Coaching & Mentorships
Let’s finish your book
I have written forty-five of them. I know where you are stuck, because I have been stuck in the same place, usually on a Tuesday.
An editor reads the book you finished and tells you what is wrong with it. A coach sits beside you while you write it, which is a different job entirely — and, if I am honest, the one most writers actually need.
What that looks like in practice: we find the story you are really telling, we fix the structure before you have written ninety thousand words on top of a broken one, and we keep going when the middle turns to sand. I will tell you what is not working. I will also tell you what is, which is the part most writers never hear and cannot see for themselves.
Who this is for
Three kinds of writer
You have never finished one
You have three chapters and four beginnings. Nothing is wrong with you — you have simply never had anyone hold you to a deadline who has met one themselves.
Your draft has stalled
It was going beautifully until roughly the middle, and now every road out looks wrong. This is the most common place to get stuck and the most fixable.
You are changing lanes
You are published, and you want to move genres, move houses, or go independent. Different problem, and one I have lived through more than once.
Fair warning
What I won’t do
Tell you it’s wonderful
Your mother will. Your writing group might. That is their job and it is a kind one. Mine is the other job, and you are paying me for it.
Write it for you
Ghostwriting is an honourable trade and it is not this one. The sentences stay yours, including the bad ones, right up until you fix them.
Promise you a contract
Nobody can, and anyone who does is selling you something other than editing. I can get the book ready. The rest is a market, and markets have moods.
Pretend it’s still 2004
I sold my first novel into a different industry than this one. I will tell you what is actually selling now, even when it is not what you were hoping to hear.
How it works
Four steps, no mystery
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Send me one page
The first one. Not a query, not a synopsis, not the whole book — one page. I will write back and tell you whether it is working and exactly where I stopped believing you. That costs nothing and obliges you to nothing.
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You send me pages
Whatever exists. Three chapters, a full draft, or a synopsis and a lot of hope. I read it properly before we start, so our first real session is about your book and not about warming up.
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We meet on a schedule
Every other week, an hour at a time. A deadline you have promised to another person is worth more than any amount of resolve, and that is most of what a coach is for.
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You finish it
That is the whole point. Not a better outline, not a tidier first act — a finished manuscript, and enough craft under your belt that the next one does not need me.
What it costs
Three ways to work together
All three start the same way — you send me a page, I tell you what I think of it, and then you decide.
Manuscript critique
$450
one manuscript
A full read and a written editorial letter. No meetings, no schedule — you get my honest assessment and a plan for the next draft.
- Up to 100,000 words
- Editorial letter, 8–12 pages
- Notes in the margins where they help
- One follow-up call to talk it through
Most chosen
Three-month mentorship
$1,200
three months
For the writer with a draft that has stalled. We meet every other week, you send pages between, and we get the thing moving again.
- Six one-hour calls
- Pages read between every call
- Plot and structure work
- Email between sessions
Six-month coaching
$2,200
six months
Start to finish. We build the book together, and by the end you have a manuscript and you know how to do it again on your own.
- Twelve one-hour calls
- Everything in the mentorship
- Query letter and synopsis
- Submission strategy
Payment can be split across the length of the mentorship. If money is the only thing standing between you and the book, say so in your email — I would rather know.
Questions
The ones I am always asked
Is this coaching or editing?
Coaching, mostly. Editing happens at the end, to a book that already exists. Coaching happens while the book is being built, and it is as much about the writer as the manuscript — the habits, the nerve, the willingness to cut a chapter you love. If what you want is a line edit on a finished novel, the critique package is closer to that, and I will say so.
Do I need a finished draft to start?
No, and honestly the earlier the better. The expensive mistakes are structural, and they are far cheaper to fix at chapter three than at chapter thirty. Come with an idea and a willingness to be argued with.
Do I have to be writing Christian fiction?
No. It is where I have spent most of my career and I know that market in my bones — who is buying, what the houses will and will not touch, and which rules people repeat that stopped being true a decade ago. But structure is structure. I have coached general market women’s fiction and memoir and been perfectly useful.
What I will say on our first exchange is if I think your book belongs on a shelf I do not know well. Hard science fiction, procedurals — you would be better served elsewhere, and I am not short of work.
Can you actually teach funny?
I can teach where the joke goes, which is most of it. Comic timing on the page is structural — it is about the order of the information and how long you make the reader wait, and that is entirely learnable. What I cannot teach is whether you find the world absurd. If you do, we can shape it. If you do not, please stop trying to write funny, because readers can smell it.
Should I just self-publish?
Sometimes yes, and I will tell you when I think so. Indie is not the consolation prize it was when I started, and for some books it is plainly the better deal. It is also a business, and if you do not want to run one, that matters more than any argument about royalty rates. We will talk about which of the two your actual life can support.
Will you introduce me to your agent?
No, and be careful of anyone who says they will. An introduction is worth nothing if the book is not ready and it costs me something every time I spend one. What I will do is help you write the query and the synopsis, and tell you which agents are genuinely buying what you have written. Get the book right and it opens its own doors.
What if it is not working between us?
Then we stop and I refund what is left. This only works if you trust me enough to hear something you did not want to hear, and neither of us can fake that for six months.
Start here
Send me one page
The first one. I will tell you, free, what I think a reader would do with it — keep going, or put it down and go find the remote.
And if you are nervous about someone reading it: everybody is. I have been publishing for over twenty years and I still hand pages over with my stomach in a knot. It never stops meaning you care.
Or write to kristin@kristinbillerbeck.com directly.