Welcome to The Writing Coach. On this podcast, I speak with the instructors, editors, coaches, and mentors who help writers and authors create their art, build their audience, and sell their work.

One year ago, I launched Writer's Craft Academy, my private membership site and group coaching program. In episode 59 of The Writing Coach, I celebrate the year's victories, as well as discuss some lessons learned. Listen now!

Episode Transcript

Hello, beloved listeners, and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast.

Now as you guys know, on this show, normally I interview folks who work with writers to help them succeed, but today, it's going be just me. I'm going be the person who works with writers to help them succeed on today's show, because as I record this, it is the first of February, which means it's been one year since I launched Writer's Craft Academy.

Writer's Craft Academy is my private membership site and group coaching program. And as I said, I launched it one year ago. We now have 12 months under our belt, and I thought this would be a great opportunity to look back on how the year's gone, how everything has worked within the Academy and what hasn't worked as well.

Let's dive into it!

Video Training Library

First off, the notion of Writer's Craft Academy came to me for a couple of different reasons, but one was I noticed there's a major problem with online courses. I sold two online courses previously, one called The Novel Writer's Blueprint and one called Smash Fear and Write like a Pro. One of the things I noticed about The Novel Writer's Blueprint was that people were not finishing the course The more I thought about it, the more this kind of made sense, because the course was walking people through the entire project of writing a book, from initial idea creation all the way through to completed manuscript. And the reality was, most of the people who were taking the course were in the early stages of working on their book, which meant they didn't need the latter stages of the course yet.

Maybe eventually they were going to come back to it and finish the course, once they were at that latter stage in their manuscript drafting, but probably they wouldn't because we lose focus. How often do we say we're going to come back and finish a course, but then not end up doing it?

I mean that happens, right? I started thinking about maybe what writers need isn't this “module one, module two, module three” style single course that's going to walk people through what they need to learn, but rather this library of resources that are available when you need them.

You know in the training library there's a whole mini-course in there on revisions, but you don't have to feel compelled to watch it if you're at the idea creation stage of your writing.

And that's the other thing… as a writing coach, it almost seemed antithetical to be selling courses, because I don't want people taking courses. I want people working on their writing. As fun as it is to take a course, a lot of the time people use education as an excuse to not do the hard work of just sitting down and actually writing.

I liked this idea of having this training library there, so that when someone has a question, I can say, yes, go watch these three videos from our training library tonight. It'll specifically address your question and show you some examples, and then you can get back to your writing.

It also allows me to just create shorter videos for things that don't necessarily have to fit directly within the larger context of a course. I'm thinking, for example, I have a video on how to use Microsoft Styles in Microsoft Word, so that you can turn your chapter titles into hyperlinks, and then have Microsoft Word self-generate a table of contents for you. It's just a little bit easier way to organize a manuscript if you are writing in Microsoft Word. But I mean, that's not part of a course on how to write a book. It's just a video I knew some of my clients would find helpful. So the video training library allows me to have this place where even if I only have a two-minute video I want to create to show someone something, I can get that in there.

As the year went on the library grew and we now have over 50 training videos in there, which I think is a really, really great collection of resources available for The Writer's Craft Academy members. We also record our book club calls, and I think that has actually become a really interesting resource as well. So maybe I'll talk about that next.

Writer's Craft Book Club

I've run several different group coaching programs before, and I've sold different online courses before, but one of the new concepts that I added to Writer's Craft Academy when we launched a year ago was the idea of a monthly book club. Each month, in Writer's Craft Academy, we have a theme. So the theme might be Story Structure, or the theme might be Dialogue, or the theme might be Genre. Then we would have a writer's craft non-fiction book on that theme that we would all read over the month. And then we would all get together on an additional kind of bonus call at the end of the month and just talk about the book. And I think it's been one of my favorite parts of Writer's Craft Academy, having these calls.

It's so much fun, but it also having a group of people working through these writer's craft books together allows us to develop a shared vocabulary. One of the first books that we read was Shawn Coyne's book, The Story Grid, and we were actually lucky enough to have Shawn Coyne join us for our book club session, which was really extraordinary. But the point being, once we all read that book, I could talk about the “five commandments of story-telling,” and everyone in the group would know what we were talking about.

And the great thing is, as I said, we record all of our book club calls. And they go into the video training library as well, so that if someone joins Writer's Craft Academy today and wants to read The Story Grid, well, guess what? They can now go and also watch the book club discussion that we had based around that book, which I think is a really cool thing.

And obviously, as a writer, and as a writing teacher and an instructor, I love books about writing, so it's just so much fun to get to do it in a group environment. And I think it educates you, as well, when you are forced to talk about a book that you've read.

You have to articulate your learning, and sometimes if you just read a book alone, and you say, “Oh, that was great. We learned a lot,” but it doesn't get embedded, or it doesn't get absorbed into your daily life, if you don't put it into practice and start talking about it and verbalizing it with other people. I think having The Writer's Craft Academy book club is really helpful on a number of different levels.

Another thing that I love about the book club is that it shows the members that there is no one right way to write a book. I have a perspective from my experience. I have recommendations that I make to people, but I don't know the answer for everyone, and so when we read a different book about the craft every month, members get to see that perspective, and they get to see, oh, well, KM Weiland approaches writing from how Robert McKee approaches writing, which is different from how Natalie Goldberg approaches writing, which is how Shawn Coyne does. You really get to see this myriad of perspectives.

I think part of my role as a writing coach and as a writing instructor is not to tell my clients “this is the right way to do it,” but to introduce them to the possibilities that are out there, the different ways of approaching things, so that they can find the one that's right for them. So again, that's another reason why I think the book club has just been a real success and been a lot of fun.

Author Community

Next up is the community aspect of Writer's Craft Academy, which is probably my absolute favorite part. I think the resource library is great. I think the book club is so much fun, but our weekly group coaching calls are so beneficial on so many levels for our members, as well as our forum.

We have a private Facebook group, so while we meet every week for a group call, we also are able to continue to share information, and resources, and help each other out between coaching calls. Even if I wasn't interested in creating this private membership site and in this group coaching program, even if I was just focusing exclusively on my one-on-one clients, I think I would still include some sort of group component to my one-on-one coaching.

I have seen my one-on-one clients, who also participate in Writer's Craft Academy, get so much value out of it, out of being supported by others but also being able to share their frustrations, or celebrate their victories, or get differing perspectives, or bounce ideas off one another. We have about ... I think at the moment we have about 16 members in Writer's Craft Academy, so it's not one of these massive programs, where you have a thousand people involved and no one knows each other. We're a really tight-knit community, and so it feels more like friendship than it does any sort of coaching program. It just feels like a community and a safe place for aspiring authors where they can come together and get what they need.

And sometimes what they need is a kick in the butt and some accountability from me.

But other times, what they need is just to hear that other writers are going through the same struggles that they're going through. And other times, they just need a place where they can go online and say, “Hey guys, I finished chapter 22 this week. No one else in the world really knows what that means or what a success that is or how far I've come from when I was struggling with chapter two for six months back.” Writer's Craft Academy's community component is a place where writers can do that.

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