“Getting Certified as a Book Coach”
Guest: Kathy Otten
Host: Wayne Jones
Wayne 0:01
Hi, I’m Wayne Jones. Welcome to Writing & Editing, the podcast for people who like words and language. Writers, editors, readers and listeners. All genres, all formats. My guest today is Kathy Otten. Kathy has published fiction in many forms and genres and has won awards for her writing. She teaches writing as well and has been a freelance editor for a few years. I asked her to come on the podcast to talk about not only being a book coach, but also the certification process for that which she completed last year. This is “Getting Certified as a Book Coach,” episode 210 of the podcast. Hi Kathy. Welcome to the podcast and thanks for taking the time to do this.
Kathy 0:49
Oh, hi. Thanks for having me.
Wayne 0:51
It’s a pleasure and you will be satisfied that we’ll be talking about things that I’ve never talked about in the previous 200 episodes of this podcast! So that’s good. So it’s very good that we’ll get new information here. Before we get started, though, we’ll be talking about book coaching and the certification of that. I wanted to give you an opportunity to just say, I mean–that’s just a slice of what you do–could tell me what some of your other activities are. Listeners, I think, would be interested.
Kathy 1:25
I’m a writer, so I started out writing. My first short story was published in about 2006, and that happened because I joined Pennwriters, which is an organization that supports writers in all aspects of genre and writing. And so they helped a lot with critique groups and conferences, etc. And once I started writing and going to conferences and helping people, they’d say, Can you look at my story? What do you think? That sort of thing.
It morphed into being asked to present a workshop at a mini conference on a certain topic. So that has expanded to a lot of online workshops and some in-person workshops through conferences and mini conferences and stuff like that. And I was reading an email on Jane Friedman’s email. Yes. And so she sends out like biweekly newsletters and there was an ad in there for Author Accelerator which said, Read books and get paid. And I’m like, I do that all the time, but I don’t get paid because I help people read their books. So I took the call, I read up on it and saved up my money and took the course and became a certified book coach. So I do book coaching and editing and stuff like that on the side and in between. I write and do workshops.
Wayne 3:14
And the, if I can say the certification, as you say, you were sort of always already doing coaching to a certain extent, but I want to ask whether the coaching instruction was valuable, whether the certification process was such that you learned things that you weren’t doing when you were simply giving people advice?
Kathy 3:42
Definitely. It’s about the people, not the work so much. When you’re coaching somebody, it’s when I would like, I’m looking at the work. And I’m not saying you don’t do the work when you coach, but it was always like, Okay, this needs a fix, this needs a fix, this needs fixing. So saying to the author, Why did you choose to do it this way? Why did you choose to make this character your primary character? Where are you trying to go with this scene? What are you trying to do? It’s more about what the author’s goals are and how to help them reach those goals.
Wayne 4:19
And so sorry, go ahead.
Kathy 4:22
Yes, I was going to say, so if you see that it’s going off
the rails, like the author started out this way with a certain tone or style,
and then it started to go off or the character drifted off of their goal, you
can say, Why did you do that? Do you think that that’s where you want to go?
Do we need to go backward and fix it, or do we need to fix where we are and
head back to where we were? And I mean, it’s like, What were you trying
to do? Why did you do that? So it’s more about the author and why the
author chose what they chose instead of looking at the work and saying, Well,
it went off the rails here, fix this and that.
Wayne 5:02
Does the other scenario play out as well? Because I also thought, perhaps incorrectly, that coaching would also involve, say, a situation where someone has got an outline, maybe a few chapters written and that that’s what you’d be working with. You’d say–you know, really stepping back because you wouldn’t have any work in front of you, any rating. I guess, two things. Is that something you do and is that part of what one normally thinks is coaching as well, where you’re working with a manuscript that’s actually very much not completed?
Kathy 5:41
Yeah, that’s kind of like the outlining process or a blueprint for your story. And I do all that for people, because somebody will say, Okay, I have this great idea for story, but I know what to do. I don’t know how to do it. You know, I have these characters and I want them to do this. I don’t know how to do it. So we can go through the whole outline process. Now, every coach has different skills. Every coach has a thing that they do best, and some coaches don’t like to do that.
