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), read my book, In It Together, a guide to writing with a co-writer without losing your mind.
Once you have a revised book and have decided on a path for publication, it’s time to put the book into production. While the book is in production, there will be a number of tasks you’ll have to divide between you as partners. Let’s take a look at what sorts of tasks you’ll need to take on as a partnership and how you might go about dividing them.
Editing and Proofreading
If you’re publishing your book through a publisher, you may have an editor who will offer feedback on your book. But someone is going to have to go through those edits and approve them, and make the necessary revisions to the manuscript. Moreover, you will still be expected to make final editing passes of your own on the book to catch any errors. After that, there will also be copyedits, which may be done by a copyeditor paid by the publisher, but which will still need to be approved by someone in your partnership as well.
If you’re indie publishing, you’ll either have to pay someone to edit your work or edit the work yourself. You can use volunteer proofreaders to catch errors like dropped words, but an amateur proofreader is not a replacement for professional editing. In indie publishing, you have three options for tasks like editing and cover design: you can pay a professional, you can become a professional, or you can put out unprofessional work. There really aren’t any other options, and all of them have their upsides and downsides.
When I say you have the option to become a professional, this doesn’t mean you need a degree in the subject, or you need to take on client work for hire. What I mean is that you need to develop skills to produce a minimum viable product—the ability to produce work that is of professional quality. You’ll probably never be as good as the best professional cover designer, for example, but if you put in the time and seek the necessary education, you can learn to put out a product that is professional and appropriate to the market. It’s a matter of how much time and effort you want to put into developing these skills, since that time will of necessity take away from the time you spend developing your writing.
I have sometimes paid for editing and cover design on my indie books, but because I’ve been unable to afford it for every book, I’ve also put in the substantial work to develop professional-level editing and cover design skills so that my work can look professional even when I can’t afford to pay. In the absence of better options, sometimes putting in the time and money to learn the skills yourself is the best solution for the job.
If one of you is already a professional editor, dividing this work will be much easier! With that partner’s permission, you can lean on those skills, but the partner who is not a professional editor should perform other tasks to balance out the work their partner puts in. If neither of of you is a professional, you’ll either need to develop professional editing skills yourself, or resign yourselves that your product will not be up to industry standards. (My personal opinion is you should always pay a professional or become one, never publish unprofessional work, but in the end the decision is obviously yours.)
If you decide to pay a professional, you must decide who is going to pay them, and how that person is going to be compensated. In my partnerships with Megan, we opened LLCs and each put in an equal amount of startup money, which paid our costs until the books began to make enough revenue to cover the costs of the next project. In my partnership with Brandon, associated costs were covered by his company, Dragonsteel, because Dragonsteel owns the IP and the property. When James and I published The Bollywood Lovers’ Club, he put in money while I contributed labor: I did the layout, book design, and cover design while he paid for the stock art and other assets necessary for me to do that work. We were both happy with that arrangement, so it worked for us.
It doesn’t really matter how you divide this work and the costs involved: what matters is that you are both satisfied with the arrangement, the work gets done, and no one feels resentful for how it was divided.
Cover Art and Book Design
If you’re publishing with a publisher, they may ask for your opinion on the cover design, or they may not. If you’re indie publishing, coming up with a cover will be entirely up to you and anyone you might hire to help you with the process. Someone is also going to need to do your book layout, whether it be one of you or someone you hire for the job. It’s important to decide upfront who is going to do the labor involved in cover design and layout, who is going to pay for it if necessary, and who gets to make the creative decisions about how your book is going to look.
People sometimes get emotional about book covers, and it’s understandable why. They want to like their own book cover. They may have daydreamed what it would look like. They feel attached to their ideas and may be put off by certain types of covers or certain artistic choices. These emotions can run very high, and even if you don’t experience them, your partner might.
This is at odds with the purpose of covers: the sole purpose of book cover design is to advertise your book and to attract the readers who will like it. Covers aren’t about what you personal like—they’re about telling your specific readers at a cursory glance that this book is for them. Because of that, book covers need to conform to genre standards—if you put the wrong cover on your book, the right readers will never even consider it, because it won’t catch their eye as they scan through all the many book choices, in person or online.
It’s important to familiarize yourself with other current and successful book covers in your genre. It’s a good time to take a trip to a bookstore or peruse the Amazon Best Seller lists in your genre and see what books are selling and what their covers look like.
