Week 28 - Author Business Coaching Challenge - Playing Big
Holding yourself to higher standards
Welcome to Week 28 of our ongoing Author Business Challenge — Join us at any time.
This is week 28 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 27’s challenge article:
Reviewing last week’s big idea—The Power of Love: How did the idea of bringing love to your author business decisions, relationships, and daily work land for you? Did you notice any shifts in how you approached your work when you led with care, curiosity, or genuine affection rather than obligation or shoulds?
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: Playing Big
Before reading on, learn more about the concept of Playing Big for coaching yourself:
This week’s challenge
⎕ Review the sections of your coaching journal that address your author goals, intentions, and idealizing. Assess how big you are playing. Is it big enough? Do you now want to play bigger in any of these areas?
⎕ In a walk or meditation session, let your mind wander to the meaning of bigness in those areas and the significance for you of stretching yourself further.
⎕ As you go about your daily activities, find one or two places today where you can think bigger, show up bigger, and play bigger. Bring your best self, your best game. Afterwards, think about what the experience showed you about your limits and your potential.
This big idea in action
Let’s look at playing big in some composite examples of authors and clients I have known:
Playing big in events. Playing big means seeing how high you can go. An author I know had been speaking at library events for $0–250 for years. Playing big meant pitching himself to corporate conferences at $5,000 per keynote. His first instincts were they’ll never go for it and what do I have to offer them? Instead, he wrangled his misgivings and sent three pitches in one month. Two didn’t respond, but one booked him. That single gig paid more than his previous year of library talks combined—and eventually led to two more large bookings in the next six months.
Playing big in pricing. Playing big means finding the right price point for your best clients—and for you. A romance author was starting to resent her $1,000 developmental editing clients who tended to dispute her suggestions. She got up the nerve to double her rates and discovered that she soon had just as many clients, but better ones, i.e., easier to work with and more likely to respect her expertise and judgment in the genre.
Playing big in partnerships. Playing big means reaching out with partnership suggestions to those you’d like to work with even if they seem too big or are a bit intimidating. Because she pushed herself for the heck of it once, a nonfiction author reached out to an industry leader about doing a joint webinar. Shed had assumed the other person was too big, famous, connected to partner with her, but the leader said yes immediately, that they had been looking for a collaboration along such lines. Their first webinar together reached an audience ten times what was usual for her.
Playing big in visibility. Playing big means stepping outside your comfort zone. A thriller author who had been pumping out books with almost no marketing, finally started doing video content at the urging of his agent. Despite hating how he sounded on camera, he got used to it and came to enjoy the variety of things he could talk about on YouTube related to his themes, characters, writing, and hobbies. His channel never went gangbusters but it got solid attention and his book sales increased 40% a year after his first video dabbling began.
Playing big in scope. Play big means an ongoing effort to try reaching the next level. I know of a poet who’d been self-publishing chapbooks for years, then decided it was time to pitch a full collection of his best work to university presses, especially those with related poetry contests. He got rejected by a dozen or so, but his work eventually found a home and he won a couple awards the following year.
Before you move on…
What’s the playing big move that scares you most right now? Raising prices? Establishing an LLC and purchasing accounting software? Increasing visibility? Making ambitious partnership offers? Submitting a manuscript in a different genre? Pitching the agent or publisher you’re reluctant to approach? Tell us in the comments —what feels too big, and what might be possible if you attempted it anyway?
Play Big by Accelerating Your Author Business!
Learn more and claim your spot by tomorrow, January 27, 2026.
The next Author’s Business Accelerator begins next week and it’s not too late to join our small group. Over 11 weeks, you’ll get the strategic frameworks, personalized coaching, and action-oriented community that transforms published authors from revenue plateaus to multiple income streams. It’s not one-size-fits-all programming. It’s custom business architecture based on what you want, who you are, and what will actually work for your life. Limited to 8 participants who are done playing small and are ready to build. Learn more and claim your spot by January 27, 2026.