In this conversation with Alice Sudlow and Kim Kessler of Novel Atelier, we’ll dig into the Renaissance workshop model they follow, why psychological safety is a prerequisite for growth, and how we can survive this algorithmic digital dark age together.

This is a bit longer than our usual episodes here, and it’s clearly my first run at a video format. I do hope you’ll stick with us, though, because we’re unpacking so much more than the ins and outs of a fiction space.

The story under the story is that Kim and I met when she was new to Scribe Media but a year+ into her time at Story Grid just as I was new to Story Grid and well-worn in my time at Scribe.

If you aren’t knee deep in writing industry gossip, both of those companies have now had very public meltdowns (public to this niche, anyway).

But we were never in those spaces for those spaces. Not really.

We were there for the authors. The stories. The art of story. The people who had gathered for similar reasons. The nerdy analysis. The power and potential.

We were there for each other.

And we stayed that way, zooming endlessly all throughout COVID, and eventually bringing Alice into our “Epic Work Sesh” or “Big Ol’ Zoom Session” lines for, no joke, most hours of the day.

The more we showed up for each other, the more we grew as practitioners and as people. The more we grew, the clearer our purpose became, the less any of the other stuff mattered.

Though, let’s be honest: it has been the challenge of my life to survive getting kicked out of the nest when Scribe collapsed, and it is a grief-riddled mess to watch Story Grid go through a similar shake-up.

It hasn’t been easy. But it has become undeniable that our work is far bigger than the containers we first found it in.

And the work itself is what this conversation is about.

You’ll hear very little about the drama, the meltdowns, the inside scoops that any of us could give you at any moment.

Just like I remind my authors (looking VERY closely at you, Magentas and Yellows), the salacious details aren’t what matters. Not only do we not owe a single person the hardest parts of our stories—often, those aren't the parts that a person needs anyway.

Instead, you’ll see what we’ve forged from that fire.

You’ll hear our passion for the authors, the art of story, the nerdy analysis, and each other. You’ll hear what we’re building out of the ashes, alongside each other, for you.

And you’ll be reminded, once again, that there is a space for you. Fiction or nonfiction. Polished or messy. Career author with a stack of book ideas to wade through or reluctant drafter with a brilliant life to protect as you write.

You’ve got this.

And we’ve got you.

I believe we’re already in a digital dark age, and I believe even harder in our ability to reimagine our own renaissance. Learn more about what’s possible for nonfiction with me and fiction with the Novel Atelier.

And as always, you are welcome to subscribe to B is for Book Coach right here, on Substack, or wherever your podcasts are found—now (finally!) available on YouTube, as well.

Today begins the last time around the sun while I’m still in my 30s, and in 30 minutes I’ll get to celebrate with you.

And by celebrate, I mean hold space for whatever is coming up for you right now.

I thought about adjusting the schedule so our regular drop-in office hours didn’t land today, but honestly this is exactly the thing I want to be doing.

I am not one to think we just have one path in life, but if we do, this is mine.

So, do me a favor and help me send off my 30s with nerdy book talk, problem solving, and/or celebrating whatever milestones you and your ideas have hit lately.

In other words, come join me!

(I don’t keep much behind a paywall here, but contributing just $20/mo or $200 for the year helps me literally keep the lights on. It’s how we make space together. So if you don’t see the zoom link below, upgrade your subscription or send a one-time Mutual Momentum contribution before 11–1 CDT today and I’ll get you hooked up!)

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Don’t worry. That doesn’t commit you to anything more than what you’re doing right in this moment. Because the best authors are simply people who show up as themselves, for themselves and for their readers.

Today, we’re making space for seeing.

Enjoying this space? It takes all of us to create it together! When you become a one-time or ongoing Momentum Partner, two things happen.

First, you get to join a small but growing group of folks who pop in for Office Hours twice a month to sort out their content and travel this journey together.

Second, you add to the Mutual Momentum fund, which helps to bring deeper development support to authors who need more than just space to get started.

You can create a one-time boost of Momentum by clicking the button below, or subscribe to keep the forward movement going for us all.

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There are as many ways of seeing the world as there are people in it.

Maybe more, honestly.

Imagine how much clearer we would see the world—how much more we would understand, empathize with, have available to us—if every last one of us could share our way of seeing and take in what everyone else was sharing?

If we were talking about literal lenses rather than a metaphorical worldview, imagine if we could see the world through all 8 billion lenses.

For a second, the idea feels like a utopia.

And then, it gets a little dizzying.

I don’t know how clear that vision would actually be. At least, not at first. It would take a while for our brains to adjust to that much perspective.

A fly is better off in the world because of all of the lenses in its eyes, but if I were to trade eyes with a fly it would feel like navigating the world through the visual chaos of a kaleidoscope.

And while I can only think of a micro fraction of 8 billion actual points of view, I can already think of multiple people whose worldviews I wouldn’t want to adopt.

There is power in sharing our perspective.

There is power in being able to choose which perspectives we adopt as part of our own.

And that power compounds when we share our perspective with an open hand, knowing that not everyone will choose it.

That’s where Purple books come in—the Signature Perspective book type on the Clarity Spectrum—from an author who trusts their perspective enough to know that it’s worth sharing, and trusts the reader to decide whether or not they agree.

That degree of trust is vulnerable in a way that isn’t often acknowledged.

Deep, personal stories take all the credit for the vulnerability of writing, when really it’s just as vulnerable to offer up your way of seeing without really knowing how it will be received. That some people will choose to consider your lens, and others will reject it outright.

Ideas are wildly vulnerable things to share.

And if you’re writing a Purple book, being ready to share those ideas with that open hand will take just as much preparation as forming the ideas themselves.

If you haven’t met the Clarity Spectrum of book types yet, it’s the framework I use to position books based on what they intend to deliver.

We do that with a 2-question quiz that gets you to your core book type (knowing that there are blended types if you’re feeling extra nuanced about it), and a development process that reflects the unique experience of each one.

All of which has been made possible by countless hours spent in story analysis, studying narrative theory, and testing the frameworks in real time. And that’s all made worth it by the countless hours saved in coaching when authors are able to see their books clearer and faster because of it.

By focusing on what you want from the book as well as what you want to offer your reader through the book, we’re better able to map the experience of the book.

And a Purple experience is like picking up a new pair of glasses and finding out whether the prescription is right.

Sometimes your whole world gets sharper. Sometimes you get a little nauseous. But you always have the option to pick it up and put it back down as needed.

Like the Magenta book type, this one sits on the far end of the color spectrum, where all the purple-ish colors tend to blend together. Not because they are similar books, necessarily, but because these books carry more nuance than their more tangible counterparts on the Red/Orange/Yellow opposite end of the spectrum.

As readers, we know exactly what we’re getting and get exactly what we want with those books. But when it comes to the Indigo/Purple/Magenta side of things, we’re showing up for something much less tangible and may walk away with more than we bargained for.

As authors, we can write the “more” into the book, but like the murky differences between shades of purple, we know not every reader is going to fully see it like we do. And that’s okay.

Our job is only to create the invitation for a changed perspective, not to force the RSVP.

It’s like we’re setting up all the wires and switches that are necessary for whatever change we’ve intended, but the way the reader shows up to those conditions will either complete the circuit… or not. Either way, they will determine their final experience. And we will keep offering up the circuit until we find the people who are ready to close it.

That’s the part that might just make a Purple book my favorite to write, coach, edit, and read.

Yes, it’s challenging to offer your perspective to a whole wide world that didn’t even ask for it.

Yes, it’s sometimes painful to trust that your perspective is, in fact, unique—even though to you it’s just the boring way you see the world.

Yes, it’s hard to name what that perspective even is, especially when it has been formed over years of experience, exploration, and expertise.

Yes, it’s scary to put that perspective out there not knowing if or when anyone will connect with it.

And.

There is a something incredibly generous about an author who faces all of those difficulties and comes out on the other side still holding the belief that this perspective matters—full stop, even if the person who needs it lives a hundred years in the future.

That’s why I love working on these books.

It’s also why I love reading them.

When an author writes with an open hand, I can read with one too.

I can come in willing to explore—to pick up the glasses, look around, see what the world looks like through someone else’s eyes—without the pressure to perform.

Picking up the book doesn’t commit me to anything. And that makes me more willing to pick up more books, which exposes me to more perspectives, which gives me more opportunities to change than if I’d pre-qualified myself before I’d ever even arrived.

Most of the Purple books that flood the nonfiction market offer up a low stakes change.

The book I read about color when building the Clarity Spectrum—Full Spectrum—was a Purple book, I think, even though it didn’t carry the weight that most of my descriptions about this book tend to have. That’s when I realized most journalistic approaches have this same energy to them.

Those authors have researched, explored, interviewed their way through a new way of looking at something and are now offering it to us, no strings attached.

And when that something is a topic like color, or trees, or tipping points, the author is probably moving right along to the next topic once they’re done.

They’re not really giving a second thought about us or how we’re thinking about color, trees, or tipping points.

The generosity of this gift kicks up several notches when the topic is much closer to home.

When James Baldwin warned us of The Fire Next Time.

When Steven Pressfield called us to fight The War of Art.

When I’m writing my way through The Audacity of Authorship.

When my clients are working on books about handing their wisdom to the next generation, being hopeful about that generation, being more human at work, creating a beautiful life, and redefining their industry…

It’s not so easy to just set it and forget it.

You care about the topic.

You care about the people affected by the topic.

You believe that the world, or at least your corner of it, would be better off with this information.

And because it’s a well-worn, personal perspective, it’s hard not to feel personally rejected by the idea that not everyone will get it. Or want it. Or even like it.

The danger is in letting the fear of rejection override the belief that brought you here.

The sneaky, subtle parts of our brains that are much more comfortable in the familiar are happy to offer up very good reasons that our message should change.

Some of those reasons fit other book types, which means they’re reflected in plenty of writing advice and sound reasonable to follow.

But as soon as we pull back to sound more authoritative, get too close to sound less prescriptive, over-explain to be more palatable…We soften our edges and lose our perspective.

We remove the circuit before anyone else can find us to close it.

We kill the magic that makes Purple books so powerful.

Readers choose these books, open to the potential changes they hold, precisely because there is no pressure to prequalify themselves for that change.

Yet authors who worry that they’ll never find that reader are at a huge risk of prequalifying the change itself. Of deciding that their perspective is too big to be accepted or too small to matter. Of closing themselves off to possibility for the fear that no one is going to meet them there.

The catch is that the worry doesn’t really go away. There is no tipping point inside of this process where all doubts are gone and only an unshakeable confidence remains.

If you caught my Hadestown episode, you might already see that Orpheus had a very Purple gift to give—a way of seeing the world as it could be, in spite of the way that it is.

And my takeaway from that episode absolutely applies here too: Like Orpheus, you might not ever see the change you hope to create. Like Orpheus, your job is to sing the song anyway.

Because an Orpheus who has to have confirmation that his song is “working” loses track of what the song was in the first place. But when he lets go of the performance of it all and just offers his gift up freely, it works better than even he could have dreamed.

The world he hoped to see did come back to life. He just didn’t get to see it happen.

So if you think you might be writing your own audacious, Purple, Signature Perspective to life, here’s the question only you can answer—and you’ll have to keep answering it over and over and over again:

What matters more to you—the change you believe you’re here to inspire, or external validation that you “count” as a change-maker?

It stings, I know.

It doesn’t make it any easier to make the hard choice to show up to the page, to your reader, to yourself.

But it does make the decision point clear.

We have to assume that our Hadestown will change without us seeing it, or that the person who’s looking for this perspective might not even be born yet—and we have to believe that that the opposite will happen.

When we believe in ourselves and this change so fully that it doesn’t matter if anyone else sees it yet, we can offer the gift of our perspective widely and freely, knowing our only responsibility is in the offering.

And in this hyper connected world, with long-tail keywords and super specific searches and weirdly attuned algorithms and networks our predecessors couldn’t have fathomed—we can almost guarantee that someone is out there looking for exactly the gift we’re giving, and that we’ll be able to find each other.

That’s not something any author, artist, or dreamer who came before us could have known.

We can.

The question is whether we will.

Will we choose to believe in the change we’re here to inspire and commit to sharing it until the people who need it have found us?

Or will we chase validation until our message is lost, even if we have become more visible in some externally measurable way?

The good news is, it’s never too late to show up fully.

Today is an excellent day to choose yourself, your (someday) reader, and the change you’re here to create.

And if the belief that leads to that choice feels too heavy to hold on your own, reach out. Let me shoulder it with you.

Because this is not an easy book type, but I will be happy to repeat the challenge as many times as it’s offered to me, or until our view of the world is 8 billion lenses clearer.

Whichever comes first.

Hey, thanks for creating this space with me today.

Whether or not you’re ready to dive into writing just yet, remember that the best authors show up fully, just as they are. That’s all it takes—and you’re already doing it.

Be sure to subscribe on Substack or wherever you listen to podcasts to catch every coaching moment to come. And when more of your book is ready to emerge, the space we made today will be here waiting for you.

And so will I.

Don’t worry. That doesn’t commit you to anything more than what you’re doing right in this moment. Because the best authors are simply people who show up as themselves, for themselves and for their readers.

Today, we’re making space for trying.

Enjoying this space? It takes all of us to create it together! When you become a one-time or ongoing Momentum Partner, two things happen.

First, you get to join a small but growing group of folks who pop in for Office Hours twice a month to sort out their content and travel this journey together.

Second, you add to the Mutual Momentum fund, which helps to bring deeper development support to authors who need more than just space to get started.

You can create a one-time boost of Momentum by clicking the button below, or subscribe to keep the forward movement going for us all.

Mutual Momentum

This past week, my family and I took the opportunity to see the musical Hadestown in movie theaters. We’d all seen it on stage, and I won’t even begin to tell you all the ways I’ve fed my obsession about it online. We’ll just say it’s a family favorite and leave it at that.

So we would have gone to the filmed version no matter what. But it was a lovely bonus to see that they treated it as a different medium altogether, making the most of the elements a movie makes available that the stage cannot.

If you haven’t spent the last several years obsessing over this musical with me:

Hadestown is the story of Orpheus and Eurydice—a Greek myth about the changing of seasons, the temporal nature of all relationships, and all the painful but beautiful ways the world turns.

Note: If you can’t get to an AMC theater or regular theater to watch it and don’t want to wait for wherever it’ll be streaming, go listen to the broadway recordings on your music platform of choice. The songs tell the story.

It begins with an upbeat song with lyrics like “It’s a sad song; it’s a tragedy—but we’re gonna sing it anyway,” as a mirror to the way we celebrate new beginnings even though we know they will also, eventually, have to end.

We stay in that upbeat space with them as Orpheus and Eurydice fall in love, as Persephone returns from the underworld to bring the earth back to life, and as Orpheus does his best to write the song that will bring the world back into tune.

But he’s still writing when Hades comes back early to get Persephone—a back-and-forth that turns into seasons that are extreme and unpredictable, leaving Eurydice out in the cold while Orpheus is still stuck in his head.

So when Hades offers Eurydice a warm place to retreat, she takes it. All the way to the underworld—to Hadestown.

