Ninth Draft

Book Coaching

Most unfinished books are not a talent problem

They are an accountability problem. The manuscript stalls at forty thousand words, the writer decides the idea was never good, and it sits. Coaching solves a smaller and more boring problem than editing does: somebody is expecting your pages on the fifteenth, and they will have read them by the call.

5.0 · 42 reviews Editing books since 2011 Read reviews
Two people seated at a small table with a stack of printed pages between them

What's included

  • Two calls a month, an hour each, on a fixed schedule
  • Pages read and marked between calls, up to fifty per month
  • A written plan with dates you actually agreed to
  • Email access between calls for the questions that cannot wait
  • Honest check-ins about whether this is the right book to be writing

Worth asking any editor

Coaching is the wrong purchase if your draft is finished. If you have a complete manuscript, you want a developmental edit, and I will tell you so rather than sell you twelve months of calls.

The editor mid-sentence, gesturing, talking to writers out of frame
Two calls a month, and somebody who has already read the pages.

★★★★★

“I had been at sixty thousand words for two years. Someone expecting pages on the fifteenth turned out to be the entire missing ingredient.”
Michael O. · Literary fiction

See the edit before you buy the edit

Send your first ten pages and I will edit them properly and send the notes back, free. Not a summary of what I would do, the actual marked-up pages. If those notes are not worth having, we both learned something cheaply and you owe me nothing.

Thinking about book coaching?

Send the first ten pages. I will edit them properly and send the marked pages back within a week, free.

5.0 · 42 reviews Editing books since 2011 Read reviews