Week 27 - Author Business Coaching Challenge - The Power of Love
Learn to love your author business by actually loving it
Welcome to Week 27 of our ongoing Author Business Challenge — Join us at any time.
This is week 27 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 26’s challenge article:
Reviewing last week’s big idea—Tipping the Scale in Your Favor: What’s one area where you calculated the real cost of an imbalanced situation in your author business? What did the actual number reveal? What’s one small adjustment you committed to making? Did you actually do it, or did you resist? What got in the way? Finally, if you didn’t make the adjustment you identified, what are you gaining by keeping the situation imbalanced?”
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: Love
Before reading on, learn more about the concept of The Power of Love for coaching yourself:
This week’s challenge
⎕ This lesson is all in the practice. You are going to delve into loving, learning it better by doing more of it: first with a special person, then with something in your author world for which you have supreme affection, and finally, with yourself.
⎕ So, who is it that you would like to love better? Today you are going to learn to love them better by…loving them. Instruction: Love them. At the end of the day, contemplate what you learned.
⎕ Now, what is something you love about being an entrepreneurial author (a skill, an idea, an experience, a job function, whatever) and which love you’d like to expand upon and know in greater depth? Today, experience yourself loving that thing, enjoying it, appreciating your love of it, and developing that predilection further. Again, what did you learn from loving?
⎕ Same thing, but this time it’s all you. Find multiple ways to love yourself today. In your end-of-the-day assessment, what comes to mind? What worked? What did you learn about yourself? About loving yourself? Where will you take this concept tomorrow?
This big idea in action
Let’s look at some amalgamated examples from real clients:
Case Study 1: Loving the Business Side
M. was the author of three novels who actively avoided the business side of being an author. Marketing felt gross to her, sales tracking felt corporate, and networking felt fake. Together we worked on her commitment to her author business and her income goals in part by practicing loving her business by doing business activities with love. She started small—spending 15 minutes daily appreciating her sales data (not just tracking it), sending genuine thank-you notes to readers, and approaching speaking opportunities as chances to connect, talk about her books, and teach about what she knew rather thinking of it all as sales, sales, sales.
Within a few months, M. noticed she’d stopped procrastinating on business tasks. Her reader engagement tripled. She booked six speaking events. She attributed the shift to not faking or dreading anything—she was actively choosing to find and nurture real enthusiasm, what she truly appreciated about having an author business. Her love became real through the practice.
Case Study 2: Loving Your Audience
J. had 8,000 email subscribers but felt disconnected from them; they were just numbers. He decided to love his readers better by treating them as individuals he just might care about, be curious about. He started reading his survey responses with deeper intent to understand, responding personally to emails, and sharing more vulnerable updates about his writing process in his newsletter and blog posts (even though he was, IMO, rightly skeptical about the value of the overhyped vulnerable 😂).
His newsletter open rates nearly doubled after only a few installments with the revised approach. Some readers started replying with their own stories, saying they were recommending his books to friends, and becoming more engaged in the comments section of his blog. J. theorized he’d been downplaying connection because he assumed it wouldn’t scale. But loving his readers, really appreciating and interacting with them, made his entire business more sustainable and enjoyable. His attitude adjustment made it much easier for him to keep on keeping on sans any cynicism.
Case Study 3: Loving Your Creative Voice
After years of trying to write commercial books, E. felt disconnected from his own work. He committed to loving his quirky, meandering, maximalist style by actually writing the way out there, stream-of-consciousness novel he’d been postponing. He shared early chapters with subscribers, many of whom returned hearty messages of approval. He started a section of his newsletter devoted to his favorite “unmarketable” reads by other authors sitting on his own bookshelf.
The first effort at loving his own creative voice didn’t sell as well as his previous titles—but it opened doors to teaching opportunities, attracted a new audience to his newsletter, and led to a university press contract for his next project. By respecting his authentic voice through the act of using it, E. started working on a career that felt a lot more like his, not a performance.
Case Study 4: Loving Yourself Through Rest
After a year of hyper-productivity and eyes-on-the-prize goal orientation, D. was burned out as a thought leader and her writing and income suffered. She decided to love herself by actually taking the rest she needed—not grudgingly, but as an act of self-care and self-appreciation. She built writing-free weekends into her schedule, stopped answering emails after 6 p.m., and treated her daily walks as sacred time, whether or not it involved her usual ruminations about how best to promote her expertise.
Her output slowly increased. Her writing quality improved and felt less stilted. She narrowed the focus of her next book and finished three months ahead of schedule with a new niche. Instead of always plowing ahead through exhaustion (and resentment), she worked from a confident place of respect for herself and her areas of knowledge. Loving herself through action (rest, boundaries, care, focus) made her a better writer, expert, leader, and business owner.
Love isn’t passive. When we turn the power of love on ourselves, our work, and our customers and readers, we know and appreciate those things better. It’s active engagement, appreciation, and nurturance. An inner swell of happy motivation. And it leads to tangible business benefits because it shifts your relationship to the work itself.
Before you move on…
Pick one element from the Coaching Yourself in Action section and actually do it today. Not tomorrow. Not when things ease up. Today.
Love someone better by loving them. Love something about your author business by engaging with it differently. Love yourself by taking one concrete action that demonstrates self-acceptance and self-celebration.
Then tell us what happened below. What did you learn by practicing love instead of just thinking about it? What surprised you? What was harder than expected? What opened up?
The point of this entire series is application, not theory. Sharing in the comments don’t just help you integrate the concept—it helps other authors see what;s possible when they stop reading about coaching ideas and start using them.
(And, if this article shifted something for you, share it with another author who needs permission to stop grinding and start loving their work—and themselves—better.)
Learn to Love Your Author Business by Building One Worth Loving
Subscribe for $10/month or $97/year. Get weekly strategic advice from my 32 years of building profitable publishing businesses—the same expertise authors and indie publishers pay me $5–$10K for in consulting. The mindsets, partnerships, and revenue models that create sustainable author income, delivered multiple times to your inbox every week.