Types of Collaboration

This post is part of a series about writing with a co-author. To read all my advice about the full process of collaborative writing (including stories and bonus chapters not found here on the blog), order my book, In It Together, a guide to writing with a co-writer without losing your mind.

While every collaboration is different, let’s take a moment to talk about the most common partnership structures, as well as some things to think about as you enter into each. I’m going to divide partnerships into two main groups: equal partnerships, and tiered partnerships.

Equal partnerships
Equal partnerships are co-author relationships where each author is on relatively even footing. You share the copyright to the work. You get equal credit on the cover (though you might choose to do this using a pseudonym, which we will discuss in chapter nine.) You have equal say in creative decisions. You are writing this book together as partners, and no one has the final say or owns more of it than the other. You share proceeds from the project equally. If you are collaborating with only one other person, you have a fifty-percent say in creative and business decisions, as well as in rights and proceeds.

One of the benefits of equal partnerships is that both partners retain an even amount of control and investment over the project. Neither partner is “the boss,” and neither benefits more than the other from the project’s success. The partners are able to work closely together and benefit from their partner’s full and equal investment in the collaborative work.

One drawback is that, frankly, these partnerships can be the most work. It follows that if you’re both equally contributing to the project, then each of you should need to contribute less total effort, but in my experience this is not the case.

Because no one person has ownership over the work, all decisions must be made by consensus. This means that points of disagreement must be discussed and debated, which can add up to a lot of time and mental effort over the course of the project. One way to streamline this is to codify and divide responsibilities, where one partner is responsible for some aspects of the collaboration and the other partner has other distinct responsibilities. That kind of partnership structure also requires effort to build and maintain, and in the end, you both need to be happy with the work the other is doing, which will require careful coordination and communication.

It’s also common in these partnerships for authors to have a pre-existing friendship, which will bring it’s own advantages and challenges. Writers who already know each other may have developed a shorthand for communication and a rapport that can help when making collective decisions, but they may also bring baggage from their previous friendship into the business partnership that can muddy the decision making process. It’s always important to tend to the health of your personal and professional relationship with your co-author, but it’s especially important in equal partnerships, where it’s very easy for resentment to build if communication and cooperation are not going smoothly or if one (or both!) partners feels like they are being taken advantage of. We’ll talk a lot more about how to manage these aspects of creative partnerships in chapter seven.

At very least, the process or writing a book as an equal partnership can be messy and inefficient. If this sounds like your current partnership, you’re in luck! I’m going to spend a large portion of this book talking about how to keep these relationships on track, and what to do when they’ve fallen off the rails.
I got my start in collaboration in an equal partnership with James Goldberg, and then I went on to write more than twenty books with Megan Walker, some of them under a pseudonym with a third co-writer, Lauren Janes. I love equal partnerships because of how closely I get to work with my co-writers. We would often have weekly meetings or get together for weekend retreats to hash out our outlines and brainstorm ideas. In my equal partnerships, we rely on each other in the details of the process, making notes and revising over each other’s work and deciding the detailed direction of the project together. I will talk at length in the process chapters about how we do this, because it’s my favorite part of working in an equal partnership.

For now, though, let’s consider a very different way of structuring collaboration.

Tiered Partnerships
In a tiered partnership, one partner has more power than the other. Maybe they own the intellectual property, and have brought on one or more co-writers to write books in a world they control. Maybe they are by far the more experienced author, so while they may or may not have written in this world before, they have the coveted asset of a hungry audience, and also the need to make sure that anything advertised to that audience fits their brand. Regardless of the reasons, in tiered partnerships, one partner is senior to the other, and the senior partner has more power in decision making, and will often have the contractual ability to overrule the other.

It’s common in these partnerships for one writer to be doing all the writing. Part of the point of bringing on co-writers to expand a universe is to be able to produce books without having to write them yourself. This tactic is employed by many authors with big properties and big followings. Sometimes megasuccessful authors will offer money and mentorship to a junior author in exchange for a book they didn’t have to pen themselves.

Often in tiered partnerships, the junior partner will be giving up significant control of the project. They may not retain any rights to the material they produce. They may earn royalties, or they may be paid a flat fee, so that when the work is done, they no longer make any proceeds from sales of the product. The junior partner may or may not receive credit for their work; they may be hired as a ghostwriter to write words that will be credited entirely to their senior partner. They may have a non-disclosure agreement that stipulates they aren’t allowed to speak about their involvement in the book. Contracts are important to every partnership—and we will discuss them in depth in a later chapter—but junior partners especially need to be sure that they find the particular mix of credit, rights, and monetary compensation to be favorable before signing on to a tiered partnership.