By the time we realize the story is in fact, a tragedy, the opening song repeats, this time with a much slower, sadder cadence. It’s a song that Hermes, the narrator, says we return to again and again, “as though it might turn out this time.”

Just like love. Just like art. Just like revolutions and fresh starts and life itself.

In fact, you can watch Hadestown through any of those lenses. The love story is the centerpiece, but in this universe where nothing is permanent, any interpretation holds.

This time through, I saw something in Orpheus I hadn’t before.

It started in a song called “If It’s True.” His dark night of the soul.

For most of the play to this point, Orpheus is head down, focused on the work of finishing his song.

Even the shining moments of connection between him and Eurydice are short-lived, because he believes she has fallen for him based on what his song can create.

Marrying her means he has to deliver on that promise, so he works even harder on his song than ever before.

Nothing else exists for him.

Not his other work. Not the world he wants to fix. Not even her.

Until she is gone.

Then he is consumed by going after her, just as single mindedly as he had been about finishing his song. Nothing else matters. Not the dangers or risks or challenges or pain.

Of course, that’s exactly where his song is found—without him trying to find it at all. The bits and pieces of it emerge as he lives and loves and loses.

It’s the song that’s already in him that makes Eurydice fall.

It’s the song that’s already in him that opens the gates of hell.

And when it’s time to convince Hades to let him leave with Eurydice, he doesn’t have to consult a notebook or refine his lines.

The song is already in him, made complete by the realizations he’s had while entirely focused on love and life.

But just before that song is sung, he’s about to give up. Hadestown has taken everything from him, including his hope.

And he almost believes them.

Until he asks the question no one else is willing to ask: “Is it true?”

Is it true that there is no hope? No chance for change? No way for the world to be anything other than what it is right now?

He asks over and over again, pressing for an answer.

Only, he already has that in him too.

The lyrics get me every time:

I believe our answer matters more than anything they say

I believe if there is still a will then there is still a way

I believe there is a way

I believe in us together more than anyone alone

I believe that with each other, we are stronger than we know

I believe we’re stronger than they know

I believe that we are many

I believe that they are few

And it isn’t for the few

To tell the many what is true

As he sings, echoes and little bits of recognition begin to come from the workers, who are supposed to be memory-less automatons who can’t recognize anything at all.

Those echoes make it back to Hades, which then leads to his challenge for Orpheus to sing his song, which then leads to the opportunity to walk out of Hadestown with Eurydice behind him.

All he had to do was sing the song that was already in him.

To speak the truths he already knew.

To move along his path with his heart on his sleeve, as Hermes tells it.

But this is a tragedy.

And it is art. And revolution. And life. And loss. And love.

And both Orpheus and Hades share the same flaw:

They believe they have to perform to be worthy.

Hades thinks he has to perform the role of a powerful leader that no one would dare question.

Orpheus thinks he has to perform the role of an inspiring leader who can deliver answers.

They’re both wrong.

Persephone had initially followed Hades home because of his openness and love, not his control.

Eurydice had gone home with Orpheus because he saw the world as it could be, even if it wasn’t there yet. And when he stood in that belief, he sparked a revolution and reignited the love that turns the world.

He can take her home again, too, just by singing that song.

But we see the next song forming on his face even before he and the Fates sing it together: “Doubt Comes In.”

Doubt comes in when he thinks about how hard it’ll be to walk home, and that he can’t make it easier for Eurydice.

Doubt comes in when the workers ask him to show the way so they can come too, and now he has the weight of a whole community on his shoulders.

Doubt comes in when Hades gives him the opportunity he asked for, and now he thinks it must be a trap rather than the trial he’s proven himself qualified to begin.

Alone in the dark on his way home, the doubt gets louder and louder until it replaces his song entirely, and he fails the trial.

The tale ends, as we were warned it would, with Eurydice condemned to remain in Hadestown until, eventually, the cycle repeats itself in a new incarnation of an old, old song.

I basically tear up at “If It’s True” and never recover for the rest of the show.

Watching the belief build in a beaten, exhausted, nearly hopeless dreamer? Then hearing that belief ripple out into those who’d been left for dead? Good grief (literally).

And it all happens in an anthem we could adopt as a creed—and have been invited to, explicitly, since Act 1.

There, Orpheus gives a toast by saying “To the world we dream about,” then he turns to the crowd and says “and the one we live in now.”

The message is clear: the song is old, but it is not over.

And “if it’s true” that there is no hope, we can all give up now.

But we don’t really believe that. Not in the moments when we drop our performances and put our hearts on our sleeves.

In those moments, we know who we are and what we’re capable of.

We know what the world could look like, in spite of the way that it is now.

And we can’t walk away from that hope. Not even when we try.

That is why these stories, these ideas, these books don’t leave us alone.

It isn’t because it’s our job to perform them. It isn’t because we owe something to someone. It isn’t because getting it right will make us worthy of something we’re afraid we can’t have.

We keep coming back to the hell of writing and creating and artistry and communication because it’s what’s true.

It’s how we show each other the way the world could be.

The most obvious lesson in Orpheus’s failing is that none of these things—art and love and life and revolution—can be fully captured.

He couldn’t force his song and he couldn’t guarantee Eurydice safety. Trying to hold on too tightly only ended in loss.

But there was value in trying anyway.

Likewise, your perspective, your truth, your belief, your art can’t be fully captured.

You can’t force perfection and you can’t guarantee it will be received exactly as you intend.

But there is value in “singing it anyway.”

And that is where I saw something new on this visit to Hadestown.

The very last song comes after the applause and the bows. The show is over by then, the fourth wall seems broken, so I always took it to be the actors singing it to the audience.

The song is called We Raise Our Cups, and it’s a final toast—“to Orpheus and all of us”—led by Persephone and Eurydice, then joined by the cast, as Orpheus plays his guitar.

It is a final reminder that the world, like this tale, keeps turning. And that the struggle is worth it. And that we are not alone in our dark nights or long walks or unfinished melodies.

Only, the actor for Orpheus doesn’t sing.

And no one looks at him, not even when they say, “wherever he is now...”

On this watch through, I also realized that the workers are back in their regular, pre-Hadestown clothes.

And everyone is standing upright, on a level plane.

And Hades is singing. And smiling.

Hadestown has changed.

The revolution happened.

The song never faded.

The love never died.

And Orpheus can’t see any of this, even as he plays the tune that supports the song that they hope will bring him comfort.

That is the tragedy of it all.

The hell we walk through for an idea—a song, a message, a book, a movement that has to be finished—has nothing to do with skill or control or proof or worth.

The hell of art that matters is that our belief has to hold in the dark.

Even when it seems like no one’s listening. Like it didn’t work. Like we can’t win. We already failed.

If what the world tells us about our art were true, we could walk away.

If our belief is true, we have to stay.

The beauty of it all is that staying is all we have to do.

Showing up to life and love and art and revolution and the world as we know it could be is how the song gets finished.

Asking the questions only we can ask does lead to answers.

Immersing ourselves in what matters always shows us the way.

And yes, doubt does come in.

It’s easy to sit in the audience and say “if only he’d sung his song…” “didn’t he know she was there?…” “he was so close!”

In reality, we fail the same test all the time.

We share a flaw with the ancients and the gods: we forget that we are enough as we are and get lost in performances of what we think we should be.

That is the comfort in the final song sung by a reimagined Hadestown: Orpheus showed us the way out of this hell, and it’s a path we can take again and again, no matter how many times we fail.

Because those aren’t actually failures.

What we’re truly after—the thing that makes this work matter—comes from the trying, not the winning.

Even when we can’t see the change, can’t hear the echoes, can’t live in the world we dream about, we can still believe.

That belief, that hope, that truth, that song is already in us, ready to emerge when we stop performing it into silence.

It’s the revolution that keeps the world turning.

It’s the love that makes the world go round.

It’s a sad song, but if you’re here, you’re singing it anyway.

And that, I believe, deserves one hell of a toast.

Hey, thanks for creating this space with me today.

Whether or not you’re ready to dive into writing just yet, remember that the best authors show up fully, just as they are. That’s all it takes—and you’re already doing it.

Be sure to subscribe on Substack or wherever you listen to podcasts to catch every coaching moment to come. And when more of your book is ready to emerge, the space we made today will be here waiting for you.

And so will I.

If you want to follow along or jump ahead, pocket-sized copies are available on Amazon, and every Substack subscriber gets a fillable PDF copy as well.

Today, we’re reading from: The Power of You.

Enjoying this space? It takes all of us to create it together! When you become a one-time or ongoing Momentum Partner, two things happen.

First, you get to join a small but growing group of folks who pop in for Office Hours twice a month to sort out their content and travel this journey together.

Second, you add to the Mutual Momentum fund, which helps to bring deeper development support to authors who need more than just space to get started.

You can create a one-time boost of Momentum by clicking the button below, or subscribe to keep the forward movement going for us all.

Mutual Momentum

I’m not sure I can squeeze one more metaphor into this book, but if that’s what it will take to see your eyes light up and your idea lock into place, get on my calendar. I’ll give you all the metaphors.

Because that’s the point of everything.

Not just my work or your work or who gets what book published where.

It’s the point of everything.

We are here to make meaning in this life, and if you’ve made enough meaning that you feel even the slightest inclination to share it, then let’s do whatever it takes to make that thing happen.

So, yes. Story is in your blood and your bones and your guts and it’s so incredibly weird to lay your guts out on the table for strangers to dissect—but who ever said being a human was anything but weird?

And yeah, you’re playing a video game with your readers and giving them a map they can follow (and tools to take on their quest).

And the process is a stinky ogre onion.

And there are charts and layers and quadrants and arrows.

And you and your story and the wisdom inside of it are the ocean itself.

Even if you just stay on the shoreline of that idea, there’s enough power there to move the very earth.

You didn’t come to that idea by accident, and you can’t be passive about it now that you’re here.

You can choose a lot of things—to just sit down and look at it for a while.

To look for a few seashells—a blog post here, a side project there.

To play a game with some friends.

To dive in deep.

To build a house.

You can choose a lot of things, including walking away and living that landlocked life for a while.

But you’ll always know it’s here.

You’ll always know how to get back if you ever change your mind.

You didn’t get here by accident.

You’ve earned it along every step of your journey from birth to now.

If you want to document this moment in time, this journey so far, this wisdom you have right now—maybe it’s time to wade in.

I hope this process has helped.

I hope you know how powerful you are.

I hope you feel that power every step of the way.

See you on the shore.

A Word after the Workbook

This is the final episode of this series, marking the end of our read through this workbook.

When I sat down to write it—several years ago now—it was the first time I’d formalized my early work with clients and captured it in written form.

That doesn’t mean my work is just “several years” old. I’ve been in this game for much longer than that. It’s just that I spent most of that time making it a one-on-one kind of game, with a bespoke approach for every single author I worked with.

I have also worked inside of too many cookie-cutter systems with “trust the process” mantras.

I saw how they fell apart for authors with more to unpack, more to untangle, more to uncover.

I saw how the authors got the blame when the system’s promises fell through.

I know what it looks and feels like to be told a series of steps will get you a serious outcome on a predictable timeline, only to “fail out” of it, feeling like you must be the anomaly. Like something in you must be what’s broken.

So, for a very long time, I resisted anything that looked like that.

Every engagement started over fresh.

Every follow up resource was typed from a blank page.

Every author got their own path.

But when you spend enough time doing one thing, patterns start to emerge. Principles become clear. Processes take shape.

You Don’t Get to the Ocean by Accident was my first realization that I was developing the same core dimensions with every single author, and that a baseline set of tools could make that development possible.

If you’ve followed along or plan to go back to binge them now, you will have a solid picture of that baseline, and an excellent jump on your own development.

And also.

The patterns kept emerging, and kept emerging, until the Clarity Spectrum allowed me to break something as broad as “nonfiction book” down into categories that match expectations, processes, and objectives to an author’s actual intentions.

It created enough specificity that the right author could see themselves in the right book type, while holding the umbrella high enough that we didn’t have to recreate the whole system for each book individually.

That brought us to the Sandbox—a beginning-to-end book development play space that bridges the gap between bespoke care and a contained process.

As I built the Sandbox, I drew on every question and process in the workbook. I returned to client calls where our conversations expanded the development even further. I tested every tool, elaborated on every concept, and prioritized the visual experience and practical uses as much as I possibly could.

Things that I felt weird trying to contain on a workbook page now feel fun and exciting to play in. Things that I often had to do for authors before are now tasks we can do together, sometimes in an Office Hours session without having to book anything 1:1.

And because each Sandbox is unique to each book type, and each author gets a customized build for their own needs, it’s you-shaped enough to feel like freedom, and development-shaped enough to feel like safety.

Long story short, I wasn’t wrong to make everything bespoke for all those years. No one is wrong for capturing their process and containing it to a single set of steps.

But we are all so much better when we meet in the middle.

The safety of a contained process is important, and so is the empowerment that comes from freely flowing through that process.

And none of it works at all if the process isn’t aligned to what you want to create in the first place.

So, my advice to you as we end this series is still the same: you get to choose.

As your book emerges, you can decide what kind of systems to work within, what processes to follow, and how intensely you’ll dive into any of it.

Just be sure that those systems and processes don’t feel like shoving a whole ocean into a thimble, or like throwing you out into one without a big enough boat.

I’d love to set you up with a Sandbox to play in, or to hear that the workbook was just enough to get you going, or to know that the space we make in these episodes is all you’ve needed all along.

Because I can’t say it enough: we are meaning-makers, and sharing that meaning is worth it. Whatever it takes.

Hey, thanks for creating this extra space with me today.

To get the rest of the workbook right away, look for You Don’t Get to the Ocean by Accident on Amazon, or subscribe to get a free copy right now.

And as always, whenever your book is ready to emerge, the space we made today will be here waiting for you.

And so will I.

Don’t worry. That doesn’t commit you to anything more than what you’re doing right in this moment. Because the best authors are simply people who show up as themselves, for themselves and for their readers.

Today, we’re making space for nuance.

Enjoying this space? It takes all of us to create it together! When you become a one-time or ongoing Momentum Partner, two things happen.

First, you get to join a small but growing group of folks who pop in for Office Hours twice a month to sort out their content and travel this journey together.

Second, you add to the Mutual Momentum fund, which helps to bring deeper development support to authors who need more than just space to get started.

You can create a one-time boost of Momentum by clicking the button below, or subscribe to keep the forward movement going for us all.

Mutual Momentum

I am not anti-AI. I am anti-inefficient-use-of-AI.

Some of you will be happy to see this. Some of you will be disappointed. Some of you will have no idea what to think.

This is a sticky topic that only seems to be more polarizing as time goes on.

So I also want you to know right up front that I do not feel polarized about it.

I am not going to judge or think differently about you based on whether or not you use AI.

And if you do feel strongly one way or the other, I’d be happy to have a conversation with you about those concerns.

But mostly, if you don’t use AI, don’t use AI.

If you do use AI, I want to make sure you’re doing so in a way that honors the energy it uses from the planet and the energy your creative time is meant to generate.

One of the first things I noticed about LLMs* is that people were treating them the same way they used to treat me in the early, super-low-paid, super exploitative days of ghostwriting: bark an order at it and wait for the magic to appear.

