30: When should you hire a book coach or editor?

In this episode of For Women Who Write, Mikaela answers one of the most important questions aspiring authors face: When should you hire a book coach or editor?

Through a personal story about assembling furniture without following the instructions, Mikaela shares why having the right guidance from the beginning can save writers time, frustration, and unnecessary revisions. She explains the distinct roles of a book coach and an editor, how they support different stages of the writing journey, and why she believes coaching is most valuable at the start of the process.

In this episode, you'll discover:

• The difference between a book coach and an editor
• Why early support can strengthen your book's foundation
• Common mistakes writers make when trying to navigate the process alone
• The importance of structure, strategy, and accountability
• How to gain clarity and confidence in your book idea before you start writing

Whether you're still exploring a book idea or already working on a manuscript, this episode offers practical insights to help you move forward with greater confidence and purpose.

For more information about Mikaela's one-on-one strategy sessions, check out the links in the show notes.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to For Women Who Write Podcast. I'm Mikayla, a certified writing coach, editor, and self-publishing expert with over a decade of experience, helping women turn their ideas into powerful, best-summoned books. If you felt the call to write, share your story, share your experiences, how you can help other people, then you are in the right place. Here we talk about the real contents of writing and publishing. From finding your voice to structuring a book, from overcoming resistance and imposter syndrome to launching it into the world with confidence. My mission is to show you that becoming a published and best-selling author isn't as possible. It's absolutely within reach. Your story matters, and chances are you're closer to holding your finished book in your hands than you think. Hello, welcome to another episode, you guys. Okay, I am going to start off this podcast with yes, another house analogy. For those of you who have been listening to the podcast and have heard all of my house analogies, you might wonder, does this girl actually think about anything else besides her house? And the answer is yes, I do think about my kids and books, but that's kind of about it. So we've been in our new home for a little over a year, and we are finally starting to get a little bit more settled. We know where we want things to go in our house, we know what's functional, and we're starting to get a good idea of the style that we really like for our space. So being settled for us means buying a ton of furniture. We're big Wayfair and Amazon furniture shoppers. There's like giant box furniture stores around here. I'm in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. There's a thousand of them, but I like online shopping for my furniture, which is really risky business, if you ask me. However, this is how we just roll the dice. And usually it's just like wooden pieces. Our couch, we definitely do big box. Anyway, neither here nor there. So when all these pieces come, they're always in like three giant boxes. And you always have to, you know, open up all the boxes and actually assemble the pieces. They never actually come fully assembled. And every time we open up the boxes, we pull out all these long wooden sections and a cardboard box of screws and nails and tiny wrenches that you're going to somehow use in order to put this whole furniture piece together. And of course, inside that small cardboard box is always a thick book of instructions. So a couple of months ago, I was assembling my absolutely gorgeous desk that I got from Wayfair that I absolutely love and just totally mix the room. But it had exactly 16,000 pieces and steps to it. And so I got a little bored with it. My husband wasn't able to help me at the time. And I had a little bit of extra time. And so I thought, you know what? I'm just going to make this whole thing myself. But after step, you know, 15,000, I was getting a little bored. And so I just kind of abandoned the instructions. I was tired of like hunched over these instructions, figuring out how to do it. And so I just kind of threw it to the side. I had been doing enough of these steps. I knew how all the pieces went together, right? So I just tossed it aside and just started screwing things together. Well, I'm guessing you can probably imagine how that actually went. When I started to assemble the drawers and put the drawers inside the cabinets, surprise, surprise, those drawers did not fit. I tried to, like I could put the drawers into the hole, but when I tried to push them close, like they wouldn't all the way close. They would just like kind of start to slowly come out and then like fall down, which obviously is not going to work. And when I sat there and I looked at the drawers, I couldn't for the life of me figure out what went wrong. I tried to look at it, tried to see, look, maybe if I tried this screw, or maybe I should try a different screw. And so I went and looked at all of the, you know, thousands of screws that are sitting in front of me. And I couldn't figure out which one I needed to. And that's when I realized that I needed the instructions. Even though I was a little bit bored with the instructions, I needed to have them. Without them, I was now going to have to do even more work now to disassemble the drawers, read the instructions, and then assemble them all over again. I ended up slowing down the amount of time to make my desk than if I had just stuck to the instructions. Now, why am I telling you this story? Well, as you might have guessed, writing a book is a lot like assembling a desk. You have all of these ideas and pieces and stories and client testimonials and points that you want to make in your book. But if you ignore the instructions, if you ignore the step-by-step process that somebody who's already done this before has given to you and just try to do it all on your own, chances are you are going to end up doing even more work in the end to