Welcome to Academic book Writing simplified. I’m your host, Jane Joanne Jones, a writing coach and developmental editor who’s here to give you some tough love about the way you write. This podcast is for women and non-binary scholars and academia who are writing academic books, but feel as if the process is a little or a lot like a mystery. If you’re ready to trade your confusion and frustration for ease, clarity, and purpose, you’re in the right place. Let’s head into today’s episode. Welcome to episode 12 where I’m going to do something a little different and tell you about how I became a writing coach. I get a lot of questions about leaving academia, so I thought I’d share my story of leaving and give you a little background on why I decided to start my own business and how I ended up running coaching programs. But before we get started, I want to be clear. None of this is business advice or advice about if or how you should leave academia that’s personal to you, but I do think some parts of my story will resonate with your experience. So let’s get into it.

I have a PhD in sociology, but I started editing work in graduate school. I edited academic books while I was still a grad student. It wasn’t a lot. I edited two or three books, but it was enough for me to realize that I had a good eye for editing and I actually enjoyed it. Even during graduate school, I had doubts about becoming a professor. I really did not want to be location restricted for various personal reasons, including my own health, but I wasn’t a hundred percent sure, and I believed that if I didn’t get a 10 year track job straight out of grad school, that I’d never get one of the reasons I believe this is because it’s what faculty told me, and I had never heard of someone getting a job outside of academia. Then returning to academia. So I wanted a job market.

I applied for jobs, I flew out for job talks, and I landed a tenure tre job right outside of a major city with excellent hospitals. It was close to home, so I was able to visit family and come back to see friends regularly. So in that regard, it seemed like a great match, except it wasn’t. I joined a department that had never tenured a black woman, and there was a huge gap in seniority between senior colleagues in my department who were pretty close to retiring and the two juniors of which I was one who are brand new faculty. That meant that there was very little in the way of mentorship, especially as the entire institution was encouraging faculty to publish more, more than what the senior faculty had been expected to publish when they were coming up for tenure. My department didn’t have clear tenure requirements or even expectations for annual reviews.

The expectations that were verbalized were so teaching focused that I wasn’t even sure if I should be writing. So I fell into the trap that many first year faculty do and wrote hardly anything my first year, and I felt really ashamed. I felt ashamed that I wasn’t getting anything done. I was also worried I didn’t love my job, and I knew that I wasn’t doing myself any favors by not publishing because as we know, publications are the currency you use to apply for new jobs. So I was beginning to feel a little stuck and a lot scared. So about halfway through my second year, I joined an online writing group, and that was the spark that I needed. I remember joining and being so amazed that people that are one institutions were in the group. I was at a tiny teaching college, and I thought that I was one of the only people who was struggling with figuring out how to find enough time to write.

When I joined this group, I did not realize that people with all sorts of academic credentials and accolades joined groups for support, sound familiar with the support of this group and the structure of the group. I was finally able to revise and resubmit an article that had been at my desk for probably a year. It felt like forever, and to this day, I’m still really thankful to that editor for waiting on me for so long because I sent her a lot of apologetic emails telling her it’s on its way, it’s on its way. It was not on its way. But with this writing group, I was able to build a routine, get a plan, and start writing and finish the article. So this was halfway through my second year, and by the beginning of my third year, I knew that I wouldn’t be staying at that institution or probably even in academia.

There were various racist incidents on my campus that I won’t get into here, and I felt as if I was being increasingly marginalized at my department. It was kind of ironic because even as I was gaining my footing in some areas like teaching and building connections across campus, my day-to-day was, shall we say, pretty shitty. So I started thinking about an exit strategy. I knew I didn’t want to be at the mercy of a very precarious academic job market. I really wanted to go back to New York, which is where I live now, and quite frankly, I didn’t want anyone to tell me where to live. I had this recurring thought that basically became a mantra. I didn’t work this hard to get a PhD so I could be pushed around. I can’t tell you how many times I thought that in my third year of this job, and also as I thought about leaving the job and planning an exit strategy and this level of stubbornness wasn’t really amenable to working for somebody else.

