How to publish a book in the coaching industry

As an experienced coach, you are standing on a gold mine of knowledge and experience. Hidden underground is the precious substance that shines out in your work with clients; the mighty foundation you've built your practice on; the deep source of energy that powers your mission and vision. But as long as it remains buried in that mine, only revealed to the few who pay for a guided tour, it isn't bringing either you or your market the full value of its wealth.

The veins of golden ore you are guarding in your mine include the years of experience you have from working in your area of expertise, the knowledge you've absorbed from being a substantial contributor to your industry along with the historical perspective you've gained and the future you envision for it. The nuggets you have beneath your feet include the innovative processes you've developed for working with your clients, the outcomes you've produced for them. And the genius you've applied to building your coaching business to its current success is pure gold dust.

It's time to extract the treasure you are sitting on, shape and polish it into a dazzling asset and offer it to the wider world. Time to transition from well-thought-of expert to thought-leading author.

But perhaps what's stopped you getting on with this transition is that you don't know just how to get started on that journey.

In my experience as the UK’s most experienced business book mentor, there are a few key challenges that stop someone getting a good and valuable book written and published. The first is very simple: they don't know where to start. Other people make a start, but don't realise that positioning and detailed planning have to come before writing, and dive straight in. Within a few chapters they get overwhelmed by what feels like a huge amorphous task, stop writing and often never restart.

In my book, Book Magic, I take coaches like you through the steps to mining the precious metal of your knowledge and expertise. Gold mining is a four-step process: prospecting, mining, extracting and refining. You prospect for your perfect readers - your ideal clients, promoters and partners – and when you've located the sweet spot, you then go through the steps for mining the ore of your unique value proposition and leveraging it in your book. Next you extract the perfect structure out of your deep experience to provide maximum impact and reader engagement. And finally you refine that value into polished and compelling written content. With your manuscript written, you will need to choose the best route to publication for you.

We start your Book Magic journey by prospecting with the 3Ps of Position - a simple but effective tool that yields absolute clarity on your ideal reader and client (Person), identifies their fundamental challenges (Pain) and articulates the transformation your book will offer them (Promise). Many coaches believe that they have to come up with a totally original concept for their book and will need to make their ROI on the time and money spent on their book from ‘trade’ sales on Amazon or other retail outlets.

A recent report on the ROI of Business Books showed that 64% of business books make a profit for their authors. But it was the resulting speaking, consulting and workshops that generated much more income than book sales and royalties, which rarely met expectations and didn’t predict success or ROI. So rather than trying to come up with an original, best-selling book, your book should be written to your market – your perfect reader is your ideal prospect who will read about you, your methodology, your insights, your journey and your case studies – and be drawn to come and work with you.

Moving on to the Planning phase, it’s vital to dig down into the topics, stories and data you'll reveal for your readers and organise them into a detailed and compelling structure of chapters and parts. Start from the bottom up rather than the top down: the titles of approximately 30 topics that represent 500 to 1,000 words each, give you the solid content of your book. Add case studies and data, then divide them into a journey of chapters and overview parts and you are ready to start writing.

Then the deep mining starts with you writing your first draft - the first step in the WRITER Process. This acronym takes you through a chunked and closely defined set of steps for what can otherwise feel like a titanic task with no boundaries: Write (your first draft), Review and Improve (together make up your first self-edit), Test (your second draft with carefully chosen beta readers), Edit (for the last time, consolidating and incorporating the best feedback), and finally Repeat (any steps) until you have a final writer's manuscript to submit for professional editing and publishing.

You have three options for publishing your book. The first is to pitch your book to a traditional publisher, by which I mean those publishers with a traditional business model: the publisher invests in the book and makes their ROI exclusively through book sales of which the author receives a small royalty. This is rarely the best option for coach authors. At the other end of the spectrum is the self-publishing option; where the author has complete control of the publishing process - which is usually far more complex, time-consuming and expensive than they imagined. My tip is to find a specialist and high-quality hybrid publisher, where you pay for their publishing package, but they manage the process as a professional team and you end up with a high quality ‘gold bar’ of a book that builds your coaching business and makes you the authority in your field.

With special thanks to Lucy for sharing this guest article.

About Lucy McCarraher

Lucy McCarraher is the UK’s most experienced business book mentor and has mentored over a thousand entrepreneurs, experts and business owners to write and publish their books. In 2011, McCarraher founded Rethink Press, the premier hybrid publisher of business books. She is also the founder and CEO of Book Magic AI, the unique AI-supported book-writing app, and founder of the Business Book Awards. Lucy’s new book, Book Magic is a galvanising call to action empowering business owners to get their book out of their heads and into the world.