make it a functional, readable book that builds your business, builds your brand, and that sells well. So the big question that we are answering today is when should you hire a book coach and or an editor? It's a really big question. And it's something that I think a lot of people are asking, just kind of in roundabout ways. But the idea of a book coach is a relatively new term. So a lot of people aren't even aware that a book coach exists. But when they do hear of one, they're like, oh, well, when should I hire one? Is that like at the end of the process or like to help me publish? Or what does a book coach even do? And when should I hire one? And we're going to answer that question today. But I'm just going to go ahead and cut straight to the chase and just go ahead and give you the answer. My belief is that you yes, need to hire one, non-negotiable, and to hire one as soon as you take everything out of the box. As early as you do in the process of assembling furniture, that you do the instructions is when you also need to hire a book coach in the process of writing your book. Now, let me first clarify what I mean by these definitions of a book coach and an editor because they're very different terms and they have very different jobs. And again, book coaching is a relatively new idea. It is definitely not something offered in your traditional college degrees. And it's not a regulated industry by any means. And so you can just call yourself a book coach, but do very different things than other book coaches. So I'm going to give you my definition and the way that I have structured my business. And it's, I would say, pretty common to most other book coaches, but just to kind of help you have an idea of what even is a book coach in the first place. So a book coach coaches you through the overall process of the book. They can help you with lots of different things. They can help you with the big picture content of your book. They can help you know how to publish and how to navigate each one of your publishing paths. They can help you stay accountable to the process because we all know writing a book is a marathon. So staying accountable to see it to the end. They can help you work through mindset struggles, things that are getting in your way, helping you with time management, all of those sorts of things. A book coach is really there to coach the writer herself. And this is how I see coaching. This is a big part of coaching for me, is that I definitely want to get to know my writers well so that I can coach them well. It's why, at least for now, I've really focused my business on being one-on-one because I really want to get to know my writers well. I really want to be able to coach them through the process and not try to squeeze them through a generic course or a generic, you know, like coaching program because it doesn't always fit for everybody. And that's where I think coaching can just thrive, is when you really get to know your people so that then you can coach them specifically through the process. Now, an editor usually, usually starts to get a little bit more granular. They work exclusively in your content. They sharpen your sentences, help with logical flow of thought, they make sure things are organized, and they likely don't have spaces for you to process how you want to publish or why you can't seem to get anything written. They're really primarily just in your content. And in some cases, depending on how you publish, you may never even have a face-to-face with your editor. In fact, I worked for a hybrid publishing company years ago. And one of the big draws that they gave to us as editors was that you would never have to work with the writer. You never had to have any communication with the writer. So come work with us. We'll handle the writer for you. And I kind of hated that because when I was editing people's manuscripts with that company, writers would come back and be like, Well, I'm really confused. Why was this edit made? This is not what I wanted. This is not my voice. And there was no trust established. And so the editing relationship really deteriorated. And because I didn't understand the writer very well, I wasn't able to edit with her voice. I wasn't able to edit with her message and her reader in it. It was a very clinical process. And I kind of hated it and I did not stay at that company for very long because of that reason. And so this is where I personally see a marriage between book coaching and editing. I think that there is this interesting intersection between the two of them. And a lot of my offers and processes and programs is that intersection of both. We want to coach you as the writer and make your content really, really excellent. So I started out as an editor. I was, you know, like I said, I was just in manuscripts, but I wanted to get out from behind the screen. I wanted to get out from exclusively behind the manuscript. And I wanted to help my writers with some big picture topics, some big picture ideas, how they should publish and what is, you know, the transformation of their book and how are they going to get this done when they had so many other things on their plates? And so that's why I added book coaching onto editing and really married the two together. And for me, I have found that the whole project works out best when I can help writers at the beginning of their project all the way until it's time to publish. And at some points, we like deep dive into your content. Other times we work on creating a schedule that works for you. But we're really just, I get to be your book coach and your editor because I really honestly believe that that's the way it's supposed to be. It's how editors used to be. Like back in the day with Hemingway and all of these other big-time authors, they had an editor who was also a coach to them who helped them figure out what their next step was as a writer and uh, you know, what book idea to pursue and what idea not to pursue for their career, but then also helped them make their books even better. Now, that's just the way that I work. It's not to say that you can't worker than the editor after you've written it, of course, and maybe you don't want a ton of interaction with your editor. And that's