Initial construction is to structure character arcs. They don’t like to do that. They’d rather work with a completed piece and do the query and editing stuff on that end. Personally, I don’t mind. I like helping people get started because I got so much help back when I wanted to start. Yeah, so I like to do that. So I offer the blueprint outlining kind of work as a separate package and then we can do, you know, let’s go through and create a rough draft. We’ll start at the beginning and go right through the rough draft. And you have something when you’re done. What if it’s kind of like, What do you need? What are you looking for in a coach? How can I help you achieve that?
Wayne 7:03
And I guess a couple of questions that come out of that. One is that do you ever have clients where once you’re done with the unloading, they say, Thanks very much for your work, send me an invoice, I’ll pay that. And then they go on their own. That’s one question. And the other one was one that I’ve forgotten. now. Yes, the other one is that it sounds like, and I think I’m stating the obvious here, that a lot of coaching involves—or the skills of coaching are not so much, you know, picking out details like. Not so much copy editing skills, but having to do with, based on your experience in writing, generally identifying things that might be me missing or whatever in the macro sense and working with people. So you have to have good people skills in order to do this. Does that make any sense, what I said?
Kathy 8:00
Yeah. If somebody, if somebody comes to me and they say, I want to complete an outline, I really want your help to develop this outline. And so I have something, a structure, a foundation to work with, and I’ll work on my own after that. That’s fine. If this is your goal and this is what I can help you with, we’ll, you know, do the package or whatever. And when it’s finished, you know, fine. And if you need help for something else, give me a call. So, yeah, you’re free to do that.
If somebody wants to continue, we can do that too. So it’s sort of each individual’s needs. And if I can meet that need, it’s like I might not do real well with sci-fi kind of books because I don’t understand that world. I don’t understand the reader expectations for what they look for in a sci-fi because I don’t read it, and so I would recommend somebody else. Yeah, so it’s about understanding your own limitations, your own skill set, and being able to offer that. Now, I forgot the other part of your question.
Wayne 9:15
Well, I was asking about whether just basically making a comment about people skills rather than copy editing skills.
Kathy 9:28
It’s both. Yeah. Because if you don’t understand structure and you don’t understand the fundamentals of putting a book together and understand character and understand pacing and those fundamental aspects of writing craft—you need to understand that, you need that base and then you have to mix it in with people skills. You know, everybody. It’s like, okay, we might have a goal that we’re working on. You’re going to give me 20 pages in two weeks or something like that. Whatever your goal is and something happens and you can’t do it. You know, there’s a death in the family. Someone gets sick. It’s about being able to say, Okay, we’re just going to put this on hold for a couple of weeks and you can get your groove back. It’s like when my brother passed away, I didn’t write at all because it was just really hard. So the people, the person, the author that you’re working with has to encompass that person too.
They might have their own skill set, they might be really good at character and bad dialogue. So we might work more on dialogue than character building. You know, everybody’s different. So there’s no one thing that we’re doing. I mean, everything kind of, it’s about being able to recognize a person, their goals, and try to figure out how to make that work for them so they can have their goal achieved, their bucket list or whatever it is they want to do.
Wayne 11:08
Yeah, everyone is unique, to state the obvious. And the other one is that everyone has another life to live. That means no one spends 100% of their day writing. If they do, they should stop because you need to balance that. Right? So I understand what you’re saying there. I wanted move a little bit into the certification process. And you mentioned, I believe it’s called Author Accelerator, is that right?
Kathy 11:37
Yes.
Wayne 11:37
Yes. And I’ve heard of that group before. And I’ve seen their website and looked at it and everything. I’m not a certified coach. And in fact, I’ve not done a lot of what you might even characterize as coaching writing, although it sounds very appealing from what you’re saying. So is the coaching certification process. Is it an online module thing or is it people? Is it webinars where ten other aspiring coaches are looking for their certification, or how does it work?
Kathy 12:14
Well, basically, book coaching is a new industry with so many people having moved, you know, when early 2000 things started going more independent publishing. So more and more people want to put their best work out there. And so they go online looking for help.
Wayne 12:34
From.
Kathy 12:36
Sorry.
Wayne 12:37
I hope, you know.
Kathy 12:38
I would talk in the backyard.
Wayne 12:41
I hope that’s a dog and not a disgruntled client. That’s all I want.
Kathy 12:45
It’s my German shepherd. There’s a woodchuck lives up in the woods and he comes out in the grass and he sees that darn thing and goes ballistic. Yeah, he’s outside now.
Wayne 12:57
I have lots of distractions, and I’m editing too, so no worries.