(LLM means Large Language Model—the actual term for these giant word-prediction machines, like ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini and NotebookLM. Their generative intelligence is limited to the inputs that have taught them how to predict. This is important to know.)

Having had that experience gave me several immediate perspectives on AI as we know it:

Generic inputs never lead to good output.

For people who are just trying to fill the internet as quickly as they can to chase their SEO/ad-spend dreams, that’s not actually a problem. They don’t want to create good things that are meaningful for themselves and their readers. They want more things.

For the rest of us, the initial magic of fast-return answers or material is often short-lived. It doesn’t take long to realize that the generative tone is flat, the perspective is skewed, and the confirmation bias is heavy.

So my first reminder for AI use is this: The machine’s output will only be as good as your input.

You will have to decide where your personal line is between learning to craft excellent inputs and deciding that your energy is better spent elsewhere.

The content machine is destroying itself.

My very first gig was with a local company who paid me peanuts (by check!) to fill websites with keyword-friendly content. I remember one was about security cameras for houses and another one was “pole dancing for exercise.”

The idea was simple: pay someone a little bit one time, have them write content that we can point ads to, and the clicks from those ads will make us a little bit lots of times.

I knew nothing about these topics. So I searched the internet, found a handful of the most common things about them, and rewrote them into something “new” that focused on the keywords I’d been given.

This was in 2005, and things only got weirder from there.

The goalposts for what search engines would feature (SEO, search engine optimization) kept moving, and people kept chasing them.

Long story short, that’s why recipe pages are insufferably long and your top search results are now unrelated (sponsored) returns.

While the internet isn’t the only thing the AI models were trained on (and that’s another topic for another space), it was and still is a primary source of their prediction material.

And now, if you ask it a question, it does exactly what I did: search the internet, find a handful of the most common responses, and rewrite them into something “new” that responds to what you’ve asked it.

All of this means three things.

First, it means that most of our AI-generated responses, especially when the prompts aren’t precise, are a summation of all of the generic content that people like 2005-me wrote.

Second, since lots of people are using AI to continue chasing those content-generation goalposts, an already full internet is filling up even more with even more generic material.

Third, all of this started because Google incentivized people to create to their standards by saying “Do these things and people will click on your website.”

But people are no longer clicking on websites because the AI summaries—made possible by all of the content that people like me wrote—come first.

This looks like a content-generation bubble on par with the 2008 housing market. If I could short it, I would.

Instead, my second reminder for AI use is this: Just because you can go fast and make more doesn’t mean you should.

A lot of people are embracing AI simply so they can keep up with the demands of algorithms and SEO standards. And I have a much bigger problem with those demands than I have with AI as a concept.

Outsourcing your writing is not a big leap from outsourcing your thinking.

I want to be very carefully clear here, because I do not have a problem with good AI use, just like I don’t have a problem with good ghostwriting work. And there’s not a huge difference between them.

Good ghostwriting extracts your thinking in a medium that you’re comfortable with—usually conversations or recordings and documentation of previous thinking you’ve done. Then it puts it into a medium you’re uncomfortable with—writing—so that you can expand into spaces where people enjoy that medium.

Bad ghostwriting extracts someone else’s thinking so that you can benefit from that new medium, full stop.

I have worked with people who expected bad ghostwriting (and got me, bummer for them) and I have worked with people who embraced good ghostwriting.

The ones who wanted bad ghostwriting did not know who they were or what they wanted in their space, aside from more-money-made-easy.

The ones who embraced good ghostwriting became authors in every sense of the word and were just as transformed as if they had gone about their book development any other way.

I have stopped offering ghostwriting completely because I wanted to create containers where people consented to the “good ghostwriting” level of work.

I saw how powerful it was for authors to wrestle through their material and come out on the other side changed, and I didn’t want to couch that inside of the typical promises of speed and ease that ghostwriting is usually sold on.

The same goes for AI.

People who are using AI to quickly generate products in order to stay on the hamster wheel of content are rarely digging into who they are, what they want in their space, or what they have to offer to that space.

People who are using AI effectively are digging deeper and accelerating their thinking and work more than even they knew was possible.

So my third reminder for AI use is this: The difficult parts of writing are not necessarily the bad parts, and the easy things AI can do are not necessarily the good things.

The wrestling, experimenting, drafting, mess-making parts of writing are where your thinking forms. If you use AI, use it to do more of that—not less.

I had been treated like an input-output machine without knowing it, and that had more of an impact than I realized.

I was a little bit shocked (and honestly emotional) to realize how familiar generic AI prompts were to the early assignments I’d been given.

I was so young when I started out in this space, and later on I was so grateful to be able to work from home with my babies, that I took what I was given.

It took that 2022/2023 launch of ChatGPT for me to realize how dehumanizing that work had been.

To take something so human as my thoughts and ideas and creativity and extract it for fractions of pennies on the word, with little more than a sentence as instruction and the looming threat that someone else was going to do it faster or better (to unnamed standards of faster and better)…

Again, this is a conversation for another space, but it’s important to name the feeling here.

Because that kind of human exploitation is still happening. A lot. All over the entrepreneurial and corporate world.

People are hired from other countries (”it’s okay, they LIKE getting paid less—currency exchange!”), from presumed 2-income households (”doesn’t it feel so good to contribute a little extra to your family?”), from actual prisons (ugh.) and paid next to nothing for their efforts. All day, every day, all over the world, right here in your industry—whatever that might be.

My first professional use of AI came at a time when I was completely overloaded in my workflow.

I was at a breaking point: the follow up tasks were drowning me. Download a call, upload it to get a transcript, download the transcript, clean it up, package it into an email, send, and then do the actual thinking work that the client needed.

And what was the dominant advice in the entrepreneurial space? Hire a VA for a few bucks a day.

Then, Fathom showed up.

An AI-based, free platform that bundled all of those steps into one. And did it well.

I literally got emotional. About a software, you guys.

It’s not an understatement to say that finding an AI-based tool saved my business at that stage of its lifecycle. And I didn’t have to exploit a human to do it.

Later, I used AI to synthesize and brainstorm and do quiz-results math as I built out the Clarity Spectrum—another moment that probably saved my business. Definitely saved my brain.

During that build, there was no human exploitation option on the table. But we did know more about the resource cost for AI. I often wondered, and still do, whether I’m exploiting the planet instead.

There is no simple answer for this one. No easy principle to relay.

It’s personal, and it’s complicated. So I’ll just tell you where I landed on it:

The way I’m using AI has helped me bring important, world-changing work to more people than I could have ever done on my own.

If I were to stop using AI in the way that I’ve used it, the decrease in resource use would be minimal, but the decrease to my impact would be substantial.

And my stopping would not do anything to affect the actually massive resource-users out there—the corporations who are happy to exploit both people and planet for their own monetary gain. And some of those corporations will directly harm the people I’m here to help.

So if I’m going to use AI, I’m going to do it with gratitude for its existence, judiciousness with my use of it, and a deep sense of responsibility to follow through on the impacts I say I’m here to create.

If you’re still here, you’re not the kind of person who naturally rushes through complex things.

You’re not the kind of person who will feel good about hijacking the thinking process, contributing to the content machine for its own sake, or treating AI like a bottomless candy machine of junk food insights.

All that’s left—if you want to use AI at all—is to know how to use it effectively. In a way that accelerates your potential and deepens your thinking without exploiting people or planet.

I am frequently asked, “Should I be using AI to make this faster? Am I missing something if I don’t?” And my answer is never a simple yes/no.

But once I know you, your reader, and your book—deeply, in the way that my services facilitate—we both know whether that AI curiosity is pointing to something more real than FOMO.

When it is, I help you use it effectively.

I have built out custom bots that are aligned to your Positioning, understand your book type, and are under very strict instructions to behave as a thought partner rather than a generic content creator.

I have built out integrations that let the development work inside the Book Development Sandbox generate custom prompts and bot instructions for you to use.

And I regularly review guidance or output from AI interactions to make sure you’re getting non-obvious insights where the pattern-making machine is limited to obvious thinking alone.

I sometimes feel like the parent of teenagers who says, “If you’re gonna drink anyway, better do it in my basement so I can keep an eye on you.”

But it’s kind of true. I would rather you acknowledge that you’re going to experiment with AI and do it within the already-set confines of an effective bot than to fall into the temptations of speed and “polish” in the dark without any idea what you’re stepping into.

And authors who “just write the book with Claude” are stepping into something messy.

I have found that those books are much harder to analyze and edit because the clean sheen of the mostly-fine writing masks gaps in thinking.

It takes a much closer eye to make sure the manuscript actually says what it’s meant to say—and often, the author who is looking for quick results is not prepared to dig in and name that thing anyway.

So my parting statement about AI is this:

If you are going to use it, I am happy to help you set up an effective container for doing so, within one of my hands-on development services.

If you use it to wholesale generate your content, it is going to take more time and more money to get it right in the end.

And if you go to your people with that content without spending that time and money, you likely won’t yet be the author that those people or this book or you deserved.

Do so with caution.

Embrace complexity.

Create with care.

And remember that the person who lands on a different side of that complexity isn’t the enemy. We’re all just doing the best we can with what we have for where we’re going.

Hey, thanks for creating this space with me today.

Whether or not you’re ready to dive into writing just yet, remember that the best authors show up fully, just as they are. That’s all it takes—and you’re already doing it.

Be sure to subscribe on Substack or wherever you listen to podcasts to catch every coaching moment to come. And when more of your book is ready to emerge, the space we made today will be here waiting for you.

And so will I.

Don’t worry. That doesn’t commit you to anything more than what you’re doing right in this moment. Because the best authors are simply people who show up as themselves, for themselves and for their readers.

Today, we’re making space for heroism.

Enjoying this space? It takes all of us to create it together! When you become a one-time or ongoing Momentum Partner, two things happen.

First, you get to join a small but growing group of folks who pop in for Office Hours twice a month to sort out their content and travel this journey together.

Second, you add to the Mutual Momentum fund, which helps to bring deeper development support to authors who need more than just space to get started.

You can create a one-time boost of Momentum by clicking the button below, or subscribe to keep the forward movement going for us all.

Mutual Momentum

We need to talk about writing.

We need to talk about what writing really is.

We need to talk about the things we have been made to believe writing is.

And we need to talk about it frequently, because too many of us are falling into the gaps between those two places.

We get the sense that we have something important to share—something that needs to take up space and be taken in slowly.

We work up the nerve to start gathering the pieces of that something together into one place.

And then, right when we’ve decided to answer this hero’s journey call to write—

We trip over the threshold.

In the Hero’s Journey story model, a threshold guardian stands between the hero and the start of their journey, testing how serious their commitment to this path really is.

If you’ve thought about submitting your book to “traditional” publishing, you might be picturing agents and editors here.

If you’ve thought about self-publishing or working with a hybrid or publishing services provider, you might be picturing all the people you have to pay.

Literal guardians standing between you and your vision.

And that’s probably not wrong. Not really.

But those guardians and their tests are easier to face than ever before.

For all but the last couple-dozen years of human history, authorship has been surrounded by practical limitations.

Storytelling could happen anywhere, but only those with paper and ink, access to printers, and the means to transport that printed material could capture those stories in book form.

The digital era changed all of that.

No more printing and packaging up manuscripts to mail to potential publishing partners.

No more traveling to the nearest print shop with a stack of handwritten pages for them to copy and bind.

No more loading up a buggy with copies of your book to cart from town to town.

Today, the words we write can be captured in permanent records with the click of a button.

That also means that technical barriers to entry have gotten so low for writing that we don’t see the internal barriers.

That’s why authors who already have an agent or have published books or other content can still get caught up in the same tangled mess as those who can only look sideways at their dream of maybe someday hopefully writing a book.

I say this with full confidence because I hear it every single day.

The same worries, fears, frustrations, and setbacks happen for everyone.

Those who have never shared a written word with another soul and those who write regularly to thousands all have moments where they wonder why they can’t. just. write.

After all, if we really do have this much access, this wide-open ability to reach the world with our writing, shouldn’t it also be easier? Shouldn’t we be able to just do it?

The other day, my friend and neighbor and daily co-conspirator Kim brought up Julian of Norwich—a woman from centuries ago who had herself walled into the recesses of a cathedral and did nothing but write for the rest of her life.

She was thinking about how much Julian’s writing impacted her, centuries later, and how remarkable it is that people in such difficult eras of history still made time to write. Still captured their thoughts. And somehow still impact us now, across all of that space and time.

“If they could write back then,” she said, “when they didn’t even have toilet paper, what’s my excuse??”

Kim said she wanted to be like Julian of Norwich someday, having written words that will live on beyond her.

The thing is, Kim has already published multiple books.

They sit on my shelf and hers, and who knows how many else besides. Which means she’s already done it. She has already written words that will live on beyond her.

It’s not unreasonable to imagine a reader a hundred years or so into the future wondering how on Earth (or any other planet) Kim of America was able to make space to create during such trying times.

By all external measurements, Kim is well beyond the threshold of her Heroic writing journey. She’s already faced the trials and reached the victories that she once dreamed might be possible.

Yet she’s still tripping over the same worry that she’s never going to be able to write like she wants to.

I could tell similar stories about almost anyone.

Poets and priests and parents.

CEOs and senior leaders and senior citizens.

Academics and artists and people who’d only ever consider themselves “average.”

It doesn’t matter where a person is coming from in life or in relationship to writing—when the words aren’t flowing, the worry looks the same.

I need to be more disciplined.

I need to be more dedicated.

I need to be more developed.

I need to be… more.

The funny thing is, if I told you more stories, you likely wouldn’t hear the similar worry. You’d hear the different circumstances.

You’d see all of the reasons that Kim is already Julian of Norwich or that poet is already skilled with language or that CEO has resources or that person has expertise or the other has the gift of time…

Our brains are so very good at holding onto stories that keep us small that we can elevate others all day long—build them up, encourage them, tell them they’re doing great *and actually believe it when we say it—*but when it comes to our own work? Our own selves? Well, that’s different.

And no matter how many good things you might see in each of those individuals, in their lowest moments, they’d also have a reason to tell you it’s different.

It’s not what you think.

I’m not what you think.

I need to be more.

I opened with the picture of writing as a Hero’s Journey and a threshold guardian moment that tests our commitment to the path.

But the guardians aren’t what we think they are—and I believe it’s because the journey itself isn’t what we think it is.

If the agent, publisher, and funding really were the guardian here—the test of whether or not we could really make it as an author—then all of these authors who have already done it before should sail right through this stage on books 2 and 3 and 4.

But they don’t.

If being a better writer, having more time available, having a bigger purpose were the ways to prove your commitment—then all of these authors who have time and accountability and well-received writing should have no worries at all.

But they do.

For all of our wildly different external circumstances, we keep landing on the same internal barriers because this is an internal process.

The decision to write happens long before we say it out loud.

The trials begin with the very first twinges of “I should write this down,” all of them in our own heads. In our own hearts.

If we can’t shake the gut-sense that we have something to share, the trials will only escalate—every distraction or anxiety getting louder and louder as the desire to write gets stronger and stronger.

By the time you’ve told someone directly that you’re writing—or planning to write, or hoping to, or thinking about it—you’re already a battle-scarred warrior.