totally fine. Great, go for it. There's tons of book coaches and editors who would work with you, you know, after you've written your book. But I see this relationship as much more long term to help you really go where you want to go and really do this incredibly, incredibly well. So, what do I mean when I say the beginning of the process? You know, that's kind of a vague term. So, what do I mean by that? When you have an idea for a book and you start playing around with it, that's when you should start talking to a book coach. If you have a few pages in a Google Doc or even like a chapter or two written, that's a great time to talk to a book coach. That's when you're starting to pull out all of the wooden pieces of your furniture from the box and pulling out the instructions. I've also found that some writers want to start writing on their own and just see how it goes. And I totally, totally respect that. But often what happens is they'll get a few chapters in and then they realize that they need help. And that's also a good time too. Sometimes it's just not great to force your way through writing your book. Because just like writing, assembling a desk, if you try to force the pieces together, what if they don't fit right? What if you have to go back and do the work all over again? What if you assemble the desk and you try to use it and then it has a very wobbly leg? What if you publish a book and you try to sell it and you're starting to see it has lots of holes or you're getting some reviews from people saying that it's confusing and that they never actually finished it? You don't want that for something that's a long-term process, that's something that you are going to use as an asset for your business or for your brand for a really long time. You want this to be something that you can rely on, that you can direct people to for years. And if you want something that is long-standing like that, then you need to do the upfront work. It can't just be something that you pull up on Claude or ChatGPT to help you or to actually write it for you. And I'm not against, you know, using AI in some capacity. I think it needs to have quite a few limits on it. And that's a whole different conversation for a different podcast. But you can use it. I just don't use it to write your book. And definitely don't use it to structure your book because there are so many pieces at play that Chat GPT or Claude just don't understand. And there's the human element. This is something we talk about all the time with AI. There's the human element of writing a book as well, because structure is incredibly important. Having the outline, having the instructions obviously is very important. But there are times where you break some of that structure if it doesn't make sense, if there's a point that you need to make, and it's way more important than sticking to structure. And that's a lot of what we do in coaching is yes, we lay structure on top of it, and then we know when we can break the rules. So I recommend that you start as early as you possibly can. Sometimes you might find that the book idea kind of fizzles. And so you start working with a coach. This has happened honestly to me personally as a writer that I had an idea. I started working on it and it kind of fizzled, and it's not exactly what I thought it would be. That happens. That's okay. It's not a big deal. It doesn't mean that I'm not a good writer. It doesn't mean that you're not a good writer. It just means that you need to start working your idea. Uh, Marie Forlio said this years ago, maybe decades ago, when I was first starting in my entrepreneurship journey, and she said, clarity comes with engagement. And it was the kick in the pants that I needed. That if I needed, if I had an idea but wasn't sure if it was good or not, I was not going to just sit and brew on whether or not it was good. I was going to go out and do something about it and determine whether or not it was a good idea. The only way I would have clarity was if I went and did something about it. And that's what strategy sessions are really there for. Strategy sessions are taking the place for workshops. So if you've heard me talk about workshops for the last few podcast episodes, we've shifted over the summer and we're gonna test it out over the summer and just do strategy sessions. And these are one-on-one, one-hour calls where you and I just strategize your book idea. We go through five really important pieces all about your book idea and test them out. See, hey, do you know your reader? Do you know your transformation? Do you know where you want your book to sit on the bookshelves? When you hammer out all of these questions and have me there to help you soundboard it and see, like this works, we may need to work on this a little bit more. When we have all of that in place, it just gives you way more confidence and way more content to work with when it actually comes time to write your outline and really create that structure. And so the strategy sessions is really kind of like pulling out the instruction book a little bit and saying, hey, is this like do I want to create this furniture piece? Let me visualize this furniture piece in this space and see if this is something that I think I really want. And if it is, then we open up the instruction book and we get started with creating an outline to help you write that book. So if you want to explore your book idea, a strategy session is absolutely where it's at. This is where you and I, again, we just sit and strategize and uh talk it all out. So if you are interested in that, you can get more information in the podcast show notes. I hope this is really helpful for you to figure out when you should hire a book coach and when should you hire an editor. Hire a book coach first. A book coach is really there to help you see big picture, what's most important, and help you create a game plan. And then once you have your rough draft, that's when you can start to engage an editor to get way more granular into your piece and help you start to make sure the sentences flow well, make sure that the stories are in the right places, and all of those types of questions. So I hope this is really helpful for you, and I'll see you on another episode.