Kathy 13:02
Oh, the accelerator. So the program was initially designed by Jennie Nash because she wanted to say, Okay, let’s have an industry standard because anybody can hang up a shingle and say, I’m a book coach. Now, that’s not to say that there’s people out there that didn’t go through the program—our book coaches are very good at what they do. But there’s the other end of the spectrum. The people, they write books and they didn’t do very good and they think they’re a book coach or whatever. So there’s no way for someone new coming in to say, I need help. Who do I go to? How do I know if this person is good? How do I know if this person is good? So she thought, well, we’ll just kind of create an industry standard. So if people go and get a coach that’s certified to offer Accelerator, they know that that coach had to go through certain trainings, which did include a lot of reading books, a lot. There were some webinars too, videos to watch. There were there was a lot of coursework. There were, you know, like manuscripts and how to fix this and that. So there was the writing aspect, the craft elements to learn that. And then there was all the business side. How do you serve your business? How do you do this? The website, what do you need? What stuff is there to help about how to deal with people, for people skills. There was a whole bunch of work on that, you know, what do you do if, you know, how do you say no to a client? How do you help a client that’s going through a tough time, you know, and balancing helping the client without turning into a therapist? There was a lot to it. And then when we were finished with all that training, then there were three practical things that we had to do with a client and work through those and turn that the Zoom call, everything that went with it, the editing, line editing, the coaching part. We turned all that in for three different practicums and then—
Wayne 15:13
Just let me step in there. When you say turn it in, you mean it’s sort of like, was your homework or your thesis for the certification that you gave to the instructors so that they could judge whether you would you would incorporated what they taught you?
Kathy 15:29
Exactly. So like the first practicum was, you know, you find a client, a volunteer that wants to throw out their work and you work on a blueprint and outline, and then you send back your corrections, your thoughts, how do you want to handle it, you know, and then you have a Zoom call and that package is like one practicum. Then there’s another one where you go through an entire novel and do some line editing and some coaching and being able to say, It’s going off the rails here, you know what I mean? And then the third practicum was how to help them find an agent. So it’s about finding comps and how to write a query letter or synopsis, all that stuff. So, and they all incorporated Zoom calls. So you had all the, the documents, the Word documents, the back-and-forth stuff, and Zoom calls, and you send it all in and then it takes them about you know, it takes considerable time to review all of that. And it’s like you said, you’re looking at not the work of the volunteer. They’re not looking at that. They’re looking at your ability to coach that person.
Wayne 16:38
Yes, of course. Yep, that’s right.
Kathy 16:39
So it’s about that. So then if you succeed in that, you can become a certified coach. Now you can continue staying with them and paying a fee every year and get access to new materials, new access to support groups, access to lists and referrals. And there’s a lot of stuff that comes or you can just take your I met the criteria. I can say I was certified and then you, well, I don’t think you can use the Accelerator anymore, but you can become, you can hang out your own shingle, which we all do anyway. We’re all independent business owners, basically.
Wayne 17:24
What do you mean? You can’t use Author Accelerator because you haven’t signed on for the year? The year-to-year stuff?
Kathy 17:30
Yeah, the year-to-year stuff. So they want to make sure that you’re still meeting, right? If you’re going to use their name they want to make sure that you’re still meeting the standard.
Wayne 17:49
It’s sort of like reminds me of accreditation in universities, that kind of thing. Right. That occasionally they visit to see whether you’re still up to snuff. So on your website or wherever say you simply say I’m a certified book coach, but you can’t mention or you don’t mention where the certification came from.
Kathy 18:18
I do get certified to offer Accelerator or I’m using their blueprint diagram package to help you.
Wayne 18:27
Yeah.
Kathy 18:29
We are. You know, once you’re certified and you pay the fee every year you’re active, you have access to all the materials, you can use them to teach classes and get paid. You can, you have access to all that stuff. But if you don’t, you can’t use their name, their products there. So that’s perfectly fine if that’s what you want to do. It’s not going to mean you have to stay with them, because we’re all independent. We have set up our own businesses, our own pricing structure, our own—
Wayne 19:00
So—and sorry, just to cut in there, probably from the point of view of the prospective client, once they see that you’re certified, they probably won’t care much whether it’s Author Accelerator or someone else. The certification gives you kind of a leg up, as it were, from someone who’s not certified or could, but probably people won’t, a prospective client won’t be saying, Well, were you certified with x, x, x or y, y y? And which leads me to my next question, by the way, which is, our there Author Accelerators in town or are there other places?
