Are You THAT Person in Your Book Club? You May Be a Perfect Candidate to be a Book Coach
There are a lot of people who love their book club because it is a chance to get together with like-minded people to have a lively conversation and great snacks. The book itself? These folks can often take it or leave it. But there are other book club members who LIVE for the book -- who read it, dog-ear it, cover it with Post-It Notes, and plan out their arguments for why it was worthy of top-shelf status, or not. These people would probably make great book coaches.
A book coach is someone who guides a writer and their project while it is still in development, as opposed to an editor who shows up when the work is already done. We give editorial feedback, but we also offer emotional support, industry insights, and we help keep the project on track so the writer can meet their goals and do their best work.
I’m Jennie Nash. I’m the creator of the Book Coach Certification Program at Author Accelerator. I’m a book coach myself, too, and am something of a book coach evangelist. It’s soulful, satisfying, good for the coach (who gets to be their own boss, work at home, and live in the world of stories and ideas all day) and good for the writer (who gets constant support and encouragement and feedback while they write).
You may already be building book coaching skills every month when you show up at book club.
Here are some clues that book coaching could be a great fit for you:
You love all the book picks.
You don’t care what the group chooses to read because you know you’re going to read all the candidates on your own anyway. You sometimes buy the book to read on your e-reader and also in hardback, because you want the best books on your bookshelf, where they will be lifelong companions. A job where you read books all day and get paid for it sounds a bit like heaven.
You mark everything up.
You flag all the good quotes and all the juicy passages and all the parts that were controversial and inspiring. You might use Post-It flags, you might turn down the corner of the pages, you might use the highlight function on your e-reader, but it’s hard for you to read without this level of noticing.
You can’t help but see all the plot holes.
Everyone else is raving about the plot twist in the latest novel but you felt there was no logic for it -- that it was an easy way out for the author. You felt betrayed. You had such a good thing going with the author and in leaving that plot hole, she let you down. This is another way of saying, you feel things that you read deeply. You become invested in the work. It’s personal to you.
You can give evidence for why the ending was garbage
Everyone else just didn’t like it, but you know why it didn’t work. You can trace the thread of character development back to Page 1 and Chapter 13 and Chapter 27 and can show why the ending failed in its mission. Learning how to communicate this evidence to the writer and help them improve their work is a core skill of book coaching.
You sometimes find yourself thinking what an editor would have done to make the book better
You imagine being able to speak with the writer about her intentions and her goals, and having a deep, rich conversation about the execution on the page. In your mind, the author trusts you, respects you, and values your input, and when the book comes out, you are part of the team she thanks in the acknowledgements. This is very much what being a book coach is like.
You love your book club friends but you sometimes wish they cared about the book as much as you do.
You care so very much! You have so many notes and so many ideas, and you have been researching other books from the same author or the same time period -- or from a totally different genre -- that connects to what you have read. You hear stories on NPR and on the podcast you listen to that tie into the topic, and you can’t wait for book club. It frustrates you that everyone else wants to talk about what’s happening with that new restaurant downtown or the World Series or the latest headlines -- because the book awaits! This kind of caring is the foundation of great book coaching.
You sometimes daydream about reading books all day and getting paid for it.
Perhaps you have a job that is book-adjacent. Or you used to have a job (college newspaper? First job out of college?) that was all about books. And during the pandemic when everyone was rethinking everything, you kept thinking that you want to get back to a book-centered world. You want your days to be about stories and ideas, writers and writing. You want to live in the world of books -- and now that you know that book coaching is a thing, you know you can do it. You can’t stop thinking about what it would be like!
If any of these scenarios speaks to you, you’ll likely fit right in at Author Accelerator’s thriving and growing book coaching community. To learn more about our certification program and the skills we teach, visit us here. You can also sign up for our upcoming workshop “Blueprint for a Book Coach: The Working Sessions” to get a glimpse of what coaching is like from a wide variety of certified coaches.