Should I trust a writing coach who hasn't written a bestseller?

Someone asked this recently: if your editor mentors haven't published a book, well, how can they help me publish mine? That's a fair question, so let's talk about it. Think about any elite athlete— Michael Jordan, Serena Williams, Lionel Messi. Every single one of them had a coach, and none of those coaches were better players than they were. Why? Well, because coaching is a completely different skill than performing. A great coach can see things the performer can't. They can diagnose problems, design training, and push you past plateaus that you'd never get past all by yourself. Writing is exactly the same way. A great editor mentor doesn't need to have a bestseller. They need to be able to read your scene and say, "Here's what's not working, and here's why." That's a completely different skill set than actually writing a novel. Our editor mentors go through 6 months of intensive training specifically in how to coach you, not how to write, how to coach, how to diagnose, how to give feedback that actually produces improvement. That's what you're getting when you work with us. And the proof isn't in the mentor's bibliography, it's in the student results. We publish books from our students that have sold thousands of copies and gotten lots and lots of reviews. We publish their work in our own literary magazine, and many, many of our students have gone out and gotten their work published in different literary magazines around the world. This is how you should judge the editorial team, not by what they've written, by what their students, the writers they've actually worked with, what they have written and the improvement that they've made.