You’ve proven to yourself that you’re committed to this path enough to speak it into existence.

In that sense, you’ve crossed the threshold.

But we have to be careful here.

If this really is an internal process, a Heroic journey inward, then external measurements aren’t enough. We can’t game the system by just saying out loud “I am going to write a book” and expect it to mean the battle is over.

I’ve seen too many programs press their authors into announcing they are writing in order to create some sense of outside accountability that is meant to keep the author going.

All it really creates is a PR boost for that program and unnecessary pressure for the author.

Remember, our brains are very good at telling stories that keep us small. So when we say we’re writing but still haven’t yet finished writing, it doesn’t take long to forget all those victories we’ve won along the way.

To forget why we’re fighting to bring these words to the world in the first place.

To forget what writing even is.

We think we’re still stuck at the threshold of the Hero’s Journey because we’re looking at the wrong journey.

The heroism of writing isn’t being done. It isn’t hitting a bestseller list or winning a prize or crafting the best lines or writing the most words the fastest or making the most money.

Those are all external measurements that serve a dying industry.

You are so much more than an industry, and so are the people you’re writing to serve.

The heroism of writing is believing that to be true.

Every time you choose to believe that your words are worth finding, even when it takes time, you’ve crossed the threshold.

Every time you choose to believe that someone out there needs what you have seen, lived, felt, thought, and learned—even if you don’t know who they are or how you’ll find them—you’ve crossed the threshold.

Every time you choose to believe that you are worth taking up space and time—while you’re creating and after you’ve created—you’ve crossed the threshold.

The truth is that there are a million heroic victories along this journey, because each one comes with a new battle.

The part of the world that only wants our words if it can extract “value” from them is loud.

It’s pervasive.

It teaches us from grade school that our thoughts only count if they fit the mold. It tells us our words only matter if they can be measured—how quickly they arrive, how easily they can be read, how profitable they can be made.

It tells us that “author” is a job we have to apply for, and “writing” is the work that proves us worthy.

So every time you believe you’re already worthy, already matter, already count, already hold intrinsic value that you are willing to generously share—the hero in you faces the shadow in you.

The part that whispers everything that the world is screaming, and twists it into things that sound so much easier to believe.

It’s easy to believe we have something to prove.

It’s hard to believe we have something to share.

It’s even harder to believe we’re capable of sharing it.

I won’t tell you here that you should just believe, because that’s not any more realistic than you telling yourself you should just write.

What I can tell you is that you, and this journey, and writing itself are so much bigger than any external measurement could possibly be.

Writing isn’t the word count for the day or how fast you can draft.

Writing isn’t the name on the front cover or the author talks you dream of giving (sweet dreams for some, nightmares for others).

Writing isn’t the rough draft or the final polish.

Writing isn’t the product at the end or the placement on the shelf.

Writing isn’t the skill. Writing isn’t the details. Writing isn’t even the story.

Writing is all of it and none of it and something none of us have named yet.

Writing is a mystery, but not in the sense that it’s some mystical thing that no one can access. It’s a mystery in the way that love is a mystery. Or birth. Death. Awe. Wonder.

Writing is just the word we use when something inside of us knows it’s meant for someone else to see.

It’s an internal process.

It’s an ongoing battle.

It’s a thousand heroic journeys won and lost every single day.

Wherever you are right now—whether this moment in time feels like a heroic win or like you’re caught in another threshold—I want you to know that I see you.

I see you in your struggle, and I see you on your way to so many victories.

I see you standing alongside countless others on this same journey. You are not alone, and at the same time, you are the only you who has ever lived. Your story, your thoughts, your words cannot be replicated because they can only come from you.

No one can beat you to this story, no one can take it from you, and no one can do it for you.

I see your pull to write, and I honor whatever it takes to do that and whatever it will look like when it’s done.

Because as long as you show up fully to that work, it doesn’t matter whether the final result is a book or a blog or a letter to a friend.

It’s the connection that matters.

And in the moments where it’s all just too much to hold on your own, allow me to hold the belief for you:

The world is already better because you are in it, and it only gets better the more time and space you take up.

You are already enough, without anything to prove.

You are already sharing your gifts, whether or not they’re in book form.

You are the only you who has ever lived, and whatever you choose to leave in your wake will ripple out for centuries to come.

You don’t have to believe any of this yet. Not fully. Not all the time.

Just keep showing up for yourself and your eventual reader.

Even in the moments where nothing can be measured and the proof is hard to find.

Even if “reader” doesn’t mean “audience” and “book” turns out to be something else.

That, I believe, is true authorship.

It is heroic.

It is writing.

And it is so very good.

Hey, thanks for creating this space with me today.

Whether or not you’re ready to dive into writing just yet, remember that the best authors show up fully, just as they are. That’s all it takes—and you’re already doing it.

Be sure to subscribe on Substack or wherever you listen to podcasts to catch every coaching moment to come. And when more of your book is ready to emerge, the space we made today will be here waiting for you.

And so will I.

If you want to follow along or jump ahead, pocket-sized copies are available on Amazon, and every Substack subscriber gets a fillable PDF copy as well.

Today, we’re reading from: Diving In.

Enjoying this space? It takes all of us to create it together! When you become a one-time or ongoing Momentum Partner, two things happen.

First, you get to join a small but growing group of folks who pop in for Office Hours twice a month to sort out their content and travel this journey together.

Second, you add to the Mutual Momentum fund, which helps to bring deeper development support to authors who need more than just space to get started.

You can create a one-time boost of Momentum by clicking the button below, or subscribe to keep the forward movement going for us all.

Mutual Momentum

We’ve spent so much time on structural pieces and naming and mapping and plotting that it could be really easy to spin yourself into oblivion and never come back.

I don’t mean come back to me, either. This is written as a summary of my process and will be more effective in partnership, yes. But my genuine interest is in seeing you unlock your ideas.

I mean it’s easy to spin yourself away from your writing.

If ten other famous authors have talked about your topic…

If you don’t have the tenure or time that others have…

If you don’t get the story down just right…

If, if, if…

There will always be a reason to keep planning and never write if you want to look for that reason.

So the last thing I want is for you to feel like this booklet and process is a required step, from start to finish, before you can write a word. Nope.

We’re unlocking doors here. As soon as you’ve got a way in, take it.

Tell your editor brain to trust that what you’ve validated so far will serve you later.

Then go experiment.

Not finding that door? Here are a few you might try.

• Do you have a really clear takeaway for the book? If not, it’ll be hard to attach it to anything without meandering. Try pulling back to name it clearly OR just let yourself free write for a while to see what comes up.

• Do you have a really clear audience? Does it need to be refined?

• Are you showing up as your most authentic self? Are you posturing or hiding in a way that might hold you back?

• Do you need to create some added layers of safety?

• Do you speak more freely than you write? Consider talking out your work with a friend or colleague, then mocking up outlines and notes from that conversation (or transcript). Writing can be just as effective when jotting down ideas here and there as it is when you’re sitting down to work-work.

• Do you have a “masterwork” or comp to refer to? Try some scaffolding exercises from your favorite author’s outline or introduction. Try some from an author you don’t love. See what the new perspective opens up for you.

• Finish this sentence: When I talk to someone about this topic, I find that I often…

• Create this reminder for yourself, then refer to it when you’re feeling stuck: When I am flowing on this topic, I am often driven by…

  • Curiosity, always asking more questions and digging for more answers

  • Expertise, confident about sharing something that you know will help someone

  • Experience, passionate about relaying wins and cautions that will build the reader up

  • Hope, cautiously optimistic about what doors a shift in perspective, change in behavior, and greater awareness could open for the reader
    

• Don’t forget you can jump in and out and around your project—paintings don’t happen from one side of the canvas to the other. If one section feels blocked, check your table and try another.

• Do you have too many answers in your book? Have you created a scenario for yourself where you have to be the expert when really you just want to explore? Check your outline for areas where it feels unnecessarily restrictive or strict.

• Do you have too few answers, when you know you actually could be more direct?

• Try writing the section you’re interested in (but stuck on) in a different style or genre. Get more prescriptive. Get more narrative. Be a scientist. Be a sci-fi novelist. Be a poet. Step outside of your plan for just a minute, get some fresh perspective, and see what comes up.

Hey, thanks for creating this extra space with me today.

To get the rest of the workbook right away, look for You Don’t Get to the Ocean by Accident on Amazon, or subscribe to get a free copy right now.

And as always, whenever your book is ready to emerge, the space we made today will be here waiting for you.

And so will I.

Don’t worry. That doesn’t commit you to anything more than what you’re doing right in this moment. Because the best authors are simply people who show up as themselves, for themselves and for their readers.

Today, we’re making space for posture.

Enjoying this space? It takes all of us to create it together! When you become a one-time or ongoing Momentum Partner, two things happen.

First, you get to join a small but growing group of folks who pop in for Office Hours twice a month to sort out their content and travel this journey together.

Second, you add to the Mutual Momentum fund, which helps to bring deeper development support to authors who need more than just space to get started.

You can create a one-time boost of Momentum by clicking the button below, or subscribe to keep the forward movement going for us all.

Mutual Momentum

Growing up, my grandma used to put her hand on my back every time she walked by me. She’d gently remind me to straighten my shoulders, and I would.

She’d tell me to stand up straight, and I’d say “I am.”

Both of us knew full well that those shoulders were going to sink right back again as soon as she walked away.

Both of us repeated the ritual anyway.

I wasn’t trying to hunch. I just didn’t know how to hold my posture.

And for all of the times she tried to press my collarbones and upper back into proper alignment, she didn’t know how to help me know.

Fast forward 30-some years, and one of my kids came home from a dance class that a substitute teacher had led, saying, “She showed me how to fix my posture to help this one move be better and to keep me from hurting later in life. She said she stands like I do and had to learn it too.”

Ballet is a precision craft, and my kid wasn’t trying to stand improperly.

Her other teachers likely hadn’t missed the error, either.

They just didn’t know how to help her correct it.

This is how I feel about positioning your book—a word that we’re borrowing from marketing spaces, where it can seem as simple to “position” as it is to “stand up straight.”

Getting this posture right helps you make the right moves. It prevents pain in the future. And not enough people, processes, or services know how to help you get it right.

The reality is that all posture is much more complex than it seems—in your body and your book.

The visible tell of rounded shoulders isn’t a shoulder move at all, but a sign of muscles in your back that aren’t quite strong enough or practiced enough in pulling the scapula backward to hold your upper body fully upright.

When the upper back loosens up, the shoulders tighten, doing their absolute best to keep you from falling over, even if it means pulling everything forward a little (or a lot).

Then the core gets involved—or maybe its weakness starts the whole cycle. In either case, the loose back and tight front of the upper torso is mirrored in your core. A literal, reversed mirror image: The lower back tightens and the abs loosen to counterbalance the upper body, creating curves in all the wrong places.

And because your limbs are, unfortunately, directly connected to your torso, all of your movements are then skewed by the backwards balance your body is ingeniously holding, with no regard for the cost to those movements or the future integrity of the body itself.

All that matters to your subconscious muscle tension is staying upright in this moment.

Not precise ballet moves. Not minimizing pain. And not, as it turns out, the ability to safely carry a baby with abs that can hold it all together.

The latter is what landed me in daily physical therapy during my last pregnancy, and how I finally learned what “straighten your shoulders” really meant.

True posture was a constant, conscious tension that I had to check and re-check as I moved through my day.

So when I say that we have borrowed the term positioning from marketing, I mean we aren’t just straightening our proverbial shoulders by naming a target reader and a few comps.

The posture of a book is more complex than that.

There’s more to think about than just staying upright in the market.

It’s placement to be found, tension to be held, and strength to be built.

And it needs to be checked and re-checked as we move through the development process.

We can think of the reader as the shoulders and upper back in this scenario. It’s the first thing most people will notice when a book’s core positioning is off.

It’s the box everyone knows to check, and in a lot of cases, the standard approach will get you there:

• Who are you speaking to?

• Where can you find them?

• Where will they find you?

We can extrapolate a lot out of those answers, and doing so will get us a much stronger book than when an author “doesn’t really care if anyone reads it,” or “just hopes one person will be helped,” or “really just wanted to accomplish the feat of writing, period.”

But shallow reader positioning puts all of the tension on the forward-facing part of the book.

That is, the part of the book that we might use to sell the book like we’d sell a product.

It’s definitely the part the industry wants to use to better understand its own product and market base.

It’s also the part that can easily confuse a “reader” with an “audience,” and really means but won’t often outright say, “buyers, whether or not they read.”

When that’s as far as your reader positioning goes, it’s far too easy to lose sight of any positioning at all.

Before you know it, you’re writing to anyone who might ever buy your book, afraid to limit your book’s potential by narrowing its scope.

Meanwhile, just like realizing just how hard it is to actually pinch your scapulae together, there is another side to consider.

The reader’s side.

Not readers plural. The singular reader you most want to impact.

• What are they looking for?

• Where have they looked?

• Why will they be impacted, and what do they need to stick around long enough for that impact to be felt?

In other words, how are they showing up to the book?

What kind of posture are they holding as they step into this experience?

When we treat the reader as an active participant in the experience that this book will become, they enter into the writing room with us.

They are part of every decision that we make.

And when that writer’s room in our head is home to one or two of the people we most want this book to impact, that’s manageable. Helpful, even. It stops us from attempting the impossible task of appeasing every potential buyer and brings our focus back to what really matters.

Hidden beneath all of this, just like the body’s core strength or weaknesses, is another vital component of positioning.

It’s how we know who the most impacted reader is and how we measure what “really matters” in the first place.

Author positioning—a term that marketing folks balk at and I rarely see named, but one I can’t imagine developing a book without.

If we so easily confuse “reader” with “buyer,” it’s not terribly surprising that we’d also confuse “author” for “seller.”

And in a product-oriented space, the seller’s visibility only matters as far as it will sell that product.

If how you got here, what matters to you, and how you relate to the product doesn’t move it off the shelf, it’s not part of your market positioning.

But the experience of a book is much closer to a prolonged, asynchronous conversation than a consumable good.

And in this era of hyper connectivity, we are all aware of and even picky about who we choose to share our conversational space with.

When a book is positioned for the market only, that pickiness might come into play enough to make the author’s bio something that matters. The industry loves to ask “Why are you the one to write this book?” And I’ve spoken to so many authors who are fretting over their credentials, wondering if they have enough outward signals to immediately engender trust with a publisher, against a competitor, or for an audience.

This status-oriented focus is the lower back pain of book creation.

It’s tension that’s overcompensating for an under-developed core.

You are more than your bio.

More than your accomplishments.

More than your status.

You are every experience you’ve ever had. Every process you’ve codified. Every conversation you’ve held. Every failure. Every success. Every interaction, experiment, and observation.

You are so much more than anything any of us can measure.

And the paradox of this process is that you are simultaneously all of that and also just a slice of it.

The same is true of all of our interactions—you wouldn’t show up to a crying child with the same posture as you’d hold in a board room meeting.

In either of those scenarios, your brain would have the whole soup of you available to draw from when you need to empathize, explain, or extrapolate. But before you stepped into the room, you’d have made an intentional choice about how you’re going to carry yourself. What parts of you are going to lead the way. What energy is going to carry the interaction.

