Here's the thing nobody tells you when you start out as an author PA: the work isn't the hard part. Learning Canva, building a newsletter, running an ARC team, you can pick that up in a month. The part that quietly wrecks people is the business underneath it. The pricing. The contracts. The saying no. The knowing when a client is going to be a problem before they've made themselves one.
I watched talented people burn out inside a year, decide the industry didn't pay, and walk away. It wasn't the industry. It was that nobody handed them the business part. So I wrote it down. All of it. And I turned it into something you can actually use, not just read.
What It Is
The Author PA Playbook is a 73-page workbook you type straight into and save. It's not a PDF you skim once and forget. It's fillable, so your rate floor, your client checklists, your package pricing, and a full year of income tracking all live in one file you come back to every month.
The front half is the teaching. The back half is where you do the work. That split matters, because advice you don't act on is just content, and I didn't want to make more content. I wanted to make the thing that actually changes how you run this business.
What's Inside
The teaching chapters cover the stuff that decides whether you're still doing this in two years: what the job actually is, how to price so you're not subsidizing your clients with your own money, what has to be in a contract even when the client is lovely, how to find clients without cold outreach, how to run it like a business instead of a hobby, and how to build your own shopfront this week for free.
There's also a full tools chapter, nearly 50 of them, ordered from easiest to hardest and color-coded by what they do. Email platforms, design tools, print and swag, distribution, the whole landscape, so you can walk into whatever a client already uses and be useful on day one.
Then the workbook part, which is the reason it exists: a rate floor calculator that tells you the number below which the work costs you money, six client checklists, six scope sheets, six red flag sheets, a package builder that keeps you to three tiers instead of twelve, and twelve months of income tracking so you can finally see which client is quietly losing you money.
And because I use this stuff too, I built in a bonus planning section at the back: an undated twelve-month calendar, a client book tracker for keeping every author's titles and notes straight as you go through interviews, and lined pages for notes and messy thinking.
Who It's For
If you're thinking about becoming an author PA and you want to start clear-eyed instead of learning every expensive lesson the hard way, this is for you. If you're already a few clients deep and quietly panicking about whether you're charging enough, this is very much for you. The rate floor worksheet alone will probably tell you something uncomfortable, and that discomfort is the whole point.
I priced it as a launch offer because I'd rather it be in your hands than sitting behind a number that feels precious. Everything in it is what I would tell you if we were sitting across from each other, which is exactly how I wrote it.
Where to Get It
The Author PA Playbook is in the shop now. Grab it, fill it in honestly, and let it do what a book cannot: give you a number, a boundary, and a plan you can actually keep.