Kathy 19:40
I’m assuming there are. It’s a new industry. I don’t know for sure because I haven’t really explored it. Like I said, I found this on Jane Friedman’s newsletter and I kind of went from there and I really liked what they were talking about and how they were talking about helping people. And I’m like, Okay, I like to do that because I’m doing it now.
Wayne 20:00
Yeah.
Kathy 20:02
So that’s why I took the course. I don’t know if there’s other courses out there that have a certification attached to it. So if you said you were certified, I don’t know. It doesn’t really have any—there’s no weight behind it. It’s just a name. It’s like saying, I’m a bestselling author. Well, what did you mean? Do you mean you got on Amazon’s bestseller list for sci-fi fantasy for two days? Or do you mean you had New York Times doing it? So I mean, so you can say bestselling and you can do the same thing with certified. I’m a certified coach, but if you don’t have the credential behind it, then there’s no standard.
Wayne 20:41
On the other hand, one could imagine the opposite, which is that since, as you say, coaching is kind of a burgeoning thing within, if you can put it in the broad editing sphere, no one could imagine that there’s going to be other places apart from other Accelerators who were noticing this and saying, Hey, we can certify as well. It’s not as if Author Accelerator, and I’m not denigrating Author Accelerator at all. But it’s not as if they have a monopoly on this teaching this line of work.
Kathy 21:14
No, but they’re trying to set the standard for others, to set the bar kind of, right? So if you were going to start your own coaching business and you looked at Author Accelerator, you say, Hmm, maybe I need to do this, this and this, because that’s what they’re doing. I don’t know. It’s just, it’s hypothetical. I don’t know.
Wayne 21:33
Yeah. No, it sort of like reminds me a little bit about the whole grand thing of self-publishing where, I don’t know, just name a number of years, three years ago, there were a couple of agencies around that could help you do that, and now there’s quite a few of them. And they run the whole range from extremely adept to outright scams. And you have to be actually very careful who you get, who you get to help to self-publish your book. So one can imagine the similar sort of thing with book coach. Yeah, at least I could. Anyway, I may be completely off base here speculating that that’s true. If there’s a thing that needs to be done and others see that, let’s say in this case, Author Accelerator is making a business out of it, someone else will be anxious to be a competitor.
Kathy 22:25
Probably. It’s the way free market works, right? Yeah. I just it’s funny you say about the scams and stuff. I just, Jane Friedman has these courses like once a month that are free.
Wayne 22:36
Yeah.
Kathy 22:37
And I just took hers on Sunday about how to spot scammers in the self-publishing industry or in the, you know, I’ll help you edit your book or I’ll help you do that. And she has a whole list of what to look for
to help people, you know, differentiate between the multitude of choices out there.
Wayne 22:59
And by the way, I’m just going to take a little side note and say Kathy has referred several times to Jane Friedman, and I’m also a gigantic fan of hers because she’s, I consider her well, I even heard her called this, the kind of the guru of publishing. She’s not only a super down-to-earth person, but she knows kind of everything and she used to work in traditional publishing. She had very senior executive positions and now she’s completely independently employed. So she has newsletters, she offers webinars, she has a blog site where she, generally speaking, solicits contributions from others to contribute to it. She’s involved in a lot of things and has a stellar reputation for pretty much anything she does. So that’s who Jane Friedman is. If you haven’t, she’s got a free newsletter actually, she puts out and she has a paid newsletter as well. If you haven’t subscribed and if you’re interested in publishing and all things about that, at least subscribe to the free one. Forget which one is one called Electric Speed.
Kathy 24:11
I get Electric Speed.
Wayne 24:13
So yeah, one of them is one of them is free and the other one which is paid is well worth it. And I subscribe to both of those and she’s, yeah, she’s, she’s to be trusted and I would also, I agree with you: something that she said, I would take it as not just some other person on the internet recommending it. She’s got the credentials to give her credibility.
Kathy 24:45
Yeah. And the whole process of being a writer or coach or an editor or whatever, you are in the industry, is always changing. It’s always changing. So you need to stay on top of it. And she does have great resources to stay on top of it. The changes in publishing and the whole industry as a whole. Yeah.