Your book—and your reader—deserve that same level of intention.

This is not easy.

I remember crying during that stretch of physical therapy, wishing that something as simple as sitting on the couch didn’t require so much intention and focus. I was consciously using muscles I’d never even thought about before, with the literal added pressure of a baby compounding the work, and it hurt.

Not only did it turn simple tasks into multi-step movements with hyper-awareness and care, but it also meant I had to choose to do something uncomfortable. Painful, even.

The same is true for your positioning.

Being intentional about how you’re showing up to your book, and clear about how your reader is meeting you there, does create a lot of ease.

You have better measurements of success. You have stronger constraints and better decision making frameworks. You prevent the future pain of misalignment.

You’ll also remove the bravado, status, and fantasies about authorship that the industry sells to us—and that’s where the pain comes in.

Even when authors are asking me if they’re good enough or accomplished enough to write that book, there’s a certain amount of security in having a perceived authority confirm that you’ve checked all the right boxes.

If you’re showing up as an accomplished academic or a successful CEO, you can let the bio lead the way. You can keep those status markers front and center, and never have to unpack the challenges, vulnerabilities, or reality that lives behind them.

But when you get honest about how you want and need to show up to this book, and it’s not an easy box to check…

Or it’s a little more personal than you’re used to being…

Or it’s not a tidy solution like your bio might suggest you’d offer…

Or the perspective is just counter cultural enough to make you worry about how it’ll be received…

Or what you really want out of this book is something new and unfamiliar to you…

Or, or, or…

There’s not as much left to hide behind.

There’s tension to hold.

There’s discomfort, even pain, to work through.

But we do it because our proverbial limbs are attached to this core.

How we move forward in the world, toward the things that matter most to us, will be affected by this intention.

That’s where the third key component of core positioning comes in.

Reader positioning tells us who we’re communicating with and how they’re showing up to that interaction.

Author positioning tells us how we’re showing up to that interaction and how it shapes what we’re communicating.

Book positioning tells us what that interaction is meant to be.

And yes, it could include the expected marketing-oriented components of book positioning like genre and comparative titles.

But we’re still not trying to sell a product.

So asking about other titles is asking about other conversations that other authors are having with this reader.

• How are those conversations playing out?

• What is missing for this reader?

• What do they still need to hear?

Asking about genre is really asking about the signals this reader is looking for.

• What kind of reader are they?

• What kind of content is going to move them onto the first page?

• What will carry them through to the end?

Naming the book’s position isn’t about placing it on the shelf. It’s about placing it in the context of this author and this reader in this moment in time.

It’s honoring everything you’ve gone through to offer this experience up to a noisy world, and respecting the time that a real, live person will offer you when your signal calls them in.

It’s making sure the arms and legs of your larger movement are anchored with intention, strength, and just enough tension to stay in balance.

This is worth doing well.

It’s worth checking and re-checking. It’s worth the discomfort.

It’s why my core positioning work takes up multiple pages in the book development playground I’ve been building this year.

When I do that work directly with people, we spend at least a month, sometimes a couple of them, digging into the book that’s on the page and the vision of the book that’s still in their head.

And it’s why I recommend we do that work first, no matter how much more you think you need to name before you “need an editor,” or how close to the finish line it might seem you are.

Because it’s not enough to check the boxes, just like it’s not enough to straighten your shoulders.

We are dancing dances and birthing work into this world that will require our stability to run deep, right down to our core.

The best time to find that stability was a long time ago.

The second best time is now.

Hey, thanks for creating this space with me today.

Whether or not you’re ready to dive into writing just yet, remember that the best authors show up fully, just as they are. That’s all it takes—and you’re already doing it.

Be sure to subscribe on Substack or wherever you listen to podcasts to catch every coaching moment to come. And when more of your book is ready to emerge, the space we made today will be here waiting for you.

And so will I.

Don’t worry. That doesn’t commit you to anything more than what you’re doing right in this moment. Because the best authors are simply people who show up as themselves, for themselves and for their readers.

Today, we’re making space for words that belong.

Enjoying this space? It takes all of us to create it together! When you become a one-time or ongoing Momentum Partner, two things happen.

First, you get to join a small but growing group of folks who pop in for Office Hours twice a month to sort out their content and travel this journey together.

Second, you add to the Mutual Momentum fund, which helps to bring deeper development support to authors who need more than just space to get started.

You can create a one-time boost of Momentum by clicking the button below, or subscribe to keep the forward movement going for us all.

Mutual Momentum

For the past several months, I’ve been working with the incredible Hussein al-Baiaty over at Rising Authors to get my new website up and running.

But the website was just the output. What we were really spending all that time on was what the website should contain.

Not should as in “supposed to.” Should as in “belongs.”

The reason I worked with Hussein on this project and why I send so many authors to him for their post-publish marketing, is that he treats a platform as more than a product.

It’s a place where connections are made, and our work is to make sure the connections are properly grounded.

Anyone could make my website look nice, hold together, and check all the boxes for the typical ad-spend-style marketing.

Honestly, what I had done on my own had gotten me that far.

But I needed Hussein to help me develop it into a place where the right connections could be made.

It’s the same for your book.

Anyone can make a nice-looking, mostly coherent, checks-all-the-boxes book.

But if it doesn’t make the right connections, it still won’t feel done. It won’t feel right. It won’t belong.

It took a little while for me to unwind all of the “supposed to” language in order to get to the words that I’d actually say to an actual person who actually needed my help.

I kept trying to name programs—Anchored Author, Clear Direction, [insert any number of wonky terminology here]. Things that sounded official or complete or good. Things that I tripped over every time I tried to explain them. Things that had to be explained.

Meanwhile, all I really needed to do was acknowledge the work that actually gets done when the right connections are made.

The book is developed. The author is developed. And we know that it’s done when the core position is in place, the book is structured soundly, the author has been coached thoroughly, and the words have been edited fully.

That’s it. Positioning, structuring, coaching, editing.

The words aren’t unique, but they don’t have to be unique. They have to be clear. They have to create the right conditions for connection. They have to belong.

Again, it’s the same for your book.

The clearer you can be about what you actually want to say, to the person you want to say it, the better conditions you’ll create for connection with that person.

What’s wild is that when we’re not trying to make our projects unique or clever, they become unique anyway.

It’s the trying that messes us up, usually because we’re trying to create polished, finished products. Will it look nice? Will it hold together? Will it check the boxes?

How will my website stack up against competitors? Where will my book sit on the shelf? Will the website convert? Will the book be a page-turner?

But none of those measurements create space for me to be me and you to be you and our paths to intersect.

Connections do happen under those conditions, but they’re usually incidental.

For those of us creating for something bigger than the writing itself, incidental outcomes are a gamble we can’t afford to make.

If we’re going to divert our resources—time, energy, money—away from that larger purpose and into something as significant as a book or a website, it needs to be saturated in intention and developed with care.

The outcomes still won’t be guaranteed, but at least the conditions will be right.

Alchemy like that happens cyclically. We find the words that belong when we know how we belong, and that makes space for readers to belong—and making a place for ourselves and our readers gives us the words.

Left to our own devices, what could be a growth spiral can quickly turn into a spin-out.

It takes outside perspective and a steadying hand to gently pull us forward—away from the genres, the competitors, the templates, the polish—coaching us toward our larger purpose.

Then, when we circle back around to positioning for the third time, or we’re still editing a year later, or the structure gets an upgrade well after we thought it was complete, we’re not worried about going backwards.

We’re on our way to a place where we belong.

Hey, thanks for creating this space with me today.

Whether or not you’re ready to dive into writing just yet, remember that the best authors show up fully, just as they are. That’s all it takes—and you’re already doing it.

Be sure to subscribe on Substack or wherever you listen to podcasts to catch every coaching moment to come. And when more of your book is ready to emerge, the space we made today will be here waiting for you.

And so will I.

P.S. If you’re already on the other side of book creation, Hussein is hosting a small, focused retreat for authors who need to get their visibility foundation in place (or bolstered). It looks like an incredible time with an invaluable output. Check it out here.

Over the last few weeks, I opened up a Clarity Spectrum Mini Session as part of my site launch celebration and a way to nerd out about book types with anyone who needed quick traction.

The numbers:

• 11 of you raised your hand (thank you!)

• 9 book types + variants to sort books into

• 2 key questions that do it

• 1 Purple, 2 Teal, 2 Indigo, 2 Magenta, 2 Yellow, 1 Red (and 1 to go!)

(I’m keeping a few spots open at the launch price if you want to grab yours.)

Every last one of those calls has been incredible.

We’ve surprised ourselves with book types we didn’t see coming.

We’ve narrowed down a ton of ideas to one clear one.

We’ve named big obstacles and big wins.

We’ve validated. Outlined. Set intentions. Laughed and celebrated and dreamed and got. work. done.

One thing that became super clear across those sessions: The next step doesn’t have to be a big one.

Sometimes it can’t be.

And just because a thing is getting clearer doesn’t mean it’s getting easier.

People say “just take baby steps” as though babies aren’t throwing themselves at the ground with uncooperative limbs.

Those baby steps around a new or newly reshaped idea can be messy.

And they tend to happen before it’s time to fully invest in a long-term project. Or when you thought you were almost done but now aren’t so sure. Or when you’re just plain stuck and can’t get the next moves locked in.

So instead of only working people into heavy development engagements without any sort of middle ground, I added one more layer of support—a focused, 90-minute session called the Book Clarity Intensive.

In it, we’ll turn the kind of book you’re writing into a roadmap: identifying exactly where it’s stuck (or might get stuck), mapping the bigger picture around it, and naming clear next moves with the supportive infrastructure to help you follow through.

It includes time for me to read a sample of your work so I know exactly where you’re at right now.

And it leaves you with a custom portal based on your book type that we’ll start filling out together live on the call.

I was going to say my books are closed for April, but a small number of Book Clarity Intensives will be available for anyone stuck in the in between.

If your book has been >this close< to coming together for a while now, this is a good place to take it.

You can read more or book your session here:
developyourbook.com/services

If it’s not for you but someone else comes to mind, send them my way.

No one needs to be stuck alone.

And not all unsticking happens at the level of intensive partnerships.

Thank you, as always, for creating these spaces with me.

Talk soon (new episode coming Monday!),

~B

P.S. April Office Hours dates & links for Momentum Partners

If you’ve joined me in shaping this space as a paid subscriber, you’re not only contributing to the Mutual Momentum fund, but you’re also invited to join me twice a month for AMA office hours.

Read more

Don’t worry. That doesn’t commit you to anything more than what you’re doing right in this moment. Because the best authors are simply people who show up as themselves, for themselves and for their readers.

Today, we’re making space for connection.

Enjoying this space? It takes all of us to create it together! When you become a one-time or ongoing Momentum Partner, two things happen.

First, you get to join a small but growing group of folks who pop in for Office Hours twice a month to sort out their content and travel this journey together.

Second, you add to the Mutual Momentum fund, which helps to bring deeper development support to authors who need more than just space to get started.

You can create a one-time boost of Momentum by clicking the button below, or subscribe to keep the forward movement going for us all.

Mutual Momentum

You and your experience are worth witnessing.

This is a true statement, no matter who you are or what your experience is.

You matter.

Your story matters.

Choosing to share any part of yourself—from ideas to lived experience to insights—is a generous gift that holds intrinsic value whether or not it creates a return.

And if you’re writing a Magenta Signature Connection book type, this belief is the cornerstone of your entire project.

If you haven’t met the Clarity Spectrum of book types yet, it’s the framework I use to position books based on what they intend to deliver.

We do that with a 2-question quiz that gets you to your core book type (knowing that there are blended types if you’re feeling extra nuanced about it), and a development process that reflects the unique experience of each one.

All of which has been made possible by countless hours spent in story analysis, studying narrative theory, and testing the frameworks in real time. And that’s all made worth it by the countless hours saved in coaching when authors are able to see their books clearer and faster because of it.

By focusing on what you want from the book as well as what you want to offer your reader through the book, we’re better able to map the experience of the book.

And a Magenta experience is centered around the value of emotional resonance for its own sake.

If you picture a color spectrum as a progression moving from the bright red that’s easiest for our eyes to take in to the murkier purples all the way on the other end, Magenta sits as far into the complexity as it can go.

That isn’t because Red types can’t hold nuance or because Magenta has to be heavy, either. Just like your book, the spectrum is built on two intentions: what you’re offering, and how the reader will experience it. And on that farthest end, the reader is contributing just as much to that experience as you are.

All of the Signature types—Indigo, Purple, and Magenta—have that almost hands-off energy.

Our job, in these cases, is to create the right conditions for an experience.

It’s like we’re setting up all the wires and switches that are necessary for whatever we’ve intended, but the way the reader shows up to those conditions will either complete the circuit… or not. Either way, they will determine their final experience.

So when the intended experience is Magenta—a deep sense of connection around some specific emotional resonance—we can create the conditions for emotional resonance and the opportunity for connection, but that’s it.

From there, all we can do is trust that we did our part and that the right reader will find those connection points and complete the circuit.

This requires a level of audacious vulnerability that’s unmatched by almost any other type of communication.

Whether your Magenta is a book, a speech, or a phone call to a friend, sharing your experience requires you to take up space with that experience.

It requires you to value yourself enough to do so, and to trust the other person enough to hold it.

That’s hard enough in our 1:1 interactions. Turn it into a book, where the space you’re taking up expands and the other person is invisible and might actually be a lot of people who might not all be trustworthy…well, you can see why I call it “audacious” vulnerability.

The danger of being in this position is that we can easily mistake vulnerability for oversharing.

I wonder if you’ve ever been in a conversation where you can feel yourself oversharing details but can’t really stop?

I’ve seen it in “life of the party” types, blowing up a story’s details to silly proportions just to hold the floor.

And I’ve seen it in more anxious, uncomfortable types—spilling a bunch of details almost involuntarily, out of discomfort from having the floor.

So it’s not surprising that this same impulse often takes over in bigger ways when we’re taking up bigger space in the form of a book.

Not surprising, but definitely dangerous.

It can mislead a Magenta author in one of two directions:

The discomfort can make us shrink back, sharing less about our experiences in an effort to take up less space.

Or it can make us overshare, thinking it’s details we need to offer up instead of the experience that came from them.

In either case, the result is a missed connection.

The vulnerability of a Magenta book is not trauma dumping. It’s not using your reader as your therapist. It’s not exploiting yourself for the sake of a “good” story.

It’s the ability to honor your own experience as a human experience.

That’s it.

It’s you taking up space with your story—the real one, not the performative one you think will entertain an audience.

And it’s doing so with or without the validation

of actually meeting the person

that you know in your bones is out there,

hoping to be seen in that experience as well.

While all authors should grow into some level of audacity throughout their development process, not all books fit this Signature Connection type. (You can find out yours by taking the quiz at DevelopYourBook.com)

If you do think this book type represents the connection you want to create, here are a few things you need to know:

First, this kind of book feels exposing—but it shouldn’t feel completely raw or unresolved. Write from what’s already been integrated in a way that feels like a gift rather than a risk.

Second, you’ll likely feel pressure to explain yourself. To justify why this experience matters. To overly contextualize yourself for the reader. To soften.

But.

