Posts by Jennie Nash
The more writers I guide in my career as a book coach, the more I see the need for writers to embrace key lessons from the world of business. Writing is art, to be sure. It springs from a writer’s imagination and from our very souls, it is brought forth by skill with craft, and is made whole when it encounters an audience of readers. But that art is made within a world of commerce, where books are bought, produced, distributed, and sold through various vendors and mechanism. It’s a business world, and writers need to understand that world in order to succeed within it.
As I have built my own business, and guided writers to build theirs, I have made it a practice to read a lot of business publications and a lot of business books. I have come to love them, and to be inspired by them, and I think they can inspire every writer, whether you are working on historical fiction, YA fantasy, memoir, mystery, of a nonfiction book about yoga or knitting or dog training or writing.
This is a short list of my top business book picks:
In 2009, this business book became a massive bestseller and a go-to for organizations looking to build mission-driven businesses, attract talent that was aligned with that mission, and ensure that they would be around for the long haul. The big idea is that while people buy what you make, and they care about how you make it, the true driver of a long-lasting business is why you do what you do.
I believe that knowing your why can literally be the difference between writing a book that resonates with readers and writing one that falls flat – or that you never finish. My Blueprint for a Book process (the system I use to guide fiction and nonfiction writers, and that I teach in my book coach certification program) literally starts with why. I ask writers: “Why do you want to write this book?”
The answer they first blurt out may have to do with goals and outcome (i.e. “I want to make enough money to leave my day job” or “I want to prove I can really do this”), but there is always an answer underneath which has to do with the specific topic or idea. People write books because they have been moved by books. They write books because they want to make an impact on a specific group of readers – to entertain or educate, illuminate or inspire. They write books because they have something to say that matters deeply to them. That’s the why.
Read Sinek’s book and define your why for the book you are writing. Your motivation will become clear and my bet is that your confidence will soar.
Writing a book with the hope of attracting readers means you are creating a product that will be bought and sold in a marketplace, which means you are becoming an entrepreneur. The sooner you can embrace this reality, the better. […]
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Memoir is a true story told by the person who experienced it. It is fact – or as close to fact as we can come with our fallible memories – and is therefore considered nonfiction. But sometimes book coaches who coach memoir use the tools of fiction to help their writers write great books and sometimes we use the tools of nonfiction. What’s behind this reality?
I believe that memoir is one of the toughest genres to write, to sell, and to coach, because it demands skills and tools from both the fiction and the nonfiction side. I am speaking here about writing memoir with the hope of getting it published – which is to say, read and embraced by people who don’t know you. Writing memoir because you want to remember something, or process something, or make sense of your life, or share it, or leave a legacy for your family is a different endeavor altogether. But if you are writing because you want strangers to engage with your story, and learn from it, and become immersed in it, and inspired by it, you have to approach it with a different mindset.
What Exactly Do I Mean by Memoir?
What exactly do I mean by memoir? Different people have different ideas, so it will be helpful to sort it out. What I don’t mean:
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As the CEO of a book coaching company with 30 book coaches serving hundreds of writers, I see a lot of stories, and I can very quickly identify the holes and weaknesses in them. This is not some kind of weird magic; it’s a simple case of pattern recognition. The truth is that while every writer is unique and every project is unique, the mistakes that writers make are actually quite similar. If I am doing a rejection audit to determine why a novel keeps getting rejected, for example, I can guarantee that I will see a pattern of these kinds of mistakes.
You can become a smarter writer by looking for these patterns in your own work. By referring to a checklist of the common things that go wrong in most narratives, you can quickly assess your own narrative and work to shore it up.
The most common problems are as follows:
Info Dumping. Info dumping – and its close relative, No. 2, below – are the most common problems in any narrative that is not working. If your work has chunks of text where you are telling us what happened instead of showing the narrative unfold, if it feels like you are giving a lecture on a topic rather than telling a story, odds are good you have an info dump that needs to be broken up. Weave the material into the text, or back up and write a scene that shows us the information you have dumped on us.
Emotion Not on the Page. A novel lets the reader into the character’s head, so if the writer doesn’t let us in, we’re going to feel cheated. We always want to know what they’re thinking, what a moment means to them, what they believe, and how their perceptions change. This is what “show, don’t tell” means and this is the reason we come to fiction. So the writer can’t be stingy. The superpower of a novel is the ability to let us into someone else’s head so we can see how other people think and feel, and why they make the choices they make. In order to exercise this superpower, the writer has to show us those thoughts and feelings. They can’t assume that when Fred’s girlfriend walks out on him, we know that Fred is sad. If the writer doesn’t show us what Fred is thinking and feeling, we might, in fact, think that Fred is secretly elated. The writer doesn’t have to come right out and say, “Fred was sad.” They can show Fred slumping down on the couch and burying his head in his hands. Or they can show Fred downing a quart of Cherry Garcia ice cream. But if they just say, “Maria slammed the door and was gone,” and say nothing about Fred’s state of mind, they’ve missed a juicy opportunity to hook us.
Too Much Plot. Story is about change. We need to see motion, action, movement. First the guy was X, now he is Y. The change can be super subtle – for example, a small change in the way that person sees the world – or it can be monumental, but something must change. It’s useful to remember that people don’t often change without being pushed, so a […]
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Therese here to introduce Jennie Nash to you as our newest Writer Unboxed contributor! Jennie is the author of 9 books, and the founder and CEO of Author Accelerator, a company that trains book coaches. It’s a topic she knows well, since she’s been coaching writers for the last twelve years, with clients landing agents, national book awards, and deals with the top houses. Learn more about her on her website and via Author Accelerator. And be sure to check out her FREE Business of Book Coaching Summit, featuring some familiar folk, from January 20th-24th; learn more HERE.
People often say that they don’t know what a book coach is or what we do – but ironically, these are sometimes the exact people who are already doing the work, but not getting paid for their time and talent.
How to tell if this is you?
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