Author: Janci

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.

Before we move on to talk about process, I want to say a word about the insidious little devil that will wedge itself right into your workload and slowly dismantle your partnership piece by piece.
I’m talking about our friend resentment. I recommend, for the health of your partnership, that you never, ever do work that you resent.

This is easier to deal with in a work-for-hire relationship. As long as you made sure that your contract pays you sufficiently for the labor the job requires, there is nothing to resent. You are doing work. You are making money. The arrangement is simple and transactional. If you find you are not receiving enough compensation for your labor and you are beginning to be resentful of the time your project is taking, next time ask for more money. If your client won’t pay you more, and you know you would resent continuing to do work for them at that pay rate, its time to walk away in favor of better paying work. The relationship is clear cut and simple.

Tiered partnerships also frequently have this advantage. Assuming that the senior partner has communicated expectations and the junior partner has made sure in advance that the arrangement is an equitable one, it’s possible to stay away from resentment. You may run into cases where the terms change or one partner doesn’t follow through on what they originally agreed, and resentment may begin to creep in. But generally speaking tiered partnerships have an advantage in this area.

It’s much harder with an equal partnership. Partly because no partnership is ever one hundred percent equal.

Wait, what?

Isn’t equal right there in the name?

Here’s the thing: writing labor is very hard to quantify. Anyone who’s written a novel can tell you that not all chapters are equally easy to write. You could write a thousand words one day and they could be the easiest you’ve ever written, and the next thousand words might take ten times as long and be much more difficult. You could spend an hour writing words that flow like a dream, and you could spend the next hour tortuously bleeding words from your soul. Not all hours of writing are the same amount of work. Not all chapters and scenes and pages require the same amount of labor.

Likewise, not all tasks are equally difficult to all people. So even if you divide your labor “evenly,” say, with each partner writing a thousand words each week, you can’t guarantee that they’ll both have done the same amount of work. Their output might be the same, but the work they had to put into it to get there will vary from person to person, even from paragraph to paragraph. Even if you divided your labor by time, each putting in the same number of hours, some of those hours of labor will be much more difficult than others.

You want to make a good faith effort to divide the work evenly so that everyone is happy with the division of labor. The book needs to be imagined, brainstormed, outlined, drafted, revised, proofread, published, and promoted—which means there are hundreds of discrete tasks you must divide between the two of you. Drafting may seem like the biggest task, but it isn’t always so: you’ll also need to balance the workload of content revision, continuity editing, line editing, proofreading, and promotion. If you’re self-publishing you will also have to either divide or hire out editing, layout, and cover design. There will be promotional emails to send and advertising to monitor. (We’ll get into all of this more in depth in part two of this book.)

I suppose you could devise some complex rating system for tasks in an effort to make everything perfectly fair, but I recommend that you don’t. Trying to quantify difficulty and effort in such a detailed way will probably breed resentment rather than eliminate it, because it will just feed the selfish part of your brain that worries at every turn that it might be doing more than your partner.

Instead, I recommend you adjust your expectations by accepting that, at times, you might end up doing slightly more work than your partner, and let that be okay.

Don’t misinterpret me; you should absolutely not stick with a partner who takes advantage of you. If your partner has stopped writing, is no longer accomplishing their agreed-upon tasks, or is not prioritizing your project, you are under no obligation to continue doing your half the work. (Unless you are contractually obligated, of course, which we will address in a moment.) But there is a huge difference between doing most of the work unfairly and recognizing that there will be slight imbalances that are inherent and immeasurable and will likely even out over time.

When Your Partner Stops Working

What if you do realize that you’re carrying the project, even though the partnership is supposed to be “equal”? What if it’s become obvious that you are doing most of the work, and your partner is repeatedly dropping the ball?

First, ask yourself if you are okay with that. There’s nothing wrong with doing more work than the other person if you’re not feeling resentment. You can think about what concessions you are and aren’t willing to make. Is the project important enough to you that you’re willing to do more than your share of the work to see it finished? If that’s the case, how do you feel about still giving your partner equal credit or compensation? What about creative control?

When I have been in situations where I am doing more of the work than one of my writing partners, I’ve found personally that the last of these is the most important to me. I don’t mind sharing money and credit. People get credit and money for their intellectual property all the time, and if it’s valuable enough for me to continue working on it, then that’s my choice, and there is nothing to resent.