Making something palatable for everyone removes the connection potential for the right person.

Identify the core truth that the story is here to convey, then do that.

Pulling your punches won’t make it any easier, but it will make it less satisfying for you and your reader.

Third, your Magenta book might blend with other types.

You might offer gentle guidance alongside your story, or pair your personal experience with some sharper cultural insights. Some truly excellent books have been built this way.

The most important thing to do with a Magenta book is to identify the core—creating connection through emotional resonance—and prioritize it. Not to make new, rigid boxes that keep you from sharing your intended message.

Last but not at all least, be prepared for the right readers to form deep bonds with this work—and you by proxy—even if you never meet them.

Set boundaries anyway.

Be prepared to manage your energy in every stage, from drafting to publishing and beyond.

There’s one more thing I want to call out. One that applies to lots of authors, but Magenta in particular:

The biggest challenge here isn’t the craft or skill of storytelling. It’s permission to take up space on the page.

So many forms of communication ask us to say less or prove more.

If you have any sort of experience in academic writing, business language, or web content, you have been trained to compress. To get to the point. To make your readers care and your words count.

But Magenta books need the opposite.

They need room. They need you to slow down and let the reader settle into the experience with you.

This book is a gift to yourself, allowing your story to be seen and honored for what it is.

But it’s also a gift to the right reader, who wants to be seen in their connection to that experience.

They need to know they’re not alone, and that only happens when you give the moments of your story room to land.

So as you’re stretching into the spaces of this book, remember why you’re doing it.

For the version of you who lived through this moment and deserves to be honored.

For the reader who’s living through it now and needs to know someone understands.

You might not be catering to a broader audience who wants something palatable and entertaining, but you are providing a service for someone who desperately needs it.

You don’t ever have to meet them for that to be true.

You don’t have to perform as a storyteller for it to be felt.

You already hold the magic. The lived experience. The integrated truth. The willingness to be seen.

The book is just a container.

Hey, thanks for creating this space with me today.

Whether or not you’re ready to dive into writing just yet, remember that the best authors show up fully, just as they are. That’s all it takes—and you’re already doing it.

Be sure to subscribe on Substack or wherever you listen to podcasts to catch every coaching moment to come. And when more of your book is ready to emerge, the space we made today will be here waiting for you.

And so will I.

Don’t worry. That doesn’t commit you to anything more than what you’re doing right in this moment. Because the best authors are simply people who show up as themselves, for themselves and for their readers.

Today, we’re making space for noticing.

Enjoying this space? It takes all of us to create it together! When you become a one-time or ongoing Momentum Partner, two things happen.

First, you get to join a small but growing group of folks who pop in for Office Hours twice a month to sort out their content and travel this journey together.

Second, you add to the Mutual Momentum fund, which helps to bring deeper development support to authors who need more than just space to get started.

You can create a one-time boost of Momentum by clicking the button below, or subscribe to keep the forward movement going for us all.

Mutual Momentum

The first time I shared the material in this episode, I couldn’t read it out loud.

I had to send it as an email alone, because I couldn’t quite make myself say the words that follow:

My author, my friend, had died.

I had the honor of working with Will Keiper for the last several years of his life, which neither of us knew would be the case when we met.

He simply had a lot to say, and he spent all of his time saying it.

At the beginning of our work on The Power of Noticing, he talked about how this book was one thing but his next would be another.

Gradually, almost reluctantly, that “other” type of book blended into this one, and we now know how important that was. There wasn’t ever going to be another book.

In a few moments, you’ll hear directly from Will about the experience of writing that last book, recorded a month into post-publish territory—and a month into borrowed time, according to the prognosis he’d been given.

Before we go any further, I want you to know that it’s okay if this one’s too heavy to sit with. If for any reason you don’t want to continue on, I completely understand.

If you’re still with me, I’d like you to meet Will.

He and I had worked together on several books before this one.

His name was always exciting to see in my inbox—usually with a request like “can you make some time for me on…” in the subject line, with a specific date, an attached document, and an exciting new breakthrough to sort out.

The Power of Noticing came with a lot of breakthroughs.

It also came with a surprise diagnosis of cancer, multiple rounds of chemo, the assumption that the battle was over, and a shocking resurgence of the disease with a sudden three-month prognosis—well before the book was complete.

The tension was wild. We balanced taking our time to let his book emerge as it needed to, alongside the race to ensure he actually saw his book enter the world before he left it.

Each time we spoke, he told me about the miles he was walking and how great he felt, all things considered.

We knew when he could work around his “foggy days” with chemo and when he required rest.

And he had a team of supporters around him, reading along, offering insights, and shuffling his words from development to production—leap-frog style—until it finally made it to print.

That was in September. In October, we had the conversation you’re about to hear excerpts from.

Then, just before I published those excerpts the first time—probably around the time I had the thought that I should check in on how he’s doing—Will left this iteration of his life.

I have no doubt that he went on revising himself and his work on some quantum level somewhere. Maybe, in part, right here in moments like these.

Will was so prolific with the words he wanted to write, and so efficient at doing so, I also have no doubt more books would have emerged if he’d had more time.

He thought so too.

He often said that “someday” he’d write something more personal than the how-to, leadership-driven books he’d been drawn toward for so long.

But when it came down to the wire, he didn’t let “someday” stop him.

As this book took its inevitable turn toward raw vulnerability and new-to-him depths, he followed the path.

He trusted what was inside of him.

He trusted what he knew his readers would need.

He trusted me and his team as we encouraged and supported him through this more challenging topic.

He trusted that his own perspective was his most valuable expertise.

And he wrote.

He showed up.

Fully.

Just as he was, chemo and all.

And that, as I remind you all every single week, is what the best authors are made of.

This is why we write.

Through tears, through chemo, through imperfections and vulnerabilities.

Not to produce. Not to perform. Not even to perfect.

We write because the slow medicine of books heals us—body and soul—on a collective level that lasts far longer than we do.

Thank you again, Will, for sharing so many doses of healing over the years.

I hope you’re resting well.

We’ll take it from here.

On Taking His Time

~7 minutes

On Writing through Chemo

~4 minutes

On Books being One Thing

~5 minutes

On Going Deep with Experience

~8 minutes

On Writing with Three Months to Live

~8 minutes

Hey, thanks for creating this space with us today.

Whether or not you’re ready to dive into writing just yet, remember that the best authors show up fully, just as they are. That’s all it takes—and you’re already doing it.

Be sure to subscribe on Substack or wherever you listen to podcasts to catch every coaching moment to come. And when more of your book is ready to emerge, the space we made today will be here waiting for you.

And so will I.

We freaking MADE IT, friends.

It’s funny how things like that happen. So slow for so long, then over all at once.

My branding/website project has felt that way too. I’ve spent so long adjusting, refining, sorting, naming, creating, and otherwise slogging through this thing that I have often wondered what it was that sent me to this impossible purgatory.

Until this week, when I got a sneak peek from my coach and developer, and it looks…done.

Like, I-can’t-wait-to-share-it done.

No-more-apologetic-shrugs done.

Owning-its-awesomeness done.

Out of nowhere.

Books do that too.

I witnessed it just this week, in a project that had been progressing, but still had miles to go. Then all of a sudden, a burst of energy and insight took the author all the way to the finish line.

I had just told him on our previous call that he might need to expect a late 2026 release date, and that it would have been just fine for his goals.

Now we are looking at this summer.

Unlike the movements of the sun, this kind of progress isn’t predictable.

But it is reliable.

That is, it’s reliable when you’re in the right spaces.

If you stay hidden away in a windowless room, the sun never comes back.

If you’re looking in the wrong places for progress, your breakthrough will be elusive, too.

To some degree, the episodes I create for us here are a way to look toward the light.

They are reminders, strategies, techniques, and encouragements meant to pull you back into alignment with the thing that pulled you into this space in the first place.

But sometimes, it’s not enough to just know.

Sometimes, you need guidance and perspective from someone who lives in the sun 24/7.

That’s what it took for my website.

I’d gotten to a certain point of “done” on my own, but without coaching around my language and development for the implementation, I’d still be stuck.

Eventually, I’d have made it out to the light. But it wouldn’t be this week. And it wouldn’t have come with the same perspective that my developer was able to provide.

And while I won’t take away from the work my author did before we met and throughout our time together, our coaching and development container served as an accelerant.

It gave him the guidance and perspective he needed to keep moving toward that “sun” of a finished project. And when it finally hit, it was brilliant.

So as a new month opens up, I’m repeating my ongoing refrain of “don’t stay stuck alone.”

Get on my calendar.

Grab a strategy session to lock in one of the few spots I hold open for deep work, or grab a next steps diagnostic to get a glimpse of the light.

Or just reply.

Let me know what’s feeling heavy these days.

After all, you’ve made it this far. It’d be a shame to keep all that brilliance hidden away in the dark.

Talk soon,

~B

P.S. For my Momentum Partners:

Read more

If you want to follow along or jump ahead, pocket-sized copies are available on Amazon, and every Substack subscriber gets a fillable PDF copy as well.

Today, we’re reading from: Using the Table of Content.

Enjoying this space? It takes all of us to create it together! When you become a one-time or ongoing Momentum Partner, two things happen.

First, you get to join a small but growing group of folks who pop in for Office Hours twice a month to sort out their content and travel this journey together.

Second, you add to the Mutual Momentum fund, which helps to bring deeper development support to authors who need more than just space to get started.

You can create a one-time boost of Momentum by clicking the button below, or subscribe to keep the forward movement going for us all.

Mutual Momentum

So when are the three separate layers of the Table of Content (top-level doesn’t matter so much here…not yet) “done” and ready to move into the table? You can probably already see that putting it all side by side could get complicated fast—so don’t start here unless you’re really good at holding your focus to one thing at a time.

If you’re like me and cannot, then play with each list separately until it looks like a decently logical progression from point “hm this book looks interesting” to point “woah, I (see the world/myself/my want) differently now!”

By logical, I mean you’re setting the reader up as Kurt Vonnegut’s Man in a Hole plot. And if you haven’t seen that yet, pause now. Click. Watch. Enjoy. Come back.

Ready?

Ok, so you’re meeting the reader wherever they are—probably “mostly fine, but curious about how things could be better”—then dropping the bottom out from under them with whatever curiosity or problem or pain you’re digging into.

That’ll happen somewhere in the first few chapters: your proposition space. You propose that the world could actually be significantly better, because look at how hard it really is.

After that, you’ve got to build them a ladder and help them climb out of it.

That happens step by step (procedurally, if you will), and too big a leap may mean they can’t stay with you to get out of the hole.

Then, just as their head pops out to blue skies above ground, you help them see how much their perspective has shifted after all that undergroundedness, and they’ve got to reckon with real change they hadn’t quite expected.

If you don’t prepare them for or meet them there in that discomfort, you may lose them altogether.

If you don’t lose them, if you’re able to move them along with you beat for beat of this journey to a new way of thinking or doing or being in the world, then they get the option to participate with you in that way of thinking.

And if you’re really honest with them, (and you should be) that won’t be all blue skies either.

But it’ll be worth it.

And you’ll tell them why.

You can see how each point of that process is about keeping the reader with you. It’s not “drop man into a hole and leave him there.” The arc has to come back up.

So making sure each of your lists make decently logical sense in terms of what it’s asking of the reader, what you’ll need to give them along the way, and how far you can realistically take them…that’s what “done” looks like here.

When you have that for all three arcs, plug them in as they are, again without any judgment or panic. Then your table becomes the hypothesis, and the chapter maps become the experimentation space.

Pull the text out from the table to a map.

Run a 5 minute outline for just that chapter.

See if that one row makes sense.

If not, play around with what would make that 5 minute outline make sense.

See what we’re doing here?

One focus at a time, one solution at a time, one experiment at a time.

It’s all good data.

And hey, if at any point you get the itch to just write, step. away. from the spreadsheet.

Go write.

You’ve been unlocked.

Come back if you get stuck.

Chapter Map Template

Note:  The idea here is to take what we’ve mapped out into the table and start moving it into another document that feels a little bit more like writing and less like plotting.

Transformative Journey:

Worldview Analysis:

Tangible Outcome:

Reader wants:

But needs:

Outline

1. Hook/Why we care:

2. Topics/What’s in our way:

3. Takeaway:

4. Anchor/Why we’ll believe:

5. Payoff/What’s the invitation:

Totally Ridiculous Example

Transformative Journey: Caught Shining / the Fairy Godmother Story

Worldview Analysis: What makes fairy godmothers pick someone to help

Tangible Outcome: Hope that anyone can be helped

Reader wants: To go to the ball like I did

But needs: To see herself as worthy of the ball

Outline

1. Hook/Why we care: Fairy Godmother found me and saw something in me and dressed me up and sent me off

2. Topics/What’s in our way: Why would she do that? What’s a fairy godmother’s M.O. anyway? Why would she do that for me?

3. Takeaway: My invitation has always been waiting—so has yours

4. Anchor/Why we’ll believe: Empathy—I need to get more vulnerable here. Probably go deeper into what I was thinking when she first appeared.

5. Payoff/What’s the invitation: It wasn’t what she gave me, it was how she helped me see myself differently—the way she sees us all.

Hey, thanks for creating this extra space with me today.

To get the rest of the workbook right away, look for You Don’t Get to the Ocean by Accident on Amazon, or subscribe to get a free copy right now.

For this one in particular, i f you would like to send me your lists or tables or spots where you got stuck, you are welcome to do that.

And as always, whenever your book is ready to emerge, the space we made today will be here waiting for you.

And so will I.

Welcome back to B is for Book Coach. I’m B, midwife of big ideas and book development partner for writers and non-writers alike. And for the next few minutes, you are my author.

Don’t worry. That doesn’t commit you to anything more than what you’re doing right in this moment. Because the best authors are simply people who show up as themselves, for themselves and for their readers.

Today, we’re making space for the mess.

Enjoying this space? It takes all of us to create it together! When you become a one-time or ongoing Momentum Partner, two things happen.

First, you get to join a small but growing group of folks who pop in for Office Hours twice a month to sort out their content and travel this journey together.

Second, you add to the Mutual Momentum fund, which helps to bring deeper development support to authors who need more than just space to get started.

You can create a one-time boost of Momentum by clicking the button below, or subscribe to keep the forward movement going for us all.

Mutual Momentum

Do you remember the old Reese’s candy campaign, “There’s no wrong way to eat a Reese’s”?

It would show the chocolate being eaten around the edges first so the peanut butter center was left…Or the middle would be popped out to eat first so the chocolate was left. Or small bites. Or big bites.

Even though everyone had their own opinions, all were meant to be celebrated.

In retrospect, this was probably meant to counter KitKat’s “break me off a piece of that KitKat bar” methodology.

KitKat might not be my favorite candy, but their approach makes sense.

Simplicity is appealing.

So when I talk about simplified templates and processes and systems for writing (and I get a smidge of irritation in my voice), I don’t blame anyone for that, either.

When you’re looking back and forth between the intricacy of a completed book and the mish-mash that is your concept-in-progress…well, it’s natural to want it all broken into pieces.

I’m just a “no wrong way to eat a Reese’s” kind of person.

The problem isn’t that templates are bad. It’s when we think the templates are going to pre-fabricate the entire creative process for us, like a KitKat bar for our brains.