So I decided to try to go out on my own. This was not easy. It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be because I didn’t realize how much of my identity was wrapped up in being a person with a PhD and being a college professor. I was really worried about what other people would think, especially my peers and mentors from grad school. I was worried they would think that I was forced out of my job even though I chose to leave, and I was worried that they would think I didn’t know what I was doing, that I was just starting this business because I had no other options. In fact, I think part of the reason I turned to editing as a career path was because it was legible to folks in academia as an intellectual career path. But thank goodness, lucky for me, I really love editing and editing is what I started doing.

First, I started editing for former colleagues, peers, colleagues from grad school, connections I had made during my time as an academic, and then I moved on, was able to expand my editing practice to work on bigger projects, like more book manuscripts, journals with people who I didn’t know. So the business was expanding, and as much as I loved editing work, it was also frustrating to make a business out of it because everybody was always late, and if you read my newsletter, you’ve heard this part of the story, nobody would ever get their manuscripts to me on time. People would reach out and say, I need you to edit this article or this book. I’m going to have it to you by this day. They never had it to me by that day. I was always waiting and rearranging my schedule, and when I would talk to my clients about it, they would consistently tell me that the project just took way longer than expected.

But as a sociologist, I knew there was something driving these patterns of unrealistic expectations. So I started working with clients to create better timelines, and that’s how my coaching business was born. I also started creating some lessons and curriculum to help people write, and again, I noticed a pattern. Folks would ask how I was able to make a business out of coaching, and not in a mean way, but more in a, there are enough people that want this, that you can run a business. And I believe the reason they ask that is because the high achieving talented academics I worked with truly believed that they were incompetent in some type of unique way, and that everyone else had it together. They thought they were the only ones that needed help creating a writing schedule or figuring out how much they can get done during a sabbatical or mapping out how to write an article.

And I knew that feeling. I knew that feeling that everyone else that thought everyone else has it together, but me, that feeling of embarrassment, it was the feeling I had on the tenure track when I joined that writing group that I told you about and saw that academics at better schools were members of the group. At first, I couldn’t believe it, and there’s a reason. It’s because of the myth that’s perpetuated in academia that if you don’t know something or you don’t understand something, it must be your own fault. It could never be the fault of bad mentorship or gatekeeping or hyper individualism, or the simple fact that it takes time to learn something new. So I created my group coaching program, elevate, which is the main service that I offer right now because I know the power of being a community with people who are facing obstacles similar to yours.

There is power in supporting other people and being supported, and I know that especially for women and non-binary scholars, you don’t have the luxury of retreating to your office for hours or days of solitude to write your magnum opus. You face a unique set of burdens and obstacles, and you’ll be better equipped to confront those burdens and obstacles with the help of a group. And I created this podcast because I know that there are folks who need this advice. I know it through my 10 years of editing and coaching. I talk to them every day, and some folks are never going to raise their hand and ask for help. They might be embarrassed, or they might understand that for minoritized groups in academia admitting publicly that you don’t know something can be dangerous, and I’m not going to shy away from speaking to issues like that.

This podcast is a resource for everyone. You can listen to it in the privacy of your office. You could blast it so that everyone around you hears it. It’s up to you. This is a resource for everybody. Okay, now that we’ve gotten all of our introductions out of the way, here’s what you can expect on this season of academic book writing simplified. We’re going to start with our next episode on the values of Sabbatical for book writing. I’m going to tell you why I think sabbaticals are overly romanticized and why we let our fantasies be the enemy of realistic progress. Then we’re going to discuss motivation in book writing. I’ll discuss the ebbs and flows of motivation, how to create motivation and why you’re probably worrying too much about your level of excitement for writing. As always, thank you for listening. I truly do appreciate you taking the time to listen to me talk to you about writing books. Take care, and I’ll see you in the next episode. Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode. Remember, writing an academic book is challenging, but that doesn’t mean you have to overcomplicate it. If you liked what you heard in today’s episode, please leave a review. This helps get the word out about the podcast so more people will listen and we can continue the conversation. Take care and tune in for our next episode.