In equal partnerships, I have sometimes accepted equal credit and compensation for unequal work, and I don’t regret the times that I have. All of my co-writers have made meaningful and irreplaceable contributions to all of my collaborations, but the distribution of wordcount has not always been equal. In cases like that, I have sometimes asked my partner for more creative control, but never for a larger share of the compensation or credit. Those are my choices, and when I fully own them, I’m able to avoid falling into resentment.

You might make different choices. You might even want to go back and renegotiate your contract, if your co-writer is amenable. These are conversations you can have, as long as you offer clear communication and your partner is willing to work with you. There’s nothing wrong with working under less than completely equal circumstances, as long as you’re happy doing so, and are doing so without feeling coerced or taken advantage of.

But if resentment starts to creep in, it’s time to make some changes. What do you do if you find yourself presented with work you resent?

The first thing I recommend is that you don’t do it. Stop working. Not permanently, just long enough to sort out how you need to proceed.

First, you need to get at the source of your resentment. Do you feel the workload is unfairly balanced? Are you unhappy about the direction of the project, which has soured you on the labor? Are you upset about something unrelated?

Once you know what the problem is, refer back to the chapter about communication and talk about it. Hopefully you will do this before you start lashing out at your partner in overt or subtle ways, and before your resentment hurts not just the project but also your working relationship.

One thing to especially avoid is ruminating on your own resentment while continuing to do the thing you resent. Rumination is when you sit in your negative thoughts and play them for yourself over and over. You tell yourself how unfair the situation is, rehearsing again and again how you’re being taken advantage of, all without recognizing your own part in continuing to do the work and remain in the situation. No partner can take advantage of you without your consent, and persisting in painting them as the villain in your own mind without taking productive steps to change the situation means you are just as much a part of the unfair system as they are. You may have reasons to stay in the situation—you may feel guilty for refusing to pick up the slack, or you may have a hard time letting go of your goals for the project. You may even be contractually obligated to continue! But letting those feelings turn into contempt for your partner—even when they have let you down!—will not help you, or anybody.

When You Are Behind
It would be lovely to assume that you will always be the partner who is on top of things, and never the one who gets behind or fails to complete their work. But life gets the best of all of us. I’ve had to tell partners I’m going to need more time or a break from working on a project while I attend to other things—doing this is a natural part of a healthy working dynamic, so it’s to be expected.

What should you do if you find yourself unable to meet commitments? The first thing to do is to communicate sooner rather than later. It’s better to express weeks or months in advance that you won’t be able to meet a deadline than to spring this on your partner the day the work is due—or even later. It’s easy to want to avoid this conversation, especially if you’re feeling guilt or shame about not being able to meet your deadline, but failing to communicate will only make the situation worse. Don’t put it on your partner to notice that you’re struggling to keep up; take responsibility for your own work and communicate your struggles promptly and clearly. Then, as a partnership, you can work out a way forward.

The Pressure of Deadlines
But what if you have a deadline and your partner isn’t doing their share of the work? In that case don’t you have to pick up the slack?

I would argue that you usually don’t. If your partner can manage to stop meeting their obligations, what rule of the universe says you have to do the work for them? There may be consequences if you simply stop. You may miss your deadline. And while deadlines are important, you won’t be the first writer, and certainly not the first partnership to miss one.

If your partner is not picking up what you perceive to be half the work, you don’t have to do that work for them, especially if you’re going to resent them for it. You aren’t really doing them or yourself any favors if the task gets done at the expense of the well-being of your relationship. You may hoist the pail of water up from the well, but in doing so, you’ll have dumped poison into the well so every bucket from now on will be laced with it. No one needs help like that.

Am I advocating that if your partner misses a deadline, you should begin to miss your own in retribution? Certainly not. But you can slow down and communicate with your partner about what’s happening. A quick flag for your partner that you’re making an adjustment will suffice: “Hey, it looks like you need more time on that! I’m going to hold off on writing my next chapter and let you catch up. When you finish that, we can talk about next steps.”

You’ve been up front about your intentions. No one is punishing anyone else. You’re patiently providing them with more time, while they are receiving the time they need to finish the task. This may also help your partner not to resent you; if you leave your partner behind while they struggle to catch up, they may come to resent you for taking over and doing more than your share of the creative work. Maybe the book will get done more slowly, but that’s okay. Not all collaborations can or should be completed on tight deadlines. You won’t be the first writers to miss a deadline, and for much worse reasons than having patience with yourselves and each other.

