat
Yes. And what I really like about the system for both nonfiction and fiction is how much thinking you push the writer to do. Because I do think the one theory out there all the time, we can NaNoWriMo’s great in some ways, but really just ticking the box of the 2,000 words a day, if they’re not 2,000 words that contribute to an actual story, they don’t do anything. They don’t take you anywhere. You’re going to end up throwing them away. And I don’t know how many writers I’ve heard say, yeah, I’ve never finished that story, that I was just so intent on putting words down on the page. So it’s a lot. That writer was able to do that because you had gone through the blueprint with them and thought through and thought through, what is this story? What’s the middle, especially because everyone gets stuck in the middle. How do they get to the climax and how do they get to the end? That’s what the genius of this process that you put together is.
Jennie
Well, you’re talking about the blueprint, and it’s interesting because there’s a blueprint for a book which is fiction. There’s a blueprint for a nonfiction book which is nonfiction. And the book I’m currently writing is the Memoir Blueprint. And what’s fascinating for me is I developed this system or process. It’s a 14-step process, and it happens before you write,2 that’s its intention. You work out the story fundamentals before you write. And it’s very different from plotting out a book, a story, or hashing out a table of contents. It’s a 360 look at how the story is going to function in the world. And as far as I know, it’s the only system that does that. All the other Story Grid and Save the Cat, and even Lisa’s Wired for Story, all great systems. I love them all. My writers have used them all. They’re all great. But none of them ask these foundational questions about story. And the longer I work with the blueprint and see coaches working with their writers of the blueprint, the more convinced I am of its power. And I used to be softer about it. This would be a good place to start. This would be a good idea. This is how we could get into it. And the longer I do it, the fiercer I get. If you don’t do this, you’re just wasting time. And NaNoWriMo, I love NaNoWriMo’s spirit. I love the energy of everybody doing a thing together and challenging themselves. There’s so much about it that’s lovely and great. But anybody who does that without doing some sort of blueprint for their book before they do it is actually just wasting a lot of time. A lot of time and a lot of words and a lot of energy not going anywhere. I know a lot of pros, meaning authors who make their living writing, who use NaNoWriMo to draft fast draft books, but they spend the three months beforehand getting ready to do that.
Kat
Yeah. And it’s interesting because the indie world or the writing world is figuring that out because now you have Preptober, right? So now we’re prepping our book. But really, again, it’s more than just plotting because I came across plotting because for one book, I decided it needed to be actually two books. I really wanted to explore two different characters. And so I pulled one character and what I realized is, I don’t know that much about this character because the other person was the main character. And so now I need to find out this character and what is his story and am I really going to do this? And I looked at plotting because I got very frustrated because he became very annoying as a character. So I looked at plotting and I thought, well, that’s great. If you know the points, if it’s Star Wars, everyone always uses Star Wars, and I know that they have to go fight, but I don’t know what he’s doing. So what am I going to plot? And I do like Lisa Cron’s book but still, and even Story Genius, I still got frustrated of like, okay, but I need to, even for the story cards, okay, I could make up a story card, but that doesn’t help me make a scene that’s worth keeping in the book. I just need it. And so when I found you, I was like, finally. It really… I took it. We talked about why people would want to coach, but why would you want to become a coach? I took the course primarily for myself because I had these questions of how does story work? And I kept asking people that I really admire, what is the difference between a scene that I see in my head and an anecdote in a story? What is that? What makes the whole story, beginning, middle, and end, is what I got a lot of times, or whatever, the climax and a premise, and it’s like, oh, okay. But your blueprint is actually what the story is. It is looking at the 360. It is seeing everything and then having an ending to it.
Jennie
Yeah, right. Having it go where it needs to go. It’s stepping out of the story itself and looking at how is that story going to function? What is its form and function? And asking those questions separate from the writing, which is a thing that really got hammered home to me by that book, Rachel Aaron’s 2000 to 10,000 is a tiny little self-published book that I just love because she’s a writer who examined her own process. And what she was looking for was, how can I write more words in a single session? So that’s the 2000 to 10,000. But what she does is she analyzes her productivity based on where she’s writing, what she’s done beforehand, and her conclusion, how she came to be able to go in a single session from writing 2,000 words to 10,000 words is separating out the thinking from the doing. So if you spend the time thinking, why is this scene here? How is it going to function in the whole? What is the whole? All those questions, then you can write much more in any given session. And I just love that concept. And it’s not only about efficiency, although working with a coach and doing that thinking and strategizing definitely makes you a more efficient writer.