Wayne 25:07
So can I ask just, to finish off the frankly, our interview, but also the certification thing. So you’ve gotten certified and you’ve gotten clients based on that with whom you’ve used your skills, that you learned to coach them and make them or have them produce books and finish off their books perhaps, and perhaps even get them published. I was a little unclear whether you’ve subscribed to Author Accelerator or not, or whether you simply have taken the certification and you work with that?
Kathy 25:49
No, I’m staying with them because they offer a lot of support. Oh, so if you’re having a problem with how to handle an issue or you’re struggling with your business or you’re struggling and you just need to vent about this client, you know. Or, how do I do … what do I do with this problem? You’ve got this huge support group. Plus there’s always articles and videos and things that are recommended to stay on top of the industry changes. There’s also referral lists. So if I run across somebody who really wants help but they want to write a memoir and I don’t do memoir, or I have a list of go-to people that I can recommend to them and I know they’re going to get somebody who hit that same bar. So those resources are invaluable, even if it’s just, I have a bad day and I’m overwhelmed and I don’t know, you know. I hope you have a go to person that understands where you’re at. So there’s the whole support network there, plus all of the updates and changes and new stuff that we can work with, new outlines or new craft tools, you know what I mean? So all that’s accessible if you stay with Author Accelerator, which I find invaluable. If you can’t do that for whatever reason, you’re not obligated to, but you can’t, you can no longer say you’re an Author Accelerator book coach.
Wayne 27:28
You could say, Can you say that, though, that you’re a certified book coach?
Kathy 27:32
I don’t think you can use the word certified. I think you just have to say that you’re a book coach. I’m not positive about that. I’m pretty sure that somebody said that to me once.
Wayne 27:46
Yeah.
Kathy 27:47
Because you can’t throw their name out there anymore.
Wayne 27:50
No, but I’m sorry to interrupt, but I was just thinking, at one point you were certified, right? You were certified and we’re finished. Yeah. And I don’t want to have this argument with you. Basically, it’s something like that we can check on line kind of thing. But that’s interesting. If that’s the case that you—
Kathy 28:09
Because I’m, don’t quote me. I just know that you can’t say you’re certified off the Accelerator. You’d have to take—if I have their materials and I want to use them to teach a class on writing a blueprint, I cannot do that anymore because I can’t use their materials. I can’t say, Hey, go away—sorry, I tried putting them in a crate once, but I made a worse.
Wayne 28:38
Interest thing, that that’s really interesting. That’s
something where I can see where, for example, a competitor might jump in and
say, Well, we all will certify you. And part of the certification process
means that because you’ve taken our courses, you’re a member for life and you
always have access and you can always say that we certified you.
Kathy 29:02
So yeah, I suppose. Yeah, I see. I don’t know how you would do that because if you, you couldn’t use Author Accelerator. Maybe you’d have to say you’re—it’s like that thing I just said about I’m a bestselling author. What does that mean? What does certified mean? So you still need that qualifier as to where you were certified. So if you were certified through X, Y University, then you would say, I’m certified through X, Y University. You wouldn’t just say certified.
Wayne 29:34
Yeah. I guess the interesting thing is, for example, I have a, you know, a master’s degree from a certain university just because I haven’t kept up with whatever the subject matter is or might not have or whatever—I still have that master’s degree and I can certainly cite that I have it. I’m not sure if that’s a good analogy. Anyway, I don’t want to end up quibbling about that because we can probably check it online and see what it is. I wanted to thank you for explaining a lot of this because I had a vague idea what coaching was and I had an even vaguer idea about what the certification process was. I appreciate your clarifying it and it’s probably something I’ll follow up on and see what see what the competition looks like, whether Author Accelerator is the only one out there or whether there are others.
Kathy 30:26
I’ve never actually taken the time to explore it. I know there are a lot of people throwing out stuff that say, We guarantee you a bestseller or We guarantee you this or that. So a little warning sign when you see that: just back up. But it’s kind of like having a golf pro or a gym coach, you know, a coach at the fitness centre or something like that, they’re going to tailor to your needs. So it’s about what do you want as an author? What are you looking for? For help? And then we’ll try to help you get to that goal.
Wayne 30:58
Thanks very much and I appreciate you taking the time. Good luck with your with your coaching.
Kathy 31:03
Thank you so much for having me.
Wayne 31:06
And that’s all for today. Thanks for listening. Check out the show notes for links. My co-host on the next episode is Jennia D’Lima. And we’ll have the third in our Editing Essentials project. This time we’re talking proofreading. That’s on Thursday. Please join us.