And that problem begins with us thinking about our concept-in-progress like it’s supposed to look like an already-completed book.

I regularly hear from authors who are frustrated with their process because their words don’t look, sound, or feel like their favorite authors.

Authors who are trying to sort their earliest ideas into a “table of content,” wondering why their brainstormed arcs don’t feel as logical as the table of contents in the book they just read.

Authors who are used to enjoying the “candy” of effective books, forgetting that their job in this moment is to create rather than consume.

I tell them all the same basic thing: the mess is where the magic happens.

When we’re gathering the pieces of a book, aligning those pieces to the reason for writing in the first place, and refining it all until we finally see the light of publishing on the horizon—we’re not opening up a piece of candy and eating it.

We’re designing, perfecting, and executing a recipe.

No matter how they talk about their final consumer experience in the marketing stages, both Reese’s and KitKat are made from that same process. One that’s iterative and complex long before it’s simplified and repeatable.

And in this slight stretch of a metaphor, we are the candymakers. Not the consumer.

If we skip the development stage—with all of the iteration and design it requires—then all that’s left is to follow someone else’s recipe. Which will yield someone else’s outcomes.

And maybe it will be perfectly fine, as far as that kind of recipe goes. But will it satisfy the craving that sent you into the kitchen in the first place?

For those of us who feel the pull to write a specific book for a specific reason, the only way out is through.

Even when we have good support and serious self trust and solid expertise, we’re still stepping into the proverbial test kitchen.

And while the experience is most intense for those of us who don’t primarily identify as writers and haven’t stretched our thinking into book-length territory before, I can tell you that it’s not all that different for career writers.

Each book is a new exploration. Each book takes what it takes. Each author makes messes and untangles and discovers in their own way.

If they’re talking about their process like it’s smooth sailing to clean structures, it’s because they’ve made it to “simplified and repeatable” after a whole lot of iteration.

They’ve found the baseline recipe that leads to their intended outcomes.

If you’ve found something in their process that feels empowering, energizing, or effective—you might be working from a similar baseline recipe. But it’s important to know that the iteration is still on its way.

One of my daughters has a gluten restriction. This winter, we’ve been working through a cookbook from a scientific-minded author who has figured out exactly how to adjust any recipe to make them gluten-free, vegan, or both.

We have learned to see where the replacement for an egg is in a vegan recipe or how the gluten-free flour blend in our cabinets can be exchanged for the recipe’s individual blend ingredients. We can also see how one recipe can be adjusted in a few key sections to become something else entirely.

We have learned to see the baseline recipes.

Similarly, there are baseline processes that will work for a range of authors. That’s where we get the idea of “plotters” and “pantsers” and why most of us find templates and steps and best practices that resonate…at least for a little while.

The baseline recipe works.

But if you’re following one recipe to the letter when you’re hoping for a modified version, or if you’ve suddenly got a new food restriction to work with, or you realize you’re out of an ingredient you’d expected to have…you’re going to have to iterate.

It doesn’t mean the recipe is broken.

It doesn’t mean you’re a bad cook.

The mess is where the magic happens.

By this point, no one is surprised that I prefer the message of “no wrong way to eat a Reese’s.”

But just because there’s no wrong way to write a book doesn’t mean you’re going to be trapped in the mess forever.

Remember that a Reese’s cup is a very simple shape, despite the many ways it can be experienced.

Your writing process can be simple as well, even when it’s messy.

It can be easeful, even when it’s not easy.

It can be effective, even when it doesn’t look efficient.

Just remember that you’re the candymaker here, working through a process. Not a consumer who’s comparing products.

And maybe get yourself some candy to snack on along the way.

Hey, thanks for creating this space with me today.

Whether or not you’re ready to dive into writing just yet, remember that the best authors show up fully, just as they are. That’s all it takes—and you’re already doing it.

Be sure to subscribe on Substack or wherever you listen to podcasts to catch every coaching moment to come. And when more of your book is ready to emerge, the space we made today will be here waiting for you.

And so will I.

Don’t worry. That doesn’t commit you to anything more than what you’re doing right in this moment. Because the best authors are simply people who show up as themselves, for themselves and for their readers.

Today, we’re making space for the future.

Enjoying this space? It takes all of us to create it together! When you become a one-time or ongoing Momentum Partner, two things happen.

First, you get to join a small but growing group of folks who pop in for Office Hours twice a month to sort out their content and travel this journey together.

Second, you add to the Mutual Momentum fund, which helps to bring deeper development support to authors who need more than just space to get started.

You can create a one-time boost of Momentum by clicking the button below, or subscribe to keep the forward movement going for us all.

Mutual Momentum

In this month’s subscriber update, I said something that might need a bit more explanation.

I said that “community is the future of books.”

And I meant it.

Storytelling was our original form of connection and remains our most human way to facilitate change, wisdom, safety, and growth.

Before, during, and (I believe) after the existence of the so-called “traditional publishing” industry, people have captured their insights in book form and offered them to any corner of the world who might possibly care to listen.

It’s only in the last century or so that we’ve lost our way, turning over our storytelling instincts to an industry who only sees us as parts of an assembly line and story as a product to sell.

In The Untold Story of Books, Michael Castleman named that century as one of three distinct publishing eras. He said the traditional publishing era was “publishing focused.”

The Gutenberg era before that, when authors would pay printers directly or accept patron funding to pay printers for them, he called “author focused.”

Today, the internet has given us more (and cheaper) access to those printers, and Amazon has given readers more access to books that the publishers used to mete out for us.

The resulting book boom has led to more published books with fewer sales, and the “how do I stand out over the noise?” question led him to call this third, digital era “sales and distribution focused.”

I nodded along as I read that section, until something caught my eye. I paused and re-read…and wondered where the reader fit in to any of this.

Singular.

Not the readers, plural, that we’re hoping to find in the digital era or that publishers wanted to tap into in their heyday or that the pre-industrial authors hoped would connect with the thing they had invested so much into.

The reader.

The person who’s out there right now, in this era of long-tail keywords and hyper-specific niching, looking for the exact thing that some other person has to offer.

We couldn’t really create for that person explicitly in the pre-21st century world, because we couldn’t really know that we would find them.

The only thing to do was to offer up what was in our guts and hope it all worked out.

And the publishers didn’t want us to create for that person throughout the 21st century, because they’re exclusively playing a numbers game.

They spout all kinds of nonsense about how mysterious the business of selling books can be, only because they want that business to be a casino. If enough authors make enough guesses about what today’s audiences want, publishers are bound to hit it big at least sometimes…enough to keep the house on top, anyway.

It isn’t working.

There is so much industry-centered panic about the future of books, not because people aren’t reading but because people aren’t reading in the way that the industry wants to exploit.

This brings us back to my original prediction: I believe the fourth era of publishing is one where authors employ the best of all previous eras in service to a reader.

Not one where we focus on selling books to communities, though that will happen.

Not one where we write to create communities, though that tends to happen as well.

One where we understand that a book can embody community itself, and we seek to serve them well.

But a vital part of that future track is us remembering what community is in the first place.

Over the last couple of decades, society has shifted in ways few people saw coming.

I’m not quite old enough to be a Gen-X latchkey kid, but I am old enough to remember getting in trouble if I didn’t pick up a landline and call when I got to my destination, or dialing my friends and hoping they were actually home so we could align on where to meet up.

Now, not only can I see my kids’ every movement on Life360, but they also have their friends on it and can unapologetically stalk each other all day every day.

We don’t even have to knock on doors anymore. Just text that we’re on our way or “here” and out they’ll come as soon as we pull up.

The rise of mobile and internet connectivity has done so much good for us.

I wouldn’t be here right now, doing this work, talking to you in your car or at your work or while you’re eating lunch if it weren’t for the internet.

Movements have been sparked and managed and coordinated thanks to the internet.

Entire educations can be accessed because of the internet.

The internet has given us a pathway to completely decentralize everything that the gatekeepers once held the keys to—learning, organizing, publishing, and growth.

We like the internet.

I’m not sure we were ready for the internet.

Between profit-driven algorithms and dopamine addiction, we spend more time doom scrolling than interacting face-to-face, all while believing we are more connected than ever before.

All other negatives (or positives!) aside, it’s this illusion of community that has me worried.

Because when I say “community is the future of books,” it sounds like something to join.

Community has become synonymous with an online platform to subscribe to, participate in, exchange feedback with, and—let’s be real, fade out of when the everyday obligations leave no room for real engagement.

Even the words—subscribe, engagement, platform—have double meanings.

Engaging with a community—meaning, having meaningful interactions with a group of people—is not the same as community engagement, which is measured by buttons clicked and events attended.

The former can sustain us. The latter has to be maintained.

When we set aside all of the ways internet culture and industrial pressure has changed our expectations of “community,” we’re left with something much simpler.

Community exists wherever connections happen.

It is where people share ideas, interests, commonalities, curiosities, beliefs, goals, characteristics, space, and experiences.

And what is a book if not a connection between two people, made over some shared interest or idea or intrigue, enabled by the many other people who helped form that connection, all coming to life on the page.

This sense of community is the future of books. And it is here for us, right now, whenever we remember that and make it a priority in our process.

Now, I don’t want to diminish the entrepreneurial side of authorship, no matter how you publish.

Many types of books and many kinds of authors will go on to join Mighty Networks and run events and use whatever metrics of audience response are available to help them reach more people with the message they believe in.

But authors and readers are both served better when we approach our “authorpreneurship” as service providers rather than widget makers.

If you’re going to write a book, you need to know that you are creating an experience, not a product.

That’s where the publisher-centered era went wrong.

They saw books as the tangible good being bought and sold at a counter and not as the vehicle for an experience.

But you can’t dropship a mindset change.

You can’t mass produce a specific solution.

You can’t replicate a personal transformation.

You can’t drill for wisdom or mine for insights.

The cover and pages aren’t really the book. It’s what’s in it and how we experience it that matters. It’s a community of authors, support providers, production experts, and sellers all coming together to invite a reader to join them.

It’s a communal experience.

Books aren't sold to communities. They don't create community. They embody community.

So if you’re going to write a book—if you’re going to create an experience for a human being who is currently craving and searching for and trying to access that very thing—do it with care.

Shape your words on the page with the same intention and respect that you’d hold off the page.

Take your time. After all, this is a service that will ask someone else to give you their time. Honor that exchange while you create.

Remember that the lone writer is as much of a myth as the self-made man. Showing up for the community you’re creating will require others to show up for you along the way. Let them.

Connect with the people you most want to impact even as you shape the thing that will impact them. There is no scarcity in human connection. Don’t hold your wisdom behind the paywall of a $20 book purchase.

And don’t forget that this communal experience includes you too. Give yourself the space and grace you need through this admittedly strange and undoubtedly transformative process.

This is the future of books.

I hope you’ll choose it with me.

Hey, thanks for creating this space with me today.

Whether or not you’re ready to dive into writing just yet, remember that the best authors show up fully, just as they are. That’s all it takes—and you’re already doing it.

Be sure to subscribe on Substack or wherever you listen to podcasts to catch every coaching moment to come. And when more of your book is ready to emerge, the space we made today will be here waiting for you.

And so will I.

Last episode, I talked about my take on the evolution of publishing after having read The Untold Story of Books by Michael Castleman.

There’s something else about that book that just won’t leave me alone.

It was in the very last pages, after a whole book spent breaking down the three eras of publishing (the Gutenberg era, the industrial era, and the digital/modern era).

He was making his predictions about the fourth era, as of course anyone would expect him to do. And of course, he couldn’t really say exactly. Who could? How can we really know what’s coming when every other day is marked by yet another “unprecedented event”?

But what really struck me about those pages is that he did have some clear predictions. Advice, really.

He said that, whatever happens, booksellers (indie especially) will need to focus on community.

It’s a bummer for anyone who thought they could just say “books for sale!” and do nothing else, but we can buy books online without having to plan and park and see people now.

What we’re really craving is “third space” type gatherings. Somewhere we can go to just be. With each other. For a purpose other than buying. And then, when we do want to buy, we’ll know where to go.

He also said that, whatever happens, authors will need the support of author communities.

Did you know that early print shops basically had to be blackmailed into investing in proofreading? Every single form of editing, marketing, and overall author support that a publisher has ever offered has come from pulling teeth, and they’ll snap back to withholding that support whenever they can get away with it.

If authors want to make their books the best they can be, want to keep tabs on their publishers, want to thrive their self- and hybrid-publishing ventures, want to develop as authors—they’re going to have to create it together.

What stuck with me the most is that he didn’t really have an answer for the books themselves.

Possibly a little bit jaded by the “people aren’t reading as much” nonsense or the “it’s so hard to be heard above the noise” half-truths, I think. Or maybe just being honest about his own experiences wanting to write anyway no matter how little money it made him and how much headache it gave him.

In any case, he was so clear that “community” was the future for book writers and book sellers that I’m not sure why he didn’t see that community is the future for books too.

It’s a weird thing to think about, but why wouldn’t we?

Why wouldn’t we develop our books as communal experiences that happen asynchronously?

It’s always felt magical to me, how real a person can become when you’re spending hours on end just listening to them speak.

I have to remind myself that Virginia Woolf and Rachel Carson won’t be on the next speaker dockets, or that Audrey Lorde is only in my bookshelf and not in my contacts.

When you show up to the page with your ideas, your experiences, the thing you know matters—you are creating that magic for someone.

You are inviting them into a community.

So as we look toward this month’s deeper support options—beyond the community we’re creating every week when you tune in or read from your inbox or app—I want to focus on the very simple connection point of a paid subscription.

This model has taken many forms over the last year or so, as I’ve found my footing as a coach masquerading as a podcaster/Substacker.

What has always been and will always be true: all content here is and will always be free. Being able to “coach” whoever stumbles into this space and decides to stay? It’s a little bit like magic, and $5 a month (or whatever Substack suggests) wouldn’t change that.

Being able to offer more direct coaching to folks who need a bit of financial pressure released is even better, and for the last several months, that’s where the paid tier of Substack has gone: for $20/month, you become a Momentum Partner.

Subscribe now

That means you are filling up the Mutual Momentum fund and join this growing community of growing authors.

We’re meeting on Zoom for drop-in Office Hours twice a month.

We’re getting to know each other and our projects and making connections we hadn’t expected to make.

And yes, I’m always thinking toward other ways to build this space up, but—but!—we don’t really need more stuff.

We need more of each other.

And that’s exactly what this space is doing.

It’s not deep dive strategy. That’s available in one-time blocks.

It’s not 1:1 coaching or hands on structuring and editing. Those are available for 1-2 people at a time (reply for more info).

But it is a way to create momentum together, for and with each other, toward these magical, perspective-shaping, life-changing, world-shifting experiences we’re creating.

I’d love to see you there.

Happy February, friends.

Talk soon,

~B

Don’t worry. That doesn’t commit you to anything more than what you’re doing right in this moment. Because the best authors are simply people who show up as themselves, for themselves and for their readers.

Today, we’re making space for publishing.

Enjoying this space? It takes all of us to create it together! When you become a one-time or ongoing Momentum Partner, two things happen.