Jennie
But I think it’s also about confidence, knowing that you can do this, knowing. Again, I talked about that safe space to fail, that collaborative process, being less alone. There’s so many things about working with a coach that help you as a writer. But what you’re talking about is if I study these systems that a book coach uses, can I help my own self? And I, to be perfectly honest, never thought about that. When I created the program for coaches, I never thought, oh, this would be great for writers. And so many writers have taken it for that reason and found it to be helpful that now I understand that piece of it. And the way that I describe it is it’s like taking yoga teacher training, a 200-hour course or a 300-hours course to deepen your own practice and to deepen your own understanding of yourself in space and breathing and all the things, not necessarily because you want to teach, but because you just want a deeper relationship to your practice. And I’ve come to see that that’s what taking our course can do for a writer who wants a way to understand their work better and have a deeper relationship to it. And I think it’s really cool, especially because it’s not a thing I planned, but I see it now and it makes me really happy.
Kat
That’s cool. But it’s not just write, some of us have taken the course and we’re certified and we become coaches, whether it’s one-on-one or groups or anything like that. For me, it was also a separation between, like you mentioned before, editors out there on the internet that don’t really give any feedback. I mean, we see them all over Instagram and people who read a lot think that suddenly they are editors. And I really wanted a way to differentiate that because I want to give people classes because I want to be able to answer the questions that I had. So that was one reason I wanted to do it. But what are other reasons that people come and want to become a coach that you’ve experienced? Do you have to be a writer to become a book coach?
Jennie
Not at all. I think it’s a very different skill, and I don’t think that being a writer makes you a good book coach. It can, and certainly, if you are a writer that’s doing well in the world and selling your books, that will help you with your marketing, to be sure. But it’s a different skill. The reasons people come, I find these reasons so fascinating. Some of the reasons are negative. They’re running from something. So by that, I mean, we have a lot of former teachers and former professors who really just want to teach and they don’t want all of the politics and demands and the pay from being a teacher or being in academia. And so a lot of them come to it because they’re running from a thing. We do have people who are the editors that you describe where they started helping their friends editing or reading manuscripts, and they realize their businesses are not making the money. They’re taking a lot of time and energy. They’re not doing well running those businesses, and they’re seeking help to run a better business. We’ve increasingly started seeing people like career coaches and in some cases, life coaches because guess what? Everybody wants to write a book. When those folks are helping people try to figure out what they want in their lives or their careers, a lot of people are giving the answer, I always wanted to write, or my dream is to write. And so those coaches are coming and saying, okay, I already coach, I already help people make progress and set goals and all these things. If I can learn how to help them tell a story and do this work, then I could serve them in that way or at least be able to speak to them more formally or in a more organized fashion about that goal. So that’s been an interesting trend. It is cool. And it goes to the idea, there’s some maybe purists out there who would say, Well, that’s ridiculous. Not everybody off the street can be a good book coach. And my contention is actually, I think they can. If they have the right temperament and characteristics and understanding and training, I think they absolutely can. And we’ve seen it become true. So those are some of the reasons we see people coming to the program. And this one makes me sad. The last one makes me a little bit sad, but especially lately. So here we are talking in 2023 and the pandemic is over. But a lot of people come saying they just want a community to be part of that loves what they love as a writer. And they haven’t been able to find that out in the world. And they see what’s happening in our community and people talking about it’s a beautiful community. I mean, you. Probably speak to it better than I can, but I find it to be uplifting and collaborative and mutually beneficial. People are not competitive. They’re really service-minded people. They’re book living people. It’s a great community. When I say it’s sad, what’s sad is I’ve had quite a few people ask, c an I be in your community without going through the certification class and program? I just want to leap over all that and be in your community. I say no, because I think the reason the community is what it is is because everybody has gone through that rigorous program. I don’t want to dilute that by saying, sure, just anybody who wants to pay can be part of this community. It would diminish what it is. And so when I say that it’s sad, I see a lot of loneliness and lack of community for writers and people looking for that. And so that’s a reason they tend to come. Yeah.
