We Need Diverse Book Coaches: Announcing Our New Policy for Financial Aid for People of Color
There is an organization called We Need Diverse Books, which focuses on ensuring that books for children represent all people and all voices, so that kids can see themselves in the books they read. I love the name of this organization because it makes the mission so clear: actively work to bring a diverse range of authors and books to the publishing table.
Recent events have shed light on the fact that there is so much work to do to bring diversity not just to books for young readers, but to every corner of the publishing industry. We have heard this call at Author Accelerator in a way we simply hadn’t before, and we have committed to taking action.
At Author Accelerator, we have staked out a small corner of the publishing universe: book coaching. We are on a mission to raise the bar on the book coaching profession — to make sure that our coaches have the skills and the tools they need to offer high-value services that help writers do their best work, and the know-how and mindset to run sustainable businesses and charge what these services are worth.
We have spent a great deal of time considering the fact that our courses have organically attracted mostly white people. If we don’t do anything to address this reality, we can be sure that nothing will change as we grow — and we want to be part of the solution to change publishing for the better, not perpetuate the problem. We want to make sure that we are training a diverse range of people, who can in turn serve a diverse range of writers, which will result in more diverse books. We want to make this an ongoing part of our business.
Toward that end, we have decided to make financial aid available to Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and other people of color who are interested in becoming book coaches and feel that the cost of our courses is a barrier. We will cover 80% of our course costs for financial aid recipients who enroll in our Book Coach Training for Fiction and Book Coach Training for Nonfiction courses.
Our application for the first round of financial aid will be open in September; we will award financial aid in October. The application does not assess financial need — it is up to the candidate to determine if they need aid or not. We will assess each applicant’s desire to become a book coach, their commitment to meeting the high standards we expect of all our coaches, and how they expect to use their training to serve writers.
We will open applications every quarter in this same way — applications open in December 2020, March 2021, June 2021, September 2021, and so on. You can find the application at www.bookcoaches.com/equity.
Please share this message with any writers, teachers, librarians, bookstore owners, MFA grads, communications professionals, executive and leadership coaches who you believe may be interested in becoming a book coach and who might benefit from this financial aid opportunity.
Please also share it with anyone who is in a position to amplify this invitation.
And for anyone interested in becoming a book coach, the place to learn about what it is and how it works and what we teach is bookcoaches.com/abc. There is a series of 6 videos you can watch on that page and a chance to sign up to talk to one of our team members about whether the program is right for you.