The truth is, most writing work can be done later. Generally, writing deadlines are not a matter of life and death. In several of my collaborations we had a mantra: friends before fiction. This means that when we have to choose between the good of our partner and the good of our project, we choose our partner every time.

I’ve had to temporarily halt production on several collaborative projects because my partners were caught up in medical crises. In some cases, the pause measured more than a year, but that’s okay. Sometimes life happens, and it can’t be helped. In one case I volunteered to finish most of the incomplete draft, so we could jump straight into revisions when my partner’s health improved. In another case I put everything down and didn’t touch a word of any of it. What you do when life happens and your partner can’t contribute is up to you, but certainly don’t do work and then resent your partner for it. You’re not doing anyone any favors if you do that, and you’re probably doing active harm.

Contractual Obligations
But what if you are contractually obligated? What if you’ve gotten yourself into what I consider one of the worst possible situations in which a writer can find themselves—you’ve already been paid for a project, you’ve already accepted an advance, you’ve already paid taxes on it (or, heaven forbid, spent it), and now you’re on the hook for a book that isn’t written yet, and your partner isn’t doing the writing.

Friends, if you are not currently in this situation, I would encourage you to do everything you can to avoid it. I have requested more revisions to contracts to avoid the possibility of this ever happening to me than I have for any other single issue. That is a truly horrific situation in which to find yourself, and I would suggest you be very, very careful about accepting advances that you can’t pay back on projects that aren’t written when part of the work is dependent on other people.

But if you are already in that situation, you may be in the one, singular position in which you don’t have a choice about doing work you resent. In that case, take some deep breaths. Tell yourself that you have learned some things. Promise yourself you will never allow this to happen again. Recognize that, while your partner may have wronged you, you also made decisions that have led to you being in this regrettable situation. And then grit your teeth, do the work, and dig yourself out of the bad situation. If it destroys your partnership, know that you really didn’t have any other options.

Tell yourself that you are getting something out of finishing the work yourself: you are earning the peace of being well and truly done with the situation. Try to maintain the basic level of respect for your partner that is due to every human being. Be as kind as you can, because adding cruelty will certainly not make the situation better and will absolutely make it even worse. Do what you have to do to get the work done, and know that you are not the first writer to find themselves in a situation like that, nor will you be the last. Sometimes, in terrible circumstances, there are only terrible solutions, and you have my deepest condolences that you had no truly good options. Finish the work, and then move on with your life a little wiser and don’t look back.

Speaking of getting out, I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t include the next chapter—how do you know when a partnership is beyond saving and it’s time to quit? And once you decide that, what do you do next? Hopefully the skills we’ve already discussed will make all your partnership problems solvable, but when a partnership is no longer working for you, there’s no shame in walking away. In the next chapter we’ll talk about when and how to do that in a way that is respectful to everyone involved.

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.

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.

Very few first-time collaborators think about signing a contract before they begin, but all of them should. In an equal partnership, especially among friends, you might feel like you don’t need a contract yet, but if anyone is writing words on the project, you definitely do. Contracts are friendship saving, because they ensure that everyone has agreed about what they’re getting into. You don’t want to spend hours, weeks, months, even years on a project only to discover that you have vastly different ideas about what you will do with it after the fact.

Your contract may cover lots of things, particularly if you’re in a tiered partnership; when IP lawyers get involved these contracts can grow long enough to make your eyes cross. If you’re in an equal partnership and don’t have high value existing intellectual property (like a mega-selling published series in the setting) you can probably make do with something much simpler, only a few pages long.
There are many sample contracts to be found on the internet. I am not a lawyer, so I can’t give you a foolproof contract, but I will discuss a few points that every collaboration contract should address.

Money
Let’s address the big one first: your contract must state how proceeds from sales of the work will be divided. If you’re in an equal partnership, the share is probably fifty/fifty. If you’re in a tiered partnership, it might be fifty/fifty, but it also might not. Junior partners might be offered an upfront fee or advance on their work in addition to a royalty. They might work for a flat fee and receive no royalties at all. Regardless, take a good long look at the way money is going to be allocated and ask yourself if you’re going to feel good about the way profit will be distributed before you sign and before you invest yourself in the project.

This may seems simple, but there are a few other things you’ll want to consider. If the work requires expenses—like editing, advertising, or cover design—who will pay for those expenses? Will that person be reimbursed, and if so, how? It’s worth taking a minute to think about how you’re going to handle these things in the future and codifying them into the contract, so you don’t have a dispute about them later when there’s an already-written book on the line.