If one of you is already a professional cover designer, that’s great! But you’ll still need to confer as a partnership to make sure you both agree on what marketing angle the cover should take and what sort of design decisions will be best for your work. Like with editing, it’s also important that the designing partner doesn’t feel like extra work is being heaped upon them simply because of their skills; the non-designer should make an effort to take on other tasks so that all the work for production doesn’t fall to the designer.
Market research can still be important to traditionally published authors: if a publisher asks for your opinion on a cover, you’ll be able to give a more educated opinion if you’re aware of marketing principles. If you can speak to market trends instead of offering emotional feedback, you’ll signal to your publisher that your opinion is worth considering. Your publisher may or may not listen to you, but your chances are higher if you communicate clearly and concisely using language that suggests you’ve done your research and understand that a book cover is an advertisement.
If you’re an indie partnership working with a cover designer, this is even more important. In indie publishing, it’s the author’s job to tell the cover designer what kind of a cover they want. The designers will almost never read the book and aren’t necessarily in the business of marketing—their job is to create a professional, polished, industry standard version of whatever kind of market-focused cover you request from them.
Both when you are giving cover feedback to a publisher and when you’re soliciting work from a cover designer, it’s best to confer as a partnership and get on the same page before you communicate your partnership decisions to outside professionals. Otherwise, you risk confusing your art director or cover designer, or worse, putting your cover designer in the middle of a partnership conflict. Together you should prepare a design brief for your cover designer including the cover copy (which one or both of you must write), example covers in your genre that hit the same market you’re hoping to reach, and any information about what you two envision. The more information you can give to your designer about what you want, the easier it’s going to be for that designer to give you a cover you’ll be proud to put on your book.
How do you settle disputes between you about what kind of cover to put on your book? As with story decisions, it’s good to step back and get at the why behind your opinions. Why do you dislike book covers in the style your partner prefers? Is your preferred style also valid for the current market? What are the merits and drawbacks of each style? For any cover, there are generally several valid design choices that would all work for the market, and infinitely more design choices that would not. Finding the intersection of what you like and what sells is a lot of work, and in the end, one or both of you might have to accept a cover that is not to your personal taste, whether because it’s the best marketing decision for your partnership, or because your publisher gives you no choice.
Distribution
If you’re working with a publisher, distribution is probably decided for you. However, if you’ve gone indie, you’ll have to manage a number of decisions about what platforms to use for distribution. Will you crowd fund your release? Go exclusive to Amazon? Publish wide on many e-book platforms? Will you use Ingram for your print books, or KDP, or Draft2Digital, or some other option? Many paths are valid, and all have their benefits and drawbacks. If you’re in an equal partnership and publishing independently, you’ll have to decide between you what distribution decisions make sense for your project and your partnership.
It’s also important to recognize that all distribution decisions are going to involve some amount of work. Uploading files isn’t a complicated task, but it can take time to get them correctly prepared and to troubleshoot any files that might get sent back for corrections. If you’re wide, just the act of uploading the files to all the right places can take a substantial amount of time, especially when you include marketing tasks such as researching appropriate keywords and writing sales copy.
You’ll also need to make the decision of whether or not to put the book up for pre-order. There are benefits and drawbacks to running pre-orders—you can collect sales now, but you’ll also impose a deadline on your project, which can add to the stress of the production process.
There are no wrong answers to most of these questions, but they’re all questions you’re going to have to answer together—especially in an equal partnership, the decision-making process alone can be time-consuming and stressful. As you navigate it, remember to maintain respect for your partner and above all, communicate your opinions, your capabilities, and your needs. If there have been communications problems in the past, production is a stage where they’re likely to come to a head, so be on your guard for problems in the partnership and resolve them as clearly and thoroughly as you can, so they don’t ruin the most exciting part: the release of your book.
A Production Plan
For all tasks in production, whether working with a publisher or not, the most important thing is to have a plan and to show up to the job. You’ve written an entire book together—this is not the moment to slack off and leave most of the work to your partner, or worse, let the project stagnate when most of the work is already complete. I’ve found it’s useful to build a schedule, even if you aren’t publishing under a deadline. Production can feel like an endless list of monotonous tasks, and building a schedule with milestones to hit can help grant a sense of progression. It can also help you both keep track of what you’ve promised to do and what your partner is doing to contribute to the publication of your book. Your schedule should include timelines for editing, cover design, proofreads, layout, upload, and publication. Be sure to give yourselves ample time for every step, so you aren’t adding stress to yourselves by doing everything in a rush.
Above all, have patience with each other. Publishing is stressful enough without heaping more pressure and expectation on each other. Know that there are no right answers, and do your best for your project, yourselves, and each other.
