A Few Questions Answered...

Starting a new venture as I have with Author Coach™ leads to a lot of new questions, many of them posed by writers such as you. Thus, I’m going to try and answer a few of them here and, over time, will develop a FAQ list for the site.

Yesterday an author asked me if Author Coach had “contacts at publishers or with agents and would we recommend her to them.”

Every author coach is a veteran editor from a major New York publishing house, so of course they all have editorial and agent contacts. But Author Coach will never lead you on and promise to put your work in their hands. That’s a personal decision made by each author coach and is very subjective. What your author coach can do is help you get your work in the best possible shape so that the editors and agents who do receive it recognize it as a professional-looking submission and can focus on the important elements of your work, such as plot, character, subject, and, above everything else, writing. And, of course, beyond the simple mechanics of preparing your work to look its best, your author coach will work with you on all of those other elements, to coach you and guide you and educate you, so that, no matter what, you are a better writer in the end and your manuscript is a better work.

Another author asked me what genres our author coaches cover. The answer is, generally speaking, all of them. But here’s a partial list:

• Fiction
• Nonfiction
• Women’s Fiction
• Romance
• Historical Romance
• Historical Fiction
• Mystery
• Thrillers
• Science Fiction
• Fantasy
• African-American Fiction
• Military Fiction
• Biography
• Memoir
• Narrative Nonfiction
• Self-help
• History
• Travel
• Lifestyle
• Sports
• Pregnancy/Parenting
• Health & Fitness
• Military Nonfiction
• Military History

And pretty much anything else! You see, that’s what makes AuthorCoach.com one-stop shopping for those in search of help getting published. Because we have a number of different author coaches with experience in different areas, we can match you with just the right author coach for your work.

Here are just a few ways Author Coach can help you:

• Manuscript Editing, including concept editing and line-editing;
• Brainstorming your concept and helping you figure out the market (and if there’s a market);
• Writing a query letter;
• Preparing a submission list to agents and editors;
• Being a writing mentor, who can have weekly or monthly telephone check-ins to help keep you on track;
• Guiding you in your writing career.

Think of your Author Coach a bit like a personal trainer, but instead of getting your body in shape, your coach helps get your writing in shape and your writing career on track.

When you are trying to get a book published or find your literary agent, the hurdles are many. It’s one reason I constantly refer to the process of becoming a published author as being like training for a big race—no, a marathon.

Becoming a published writer is a long and difficult process for most authors. Most authors start out with an idea for either a novel or a nonfiction book. And many just sit down and start hammering away at their word-processor. But that’s not really the best way to go. You need to plan your book. And that almost always starts with an outline, regardless of whether or not you are writing fiction or nonfiction.

And planning your book also involves knowing the publishing marketplace. I recently had an author pitch me an historical saga following a family through the years, as it becomes more and more involved in organized crime. I said it sounded great, but a bit old-fashioned. Look at the best-seller list. What do you see? No, your book need not be exactly like everything else on the best-seller list, but certainly there are publishing trends and you need to pay attention to them. Spend a lot of time in your local bookstore and chat up the clerks on what’s selling. Whether you’re interested in writing romance, science fiction, or historical fiction, your local bookseller can be an invaluable help when it comes to figuring out what kind of romance, science fiction, or historical fiction titles are selling. Maybe military science fiction is selling better than hard science fiction. Maybe Regency romances are selling better than other historical romances. Maybe books set during the Civil War are selling better than books set during WWI. Are books with female protagonists selling better than books with male protagonists?

These are but a few of the questions an author should be asking before sitting down to write a book. And your author coach can help you answer those. From concept to finished manuscript, from proposal to published book, from query letter to cover copy, Author Coach can help you. At Author Coach, we help writers reach the finish line!™ So what are you waiting for?

Coach Andy