Week 26 - Author Business Coaching Challenge - Tipping the Scale in Your Favor
Weighing the costs, benefits, and tradeoffs in front of you
Welcome to Week 26 of our ongoing Author Business Challenge — Join us at any time.
This is week 26 of the 29-week author business coaching challenge taking place on The Profitable Author: Build a Business You Love every Monday. (All prior challenge weeks are indexed here.)
It’s free and open to all authors—established or aspiring; fiction or non-fiction; self-, hybrid-, or traditionally published. Fluffy or scholarly. Cookbooks or children’s books. All authors. Even you. Especially you.
Just set your goals for the months ahead and do the work on your own behalf.
Participate and support other authors as you can. We’ll be learning, absorbing, and applying 28 big ideas from the world of coaching to these goals.
You can, of course, modify your goals as you go. The ultimate idea here is to find yourself with a toolbox of coaching concepts that you can draw upon as needed going forward.
First, let’s review
Here was Week 25’s challenge article:
Reviewing last week’s big idea—Priorities and Nested Priorities: When you mapped your priorities honestly, where did author income actually fall? Was it nested where you thought it was? What did you say no to this week because it didn’t serve your priority hierarchy? Finally, looking at how you spent your time this week, what do your actions indicate your real top priority is—regardless of what you tell yourself?
Use the comments section in these coaching articles or anywhere on this Substack to ask a question, ask for help, test out an idea, share what works for you, propose a collaboration.
This week’s big idea: Tipping the Scale in Your Favor
Before reading on, learn more about the concept of Tipping the Scale in Your Favor for coaching yourself:
This week’s challenge
⎕ As you read the article above, what imbalanced areas of your author life came to mind? Where are you not receiving value for your efforts? Where are the costs too high?
⎕ You know what to do! Use meditation, walking, or journaling—with or without a formal coaching session with yourself—to better understand the costs, benefits, and tradeoffs of a situation that should be working more definitively on your behalf.
Where is the lopsidedness? What is the source? What is the cost to you of that inequity? And, naturally, how can you fix that? What would the ideal resolution (big idea #16) look like? What is your intention (big idea #19) in this regard? What steps will you take and how will you hold yourself accountable (big idea #9)?
This big idea in action
Let’s look at how this idea played out for authors I’ve talked to. Do you recognize yourself in any of these examples—either directly or in a variation?
The Free Content Trap
How many authors, cough, cough, do you know discover they are spending 15–20 hours per week creating free content for their websites, blogs, social media, email newsletters—essentially operating an unpaid full-time content creation business alongside their author business? When you noodle out the opportunity cost of this time, i.e., what else could one do with that 15–20 hours, the sauce is stark.
One author I know estimated she could write two additional books per year with that time, or develop a paid newsletter that would eventually generate $12,000 annually. She didn’t quit social media entirely, but she did reduce her free content creation to three hours per week and redirect the remaining hours to a paid Substack. The not-so-small daily drain of “just posting content” had been tipping the scale dramatically against her—until she measured it and made a solid pivot to something better.
The “Exposure” Speaking Circuit
Do you know any authors—I’ve met dozens—with the habit of accepting every unpaid speaking engagement request for the value of exposure? Consider someone doing just 12 free talks—one a month—in a given year, spending at least four hours per event (prep, travel, speaking, networking, follow-up). That’s a minimum of 48 hours of uncompensated work.
If this is you, ask yourself, “What am I gaining by not charging?” If your answer is some version of avoiding the discomfort of stating a fee or being unsure whether or not you’re allowed to ask for payment, you are not tipping the scales in the favor of building your author business. Consider instead what happens in this scenario if you simply charge $300 per event but only book half the events? You make $1,800 and save 25 hours of time.
The Email Mentorship Drain
Here’s one I wouldn’t have thought was common until I heard it a few times in succession: Authors generously providing extensive, personalized advice to aspiring writers by email—essentially, free coaching, consulting, and mentorship. One author calculated she was spending 4–6 hours monthly on such exchanges, which adds up to 48–72 hours annually. If she had been charging a reasonable consulting rate of $150 per hour, she was giving away $7,200–$10,800 worth of expertise every year.
When she wondered out loud in a coaching session, What is the cost of continuing? the writing on the wall was brutal: Her benevolence was preventing her from developing the paid coaching program she’d been too busy to get around to. We worked on a boundary then and there and she committed to using just three hours in the coming month 1) to write an email response for future requests (1 hour); 2) to add a page to her website about her coaching services for aspiring writers (1 hour); and 3) to set up automated scheduling and payment options for this service (1 hour).
A Case of Underpriced Book Bundles
An author I talked to at a book fair in the past year told me he’d been selling discounted book bundles for years—something like $40 for five books that would cost $75 individually. It felt “affordable” and reader-friendly. But when necessity forced him to examine his pricing, he knew he was losing a theoretical $35 per transaction. He had sold close to 100 bundles in the past year online and at book fairs. Perhaps he made extra sales and increased readership, but more likely…he had given away too much of that $3,500 spread. Once he realized this wasn’t working in his favor, he raised the bundle price to $60 and increased his shipping fees while he was at it.
Weighing Things
These authors weren’t making dramatic mistakes—they were simply tipping the scale slightly in the wrong direction, repeatedly, until the cumulative effect became undeniable. Our conversations—whether in formal coaching sessions or in casual business settings—brought attention to the pattern, the true costs, and helped them make strategic adjustments that compounded in their favor over time.
Before you move on…
Share one area where you suspect the scale is tipping against you—and one small adjustment you’re committing to this week. No need to have it all figured out. Just name what you’re noticing and what you’ll try. Let’s support each other in tipping things back in our favor.
Tip Things Further in Your Favor…
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