Week 29 - Final Author Business Coaching Challenge - Self As Authority
You know best for yourself, your author life, and your author business
Welcome to Week 29, the final week of our ongoing Author Business Challenge.
This is week 29 of the 29-week author business coaching challenge that has taken place on The Profitable Author: Build a Business You Love every Monday for almost seven months.
We’ve covered 29 big ideas from the world of coaching—concepts you can draw on as you build your author business, set bigger goals, navigate challenges of the day, and create the sustainable income and creative life you want.
If you participated weekly, you now have a toolbox of coaching concepts. If you dipped in and out, the archive is waiting whenever you need it. If you’re just discovering this series now, welcome—all 29 weeks are here for you to work through at your own pace.
My hope is that you found concepts here that shifted something for you, gave you language for what you were experiencing, or provided practical tools you’ll return to again and again.
First, let’s review
Here was Week 28’s challenge article:
Reviewing last week’s big idea—Playing Big: We explored raising the bar, taking the leaps, asking ourselves things like, “Is it enough?” and “What more do I want?” and “What else can I do?”—and then holding ourselves to those higher standards and visions. Did you find a place where you were playing small? Did you take one action this week that felt bigger than comfortable? What did you discover about your limits and your capacities?
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: Self As Authority
Before reading on, learn more about the concept of Self As Authority for coaching yourself:
This week’s challenge
Let’s do a quick review of the material presented in this series:
⎕ To coach yourself, start with a meta tool box with the instruments of meditation, walking, writing, and practice at your disposal, along with the basic coaching model: set an agenda and a takeaway, ask yourself open-ended questions, peel the onion until you shift, acknowledge your arrival at a new place, and hold yourself accountable for a next step based on your new awareness.
⎕ You are a creator! Bring about desired states, preferred outcomes, and your best, evolving author life by creating them and taking responsibility for making it so. Use getting curious, possibility-thinking, and idealizing to figure out what it is you want and what is possible for you.
⎕ Know your priorities for your author business, evaluate the costs/benefits/tradeoffs of a situation, set your intentions, and take action.
⎕ Use slowing it down, self-care, balance, and being not doing to properly care for yourself along the way.
⎕ When things get rough try being with yourself and not your problems, making yourself right (right now!), and engaging your inner video game hero.
⎕ Play bigger by thinking bigger, practicing gratitude, experiencing plenty, and loving more.
⎕ You are the author of your author life, author business, and your future—your own ultimate authority. Get ready to turn the page and begin writing and living the next chapter of your best book yet.
⎕ Re-read this summary slowly. Did you catch all twenty-eight coaching concepts? Were you able to recall the essence of each lesson? Make a note of any you’d like to review in the coming week.
This big idea in action
Let’s look at some examples of a few typical client scenarios in which an author both claims a new authority and authors a new story for themselves.
Claiming pricing authority and rewriting her story. A novelist had been charging $50/hour for developmental editing, telling herself the stories that “I’m just helping out other writers” and “people can’t afford more than this.” After wrestling with the self-as-authority concept, she recognized she was both underpricing and underselling herself with that thinking. Her new story: “I’m a professional editor with 15 years of experience and an MFA. I provide expert guidance that transforms manuscripts.” She set her new rate at $85/hour, with an eye to raising it every year after that.
Claiming strategic authority and penning the next chapter. A memoirist kept asking others what his marketing strategy should be. He surveyed his book coach, successful authors he knew, a couple marketing experts he met at a networking event, even friends and family not in the biz. He was living a very large story that “other people know better than I do.” When he finally absorbed the big coaching idea of self as authority, it dawned on him: I am the expert on my book and my life…and also how to share it and connect with the public. He intentionally authored his next chapter by focusing on smaller book club visits, rather than big events; reaching out to podcasts that focused on mental health; and speaking at treatment centers. His approach to marketing changed when he realized he wanted to focus on reaching the people who would benefit from his own mental health story.
Claiming creative authority and not bowing to others’ expectations. A business book author heard from more than one person (and, in full disclosure, I was on of them): “It needs to be shorter, more prescriptive, more bullet points.” He kept trying to revise his work accordingly and hated it, resisted it at every step. The story he was living by not employing self as authority: “The market, my coach, and my editor know what my book should be and I should listen to them.” At some point, he re-claimed his authority. This was his book and a critical part of his intended career path. He could decide to keep the length, the winding narration, the complexity, and ignore cookie-cutter models. He was already self-publishing and he was not going to throw away one of the major freedoms that come with doing it all himself and on his own dollar. He would find readers who appreciated what he had and how he delivered it.
Before you move on…
Is there an area of authority you’d like to claim? A new story you want to write for your author business? Let us know. Also, thanks for any comments and feedback on the entire series.
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