First, you get to join a small but growing group of folks who pop in for Office Hours twice a month to sort out their content and travel this journey together.

Second, you add to the Mutual Momentum fund, which helps to bring deeper development support to authors who need more than just space to get started.

You can create a one-time boost of Momentum by clicking the button below, or subscribe to keep the forward movement going for us all.

Mutual Momentum

Humans have always told stories. From campfires to city centers, wherever someone would listen (and occasionally when no one would), someone else was ready to share.

This made written language a radical technology, allowing a single person to be heard far beyond and long after they spoke.

We carved, we scribed, and eventually we printed—finding ever faster and better mediums to carry our visions to the world.

For most of our millennia of storytelling, the story itself was our most valued technology. Myths and legends were passed down, verbally edited from telling to telling based on the listener’s reactions.

Writing changed the game.

Before Gutenberg’s press, scribes were paid tens of thousands of dollars* to replicate a single book for preservation. After, the authors themselves self-funded printed replications of the stories they wanted to share.

Authors weren’t the only ones footing the bill, either. The dedication page that we’re used to seeing as a nod to mom or a spouse or a key mentor actually originated as a space to honor the funding partner. A patron who believed in the author enough to pay the printer for them.

We tend to think of self-publishing as a new development, but we’ve actually spent hundreds of years believing in our ideas or someone else’s enough to exchange the resources that would bring that book to life.

It’s “traditional” publishing that has the shortest tradition of all—an industrial-era effort to center printing as the most important storytelling technology and the story itself as the commodity that fills the page.

Industrialized printing did allow humanity to capture their stories faster than ever before, but an industrialized mindset demanded that we do so.

With fewer people required to print more books faster and cheaper, all that was left was to fill those books with stories.

And when publishers asked for more, authors answered the call.

They arrived in droves, carrying their wisdom and insights, processes and perspectives, plans and potential, hopes and dreams—each responding to the promise of a story published and a vision realized.

But as more and more authors offered to tell their stories, publishing changed what it meant to sell those stories.

With no shortage of authors to choose from, the production machines got hungrier. And greedier. And choosier. And stingier. Seeking ever faster ways to sell ever-increasing copies of books.

Eventually, without anyone realizing what had happened, the authors themselves became the machines, while the printers held the vision and the authors contorted themselves to deliver them.

Instead of paying authors for the privilege of replicating their stories, the exchange only happened for authors who promise to ideate, generate, refine, represent, and sell the books that the printers would… print. Determined by what they believed authors would buy, nevermind what readers would actually read.

But what was an author to do if they didn’t like what they saw? After all, this was tradition. The only way for real authors to publish real books.

Just as cast iron pans were once branded “dirty,” midwives were maligned as “witches,” and witches were burned at the stake, industrialized publishing declared itself to be the traditional option, then labeled our most time honored approach to book creation as vanity.

No one ever talks about the vanity of self-funded publishing that brought us the likes of Whitman and Poe, Beatrix Potter and Jane Austen.

No one talks about Nathaniel Hawthorne hawking books after presentations. About Virginia Wolf running a press in her dining room.

No.

Why would we?

We have traditions to uphold.

Meanwhile, industrialized publishing has not forgotten that story is our most valuable technology. They are acutely aware that their machines will not run if there are no authors to turn the gears.

But many of us have forgotten that story is technology at all. A tool to be used to create connection, make change, leave legacies, and realize visions.

And of all the forms our stories can take, books are far from obsolete.

They are our last stronghold for complexity.

The only place where an idea must be developed fully enough to withstand hours of attention carried only by the concept and delivery itself.

Books demand nuance.

They require us to think deeper, see further, articulate more precisely, and stand in the shadows of our own worldview more than any other medium even allows.

Books are our last stronghold for complexity.

A way to create a nuanced experience with another person across unknowable amounts of space and time.

A way to honor, capture, and share the way your unique experience leads to your unique view of your unique moment in time.

Yet instead of honoring this medium and ourselves for creating within it, we have collectively allowed our most vulnerable thoughts, powerful insights, and earned wisdom to become commodities to be exchanged. Products to be manufactured en masse. Brain widgets on a never ending assembly line.

Countless would-be authors line up to the machine, their visions in hand, their illusions leading them on.

When that so-called traditional line feels too long or too selective, along come the hybrids and pay-to-plays pedaling speed and ease like it signals revolution when it’s merely a return to our self-funded roots.

Only this time, it’s wrapped up in the shiny new productized packaging that the industrial era offered us.

The publishing industry has no incentive for revolution.

Not as long as authors keep providing them products—enough to keep the ink fresh and the process stale.

Some authors have stepped out of that line. Authors who have decided that their visions and agency are worth more than the costs of printing.

This self-valuing, self-funding, self-publishing is not new. It is not alternative. It is not modern.

It is the tradition of storytelling itself.

To have a message that you want to convey, an audience who might possibly need it, and the tool of story to carry it to them? This is our birthright and our legacy.

It is the very heart of humanity.

Publishing today is the easiest, cheapest, most accessible, most boring part of becoming an author.

The hard (and good!) part happens off the page, where your vision comes together and your audacity comes to life and you decide that what you’ve seen and done and know and believe is worth capturing and sharing.

Everything else is just buttons and uploads.

To pretend otherwise is to inflate the value of a machine and to devalue the core mechanism of humanity itself.

If the miracle of modern publishing is only that a few manufacturers can produce more books cheaper (as long as more authors produce more stories faster), then all we have achieved as a species is the ability to exploit ourselves into oblivion.

Call it vain if you must, but I believe we are worth more,

capable of more,

required to do more with this moment in time and with these tools at our disposal than to mine our own brains and hearts and bodies for someone else’s production flow.

Gutenberg’s press allowed authors to publish whatever they wanted to share.

Industrialized presses allowed publishers to buy shares in whatever they wanted authors to sell.

And the digital era has allowed everyone to access everything they might possibly want to read.

This is not the breaking of books.

The next evolution of publishing is an opportunity for us authors and readers alike—humans with stories to tell and problems to solve—to take the very best of every era that came before.

To turn the stories that we most want to tell into something some reader will most want to read, and change the game for good.

To take the power of story out of the hands of the few who only want to make more books-as-products faster,

and return it to the hands of the many with a mission to make fewer stories-as-services better.

As we collectively grow through this evolution, my concern is not for the publishing industry or “the future of books,” but for the authors themselves and the readers they most want to reach.

It’s about whether or how we’re able to develop and use story as a tool to bring our visions to life.

That’s what we’re here for.

That’s what we’ve always been here for.

It’s the kind of thing that lives on long after we die, and a process like that should be held with the care it deserves.

No technology is a threat or a lifeline or a determinant of our reality. It is only a tool, an accelerant.

Each “age”—agrarian and industrial and information—and every technology that ushered them into existence has allowed us to reach further with what we could already access. Nothing more, nothing less.

So we cannot, must not forget what we can access.

And thanks to everyone who carved, scribed, and printed before us, we know that the most important thing story allows us to access is each other.

The question isn’t how you’ll publish or what you’ll publish, or even whether you’ll publish, because publishing isn’t the important part.

The only thing that matters is the only thing that’s ever mattered:

You.

And me.

And the experiences we create together.

Develop yours with care.

Hey, thanks for creating this space with me today.

Whether or not you’re ready to dive into writing just yet, remember that the best authors show up fully, just as they are. That’s all it takes—and you’re already doing it.

Be sure to subscribe on Substack or wherever you listen to podcasts to catch every coaching moment to come. And when more of your book is ready to emerge, the space we made today will be here waiting for you.

And so will I.

*I linked to The Untold Story of Books early on, because it’s such a brilliant, easy-to-read encapsulation of the history of publishing. I highly recommend you grab it here or at your local library. Full disclosure: this is an affiliate link.

If you want to follow along or jump ahead, pocket-sized copies are available on Amazon, and every Substack subscriber gets a fillable PDF copy as well.

Today, we’re reading from: Table of Content.

Enjoying this space? It takes all of us to create it together! When you become an ongoing Momentum Partner, two things happen.

First, you get to join a small but growing group of folks who pop in for Office Hours twice a month to sort out their content and travel this journey together.

Second, you add to the Mutual Momentum fund, which helps to bring deeper development support to authors who need more than just space to get started.

Create a one-time boost of Momentum by clicking the button below, or subscribe to keep the forward movement going for us all.

Mutual Momentum

The table of contents in a book is one of the last things to be proofed (and a very sneaky place for errors to slip through anyway). It’s an end stage formatting tool. Some books don’t even have it.

So. Why the hell do we think we need an outline that looks like a table of contents from the very beginning of our nonfiction projects?

Caveat, again: Our overarching goal, at any and all times, is for you to go with whatever you have access to.

If you’ve got a vision for your chapter progression that feels fantastic, looks exactly like you want it to in the final book (for now) and inspires you to start writing, do the damn thing until you can’t. Then come back if you need another access point.

Now. Did I have a sneaky error slip through in this title (Table of Content, singular)? Nope. Just a ridiculous pun that has stuck around.

While I don’t find it necessary or often helpful to create a table of contents before there is content, I do like to make a table in which I plot out said content.

That’s what we’re looking at next.

The thing is, paintings aren’t made from left to right or top to bottom, filling inch by inch of the canvas with a perfect slice of the image. They’re built from the inside out, layer by abstract layer.

The artist’s vision keeps them going—whether it’s to roll with the inspiration as it comes or to set the tone from the very first strokes.

As a not-painter, I have exactly zero clue what’s happening in any given moment. It just looks like a mess for a good long while. But that’s the expectation, so I trust the process (and marvel as it unfolds).

Whoever set your expectations at “write clean from top to bottom or it doesn’t count” needs to come see me. I have an unofficial TED talk I’d like to give them. Because (brace yourselves, all you who’re still coping with the “author” identity): you’re an artist too.

You get to be messy.

You get to play with tones and layers and refinement long past what anyone else thinks is done or to stop at a point of abstraction only a certain few will “get.”

That may take a while to settle into if you’re not already there, so for now we’re just going to name what some of those layers are.

Hang with me. Get messy. Trust the process.

Narrative Journey Layer

Here, sketch out the process of transformative change that your book conveys or asks of the reader. (Reference your narrative dimension in #3 in the last section if you need a jumpstart.)

It can also be helpful to start with a prompt, like a Hero’s Journey, Virgin’s Promise, or any other universal process of change.

The goal of this layer is to name the steps of change from where you or the reader begin to the place of deeper truth where you or the reader will end.

Naming the steps (crossing the threshold, caught shining, etc) is more important here than choosing specific stories…yet. But as always, if you’ve got access to it, go for it!

We’re attaching deep change to a narrative journey because we do not like change, generally speaking, and do much better watching it happen than being told to do it ourselves.

So when you attach the deepest parts of the work to real stories, the reader gets to relax into those emotions without being expressly asked to deal with their own.

The stories can come from you personally, a specific case study, or collections of stories, but they should be told narratively and they should attach to a clear progression of change.

Important: Yes, you can work these layers out in any order, but when you’re on a specific layer it’s important right now to stay with that layer.

Don’t think about whether this step 6 aligns with the others. That’s when we start to shoehorn content around and everything gets performative and weird.

We’re going full Shrek with these layers, baby. Save the pretty parfait for later. They are onions and proud of it.

Worldview Analysis Layer

For this list, the work is to figure out how the reader sees the world (or how you did, if you’re closer to memoir) at the beginning of the book, how they’ll see it differently at the end of the book, and what moves them along that journey.

Note: This layer is called “academic” in a lot of my material and Story Grid’s material, which can be a bit of a misnomer or deterrent.

Here’s the thing—not all analysis is academia, but there are some seriously good things we can learn from that space. Like creating a little bit of distance so that it’s safe to really pick something apart without feeling attacked, or leading with genuine curiosity and willingness to learn, experiment, and be wrong.

I’d love to geek out more about that with you, but for now swap it out for “analysis” only and it gets you to the heart of the task.

To wrap your head around this list (and the corresponding analysis layer you named in #3), try taking the word “worldview” really literally: if your reader is sitting at home, holding your book for whatever reason, what is their view of the world in that moment?

Going back to your specific reader workshopping will help here, with their pain points and what they say they want.

I like to picture an old pixellated video game—the kind where you can’t see the whole map until you move around a bit.

The first steps in this list are you letting them know you see where they are on the map and telling them where you are (your worldview).

Then you can progressively bring light to the places on the map between the two of you until there is a clear path they can follow.

Tangible Outcome Layer

This is another layer/list that is named differently on some of my other worksheets and articles: in those spaces, it’s called “how-to.”

Like the academic analysis dilemma, this can be a distraction if you’re not already writing a how-to. But if you’ve got a takeaway, you need a how-to layer—if nothing else to tell them how-to-take-away the takeaway.

What I really love about this layer is how it can shift their attention from want to need. Your reader is here for a reason, and that reason is primarily selfish. That’s not a judgment, just the truth of how we spend our time.

They want something.

How you decide to deliver it is up to you, but the promise of that thing is going to keep them turning the pages.

So your “how-to” doesn’t necessarily have to tell anyone how to do anything. You don’t have to have a process or a set of steps or a listicle here. You just need something they can grab onto and say that they “got it” and can take with them after the book is back on the shelf.

Clear as mud?

Here’s an example:

My reader is here for me to help them get their book planned out.

I know they need to tap into their own authorial sense of agency.

I’m going to step them through the process of naming all the important parts of their book, but also step them through the process of naming all the important parts of themselves as a creator.

At the end, they could have a book plan if they’re still interested (and still have a book in them), but they won’t feel as attached to my approval of it. (See what I did there?)

Top-Layer Topic Synthesis (or: Take a Stab at an Outline)

You might start here if you already have an outline, or play here until multiple iterations finally lock into one that feels good to write from. Or you might skip it altogether.

Sometimes it takes me a really long time to get to a “proper” outline for myself or a client because there’s more that I need to uncover before the specific chapters feel clear.

Some things to keep in mind as you get closer and closer to a map of your draft or revision:

• Try to think of each line as a topic bucket rather than a chapter.
  
  (If I had a dollar for every minute I’ve spent staring at an unfinished chapter, only to realize it was a complete idea that just needed to blend into another chapter…)

  
  Don’t paint yourself into a corner.
  

• There are certain phrases in the writing community, like “page one rewrite” and “starting over from scratch” and “rewriting the whole thing” and “please God can we be done” that I wish we could eliminate.

  
  Try to think of your outlines as a hypothesis, and drafting as an experiment. If what you map out doesn’t work and needs to be retooled, you haven’t lost anything. Not time or effort or words. You’ve only gained data/inputs/ideas. It’s good work. Keep it up.
  

• Remember, there are a thousand iterations of your book that are “right.” We’re just looking for the one that feels accessible to you and your reader right now.
  
  Save any outlines and ideas that feel good but not right. Who knows what they might become later.

Hey, thanks for creating this extra space with me today.

To get the rest of the workbook right away, look for You Don’t Get to the Ocean by Accident on Amazon, or subscribe to get a free copy right now.

For this one in particular, i f you would like to send me your lists or tables or spots where you got stuck, you are welcome to do that.

And as always, whenever your book is ready to emerge, the space we made today will be here waiting for you.

And so will I.