Cathy Liska This is 20 in a series of 24 blog posts on Business and Marketing.
As a professional coach, there is tremendous value in being a published author both because of the credibility and because it helps potential coaching client find you through your book. At the Center for Coaching Certification, one way we support coaches who have completed their coach training is by creating an opportunity to be a published author.
There are many opportunities to participate with a small group in writing a book. Most often there is a charge for this – typically several thousand. At the Center for Coaching Certification, the individual authors participate free of charge. The process is to invite Certified Professional Coaches to submit an idea for a chapter and outline the key teaching points. Then the coach authors are assigned teams. Each coach author writes a draft of their chapter and then following a schedule sends it to another coach author on their team for review and feedback. After receiving the feedback, the coach author makes revisions and sends it to another teammate. In this way, before submitting their chapter, each coach author has received feedback from three others and provided feedback on three other chapters.
When the final chapter is submitted, the next step is content editing. After content editing, chapters are sent back to each coach author for their final review. Then the entire book is assembled, everyone has a chance to review it, and it is submitted for a plagiarism check to ensure it is ready for publication. At that point, an editor is hired by the Center for Coaching Certification to check all grammar, punctuation, etc. and to complete the layout. The book is then published and made available on Amazon.
Coaching Perspectives is an excellent book and each year a new volume is published. For the coach authors who participate, it is an excellent opportunity to learn the process with one chapter and thus prepare for more. While the copyright by necessity is under one name, the Center for Coaching Certification, full rights to the individual chapters are granted to the individual coach authors. Thus, many use their chapter as a white paper or as a foundation for more writing!
