Why Do You Need a Writing Coach?
If you’re aiming to get published, you should find a good writing mentor. Almost all professionals benefit from a mentoring relationship to develop their skills and in every other walk of life an apprenticeship is considered a wise idea.
In real life, most professional writers learn from other writers. Even writers with extensive experience and strong writing skills can benefit from new ideas from a writing coach and ongoing support.
In the literary world, most well-known published authors have studied with other writers and continue their writing journey with wise feedback from a trusted mentor over the course of their writing career.
The most difficult aspect to assess before you engage coaching services is the matter of coaching style.
Not all coaches are equal. A good mentor enjoys book coaching, and not all do! Do they genuinely want to improve your writing or are they a frustrated writer who considers themselves an instructor and resents working with aspiring writers when they could be developing their own manuscript? A good coach likes coaching!
An aspiring writer will want to consider a potential writing mentor carefully to ensure your writing process benefits from an experienced writer who has navigated the publishing industry successfully, and has standing and recognition in the publishing industry.
A great writing coach is the best way to achieve your writing goals. One-on-one mentoring means you get dedicated help with your own work to go beyond what MFA programs or standard writing courses can offer to progress you with more speed and certainty towards that book deal.

How To Choose a Writing Mentor?
To choose your potential mentor, consider the writer’s work and whether you admire and respect it, as a first base. Are they a published professional writer? Have they been published recently? Do they write in your genre? Do they understand the book publishing process? Do they belong to professional organisations? That they belong to a writing community and are willing and able to work with other writers is an important test.
Our writing mentors are all part of The Novelry team, chosen for their warmth, outstanding publishing record and expertise. As a team we work together and meet online weekly to review our authors’ work.
Choose based a mentor on your respect for their work, and whether they’re working in a similar genre of writing to yours. You can read articles written by the individual members of our team at the blog.
Our Writing Coach Services
At The Novelry, our writing coaches are successful, recently published authors who enjoy being part of our writing community, and who positively enjoy working with aspiring authors. Between them our writing coaches have extensive experience across the full range of genres of fiction. They have hit the bestseller lists and been nominated for an won famous awards. A good mentor is someone who loves learning and who understands that they too, as a writer, are always learning; that way the one-on-one mentoring relationship becomes a mutually fulfilling and exciting experience, open to new ideas and feedback that flows naturally both ways. Our writing coaches are chosen for their collaborative coaching style. As an experienced writer, each and every one of them has chosen to work with aspiring writers because they enjoy it so much. They love not only to help others start writing but to help them develop their writing skills.
So much more than an instructor, your writing coach at The Novelry will be cheering you on every step of the way, and will be thrilled and delighted as you tick off your writing goals, develop your skills, complete a first draft, submit your manuscript to literary agents and achieve your ambition to get a book deal. You’ll not only have a mentor you can return to again and again as you enter the book publishing process, you’ll have a friend and cheerleader in the writing community.
When considering potential mentors, we make it very easy for you to relax and trust that you’re going to find a writing coach who meets the highest standards of any mentor program for writers worldwide. Our writing coaches have been trained in our positive coaching method, and our writing mentor program is a big part of the reason we’re the world’s best-loved creative writing school.
I remember him saying... that writers were made as well as born... It was a great thing to have happen to me at that period of my life, to have someone who took me seriously enough... I knew something crucial was happening to me, something that mattered. He helped me to see how important it was to say exactly what I wanted to say and nothing else.
—Raymond Carver, on taking a Beginning Fiction Writing Course with John Gardner
Find Your Writing Coach

Rachel Joyce
Rachel Joyce is the multi-million copy bestselling, award-winning, Booker Prize-listed author of six novels and short stories.

Piers Torday
Piers Torday is the award-winning and bestselling author of seven books for children dubbed ‘the new master of children’s fiction’ by The Times.

Anna Mazzola
Anna Mazzola is the Edgar Allan Poe award-winning author of three historical thrillers, Gothic fiction and short stories.

Lesley Kara
Lesley Kara is the Sunday Times bestselling author of four novels.

Amanda Reynolds
Amanda Reynolds is the author of three novels, and her thriller Close To Me was a major C4 TV production.

Kate Riordan
Kate Riordan is the bestselling author of five novels, a has been a Richard and Judy Book Club choice. Her novels are published by Penguin Random House.

Emylia Hall
Emylia Hall is the award-winning author of four novels with her fifth, a cosy crime novel, publishing in 2023. She is a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund.

Katie Khan
Katie Khan is the author of two novels. Her first novel, Hold Back the Stars, was published in the U.K. by Penguin Random House and in the U.S. by Simon & Schuster, and has been translated into twenty-one languages around the world.

Mahsuda Snaith
Mahsuda Snaith’s debut novel The Things We Thought We Knew (Penguin Random House) saw her named an Observer ‘New Face of Fiction’.

Tasha Suri
Tasha Suri is the award-winning author of The Books of Ambha duology (Empire of Sand and Realm of Ash) and the epic fantasy The Jasmine Throne. Empire of Sand was rated by TIME magazine as one of the best fantasy novels of all time.

Jack Jordan
Jack Jordan is the global number one bestselling author of six thrillers, and an Amazon No.1 bestseller in the U.K., Canada and Australia.

Polly Ho-Yen
Polly is the author of six children’s novels and four children’s picture books. Her children’s books have been nominated for the Carnegie Medal and shortlisted for the Blue Peter Book Award and the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize.
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