This structure can be a good deal more efficient than an equal partnership. It will always be clear whose opinion matters more when you disagree. But this brings with it the trouble that the experience of the junior partner will only be as good as their relationship with their boss. If the senior partner demonstrates respect for their junior partner and their work, it can be a fantastically positive experience. If they don’t, things can go downhill very quickly. Likewise, a senior partner’s experience will only be as good as the junior partner’s skill and commitment to the project.

I’ve worked in two different styles of tiered partnerships. The one I’m best known for is my work with Brandon Sanderson in his Skyward and Alcatraz vs the Evil Librarians series. Brandon brought me on to fill in some stories that he wouldn’t have time to write otherwise. I have loved getting to play with Brandon’s characters, his settings, and his worlds. When I work with Brandon, I retain no rights to my work, because the settings and characters are originally his. I’ve worked both for royalties and for a flat fee, depending on the project. Because I’m working with properties that belong to Brandon, he retains final say over all creative decisions and ownership of his intellectual property.

I don’t work nearly as closely with Brandon as I do with my co-writers in equal partnerships; his purpose in collaborating is to produce more stories in his worlds without having to spend as many hours on them as he would on his single-author books. Even still, the time I do get to collaborate directly with Brandon gives me new ideas to play with, and the challenge of fitting my stories into the broader series is a welcome one. Brandon’s series come with a hungry readership, and it has been a genuine joy to write with them in mind, to try to create installments of those series that would give those readers more of what they love about the works Brandon had already created.

My other experience in tiered partnerships is dramatically different: I have at times picked up contract work as a ghostwriter. In these partnerships I signed away my rights to IP ownership and also to credit; I’m not credited on the works, and in many cases I don’t even know what happened to the books after I turned them in. My clients may have changed any number of details of the work, and didn’t reveal to me the pseudonyms under which the books are published. Some of these books were written to outline; the client told me what to write, and I delivered on their timeline. Other times I was responsible for creating my own outline to their specifications.

Ghostwriting was never the most creatively fulfilling work, but it had one great advantage over all the other writing I’ve done in my career: it paid promptly and immediately. I have picked up contract ghostwriting work when I needed to fill gaps in my family’s finances, and it is so gratifying to take a job, turn in words, and walk away with a paycheck. It’s especially lovely not to be on the hook for marketing efforts, promotion, or frequently even revision after the work is turned in. It’s a great way to feel like my words are valued, because monetary return for your labor can be elusive in book publishing. (That’s my fancy way of saying a lot of us are writing words with little more than a glimmer of a hope that maybe someday we will be paid for our labor.)

Senior Partners: what do you have to offer?
A word of caution about tiered partnerships: the role of a senior partner might seem like an attractive position, but not all authors are at a point in their career where they have standing to become senior partners. Occasionally I’ve seen authors with no audience or platform and no financial ability to pay up front try to set themselves up as senior partners, benevolently offering that a junior partner could write in their world for a less-than-equal share of the rights and profits. This demonstrates a misunderstanding of how these relationships work: if you’re going to be senior in a tiered partnership, you have to have something to offer your junior partner, and the quality of your ideas alone is never enough. A viable senior partner might have a huge audience, hungry for content, with an all-but-guaranteed threshold for sales. Alternatively, they might be in a position to pay their co-writer upfront, offering guaranteed money in exchange for the junior partner’s labor.

If you don’t have either of these things, you are likely not in a position to be a senior partner.
If you are in a position to bring on co-writers as a senior partner, congratulations! You’re doing well enough financially to hire writers to work for you, and/or you have an audience hungry enough for your content to support the writings of more than one writer. You’re in a fantastic position—but with the power of a senior partner comes the responsibility to respect your co-writer, to communicate clearly, and to make sure the partnership is as beneficial to your partner as it is to you. If you want to be the sort of senior partner that junior partners are eager to continue to work with, you’ll want to consider all the principles we’re going to discuss over the next few chapters, so that you can be the best boss you can possibly be.


Your Partnership is Unique
While labels can be useful, the truth is that every collaborative partnership is unique. My equal partnerships all look very different from each other, because each partner brings to the table their own set of strengths, weaknesses, preferences, and life demands. There are as many work styles, preferences, and needs as there are people, so in collaboration, it pays to be flexible. Everyone’s brain works differently, and so finding a process that works well for two brains at once requires creativity, flexibility, and ingenuity.

As we move forward, we’ll work through a set of principles to help you make the most of your unique partnership. In the next chapter, we’ll address what I consider to be the golden rule of collaboration.

Want to read more? In It Together, has all the advice you’ll need for successful co-writing, including stories and bonus chapters not found on the blog.