Kat
But it is a wonderful community. I’m surprised when I think of it how many people there are in there and there’s never really tension, ever. I’ve never seen it. Maybe you have on the other end, but you see it everywhere else. There’s always something. But I think part of that is the teaching of the program. So you’re right. If they don’t go through the teaching, because you talk a lot about being respectful of the kind of writing that a writer wants to write. This is not your time as a coach to give your opinion on the genre or the style of writing or anything like that. It’s to coach them through the storytelling process of finishing their book. And you even encourage us to find that niche that really excites us to not do whatever, even if we don’t like that genre or whatever, so that we don’t develop a sour attitude, I guess, to it. And I think that is really important and a really clear distinction. You as the book coach are not there to make them change the story or the characters or whatever to your liking. That’s not what this is about. This is about them and their writing and their book.
Jennie
My philosophy has always been that I’m tool agnostic. Although I teach tools and frameworks and I give people those to use, they can use anything they want and they should use anything they want. If they’re trained in another method of writing or story coaching or story structure, and it’s right for the writer, that’s what you do. Or if you come from another industry and you have some framework or process that works in another industry or another realm, and that’s going to help the writer, that’s what you do. I’m thinking right now of Danny Abernathy, one of our coaches, who’s an expert in the enneagram, and she uses that in her coaching. I have no idea what the enneagram is. I mean, I do.
Kat
But not at her level.
Jennie
It is so far from my area of expertise. And it’s not like, oh, why is she using that and not using our program? It’s because it’s a great tool and she’s deploying it effectively and helping writers. And that’s what we all share is the desire to help writers do better work and do their best work. And it’s a pretty cool unifying mission.
Kat
Yes, it is very cool. I’m very happy with it. I’m very pleased. I think Lisa Cron, I’m sure she’s listening, for pointing me to you. So we’ve talked about two things. You can become a book coach through this amazing program, or you can find a book coach. So where do people start for both of those things? And where would you recommend that they go? Well, the easiest.
Jennie
Thing is to go to authoraccelerator.com. On that page, you can choose if you want to hire a book coach or become a book coach. We’re actually about to unveil a searchable coach directory. I’m not quite sure when this podcast will come out, but it’s about a month from when we’re speaking, we’re going to unveil this very cool tool, which is the first time that we will do that. So the experience will be changing shortly for a writer coming to look for a coach, they’ll be able to search for that. And for someone who wants to become a book coach, use the link that Kat gives you on the show notes for this episode because she’ll get credit, which you should get credit for. And if you use that link to sign up to become a coach, then she’ll get credit. But to learn about it, you can go to authoraccelerator.com and say, I want to be a coach. And there’s so much content. There’s success stories. There’s a video series on, I think it’s 12 videos on book coaching that I’ve done. There’s a quiz you can take. There’s all kinds of resources to figure out what is this thing and do I want to be it. But when you’re ready to sign up, go use Kat’s link because I would love for her to get some credit for if you heard it here first.
Kat
Yeah. And you can you guys can always ask me what it was like. And I think it’s a go at your own pace course. I would recommend you even say in the course, set it on your calendar, get it done, keep going through it. And the community is so good that even if you feel slightly intimidated, they’re just so encouraging. So I think I can’t tell that enough. Everyone is just encouraging and you can do it and it’s great. And we help find each other practicum clients and get through the nervousness and practice and all that. So it’s really great. So we will have the links in the show notes for sure. We’ll have the links to both places and to the books that Jennie has mentioned. And thank you so much, Jennie, for coming on and talking to us about author accelerator and your journey to developing it.
Jennie
Well, thank you for having me and thank you for being such an amazing advocate and evangelist for book coaching. I mean, you’re doing beautiful work, your own self, and you’re helping people through this podcast and through your classes and your coaching and all of it. And you’re just a shining light in the universe. And thank you for being that.