A word to prospective senior partners: if you’re thinking of offering less than fifty percent to your co-writer, you must do so from a position of power. I would never accept less than fifty percent (or a proportional equal share, like 33% in a three-person partnership) unless the senior partner had something significant to offer—like a very large audience and a practically guaranteed sales record. If you are a mega-selling author, you might be able to offer a lower percentage, and your junior partner could be assured that they are going to make a reasonable wage for their labor nevertheless. If your junior partner is undertaking a serious risk that the product will not make much money, you’re doing them a disservice by offering less than fifty percent.

Credit
On this point, equal partners also have it a bit easier. In an equal partnership, both authors are generally credited as the authors of the work, or they select a pseudonym to represent them both. Collaboration contracts generally stipulate that the authors will both refer to themselves as co-authors or co-writers and not claim to be the sole author of the work.

There are a few issues that even equal partners should consider. If both your names are going on the cover, whose will be first? Do you want to use a pseudonym? If so, what will the pseudonym be? Lots of co-authors use them (like Christina Lauren, the romance-writing duo whose first names are Christina and Lauren), but many also do not. For the Five Lands series, Megan, Lauren, and I elected to use a pseudonym so as not to clutter the front of the book with three names and muddy the branding. Whatever you decide, putting it in writing upfront will help prevent disagreements later on.

In tiered partnerships, there are a few other considerations. Will your names be the same size on the cover? If not, how much smaller is the junior partner’s name allowed to be? Should your name be at least forty percent the size of your co-writer’s? Fifty? Larger or smaller? If you don’t get this in writing now, publishers may not honor it later, so it’s good to have it agreed upon (in writing!) in advance. In my original contract with Dragonsteel, I was offered equal size for my name on the Skyward novellas. I appreciate the respect Brandon showed me by offering this to me . . . but I’m well aware that his name sells books, and as I like selling books, I negotiated for his name to be bigger than mine. What matters ultimately is not the size of the names on the cover, but the fact that you agree to how each writer will be credited upfront, in advance, and in writing.

Intellectual Property
Who is going to hold the copyright for your book? Who will own the IP and therefore the rights to write other books in the setting? In an equal partnership this might be held equally, but it also might not. The important thing is that you both agree in advance, so you know what you’ll be allowed to do with the setting if the partnership ends, and more importantly, what won’t be permitted. In a tiered partnership this is even more complicated; if the senior partner has other books in the setting, they may want a longer clause with additional protections to make it crystal clear what the junior partner has rights to and what they don’t.

There is a lot more to IP than just print rights. What about film? What about merchandising? How about foreign rights? All of these things need to be addressed in the contract so everyone knows who owns which pieces of intellectual property. Laying this out in advance will not only protect your relationship with your partner, but can save you from lawsuits in the future.

Control of Decision Making
It’s important to decide in advance how decisions will be made, especially for anything that isn’t codified in the contract at the time of signing. If it’s an equal partnership, the contract should stipulate that decisions will be made jointly. If, in the equal partnership, partners have specific jobs and decision-making responsibilities, those should also be outlined to avoid future confusion.

In a tiered partnership, no doubt should be left about exactly how much control, if any, the junior partner has over the final product and the future publishing decisions related to it. Make sure you feel good about whatever the decision-making arrangement will be, and think long and hard about how it might impact you in the future.

Non-disclosure Agreements
Most equal partnership contracts don’t require NDAs. If you are new or midlist writers, it’s not necessary to contractually prevent partners from discussing your business dealings outside of the partnership. In tiered partnerships with established writers, however, it’s common practice for junior partners to sign non-disclosure agreements stipulating that they won’t talk about the details of the project publicly. These NDAs can be anything from waiting to announce project details until the senior partner announces them first to never speaking about the existence of the project for eternity. The key is to be sure you’re ready to abide by the terms once you sign them, so read your NDA carefully.

Kill Clause
The contract should address what will happen if the partnership ends, and what the obligations (if any) of each partner will be in that event. Be sure you know how to get out of the arrangement if necessary, and what rights you keep (and which you lose) if you decide to do so.

Please Read Your Contract
This should go without saying, but please read every word of your contract, both when you receive a draft to negotiate, and before you sign the final version. Make sure you understand everything it says, and if you don’t, seek clarification before signing. You can and should negotiate any wording that you’re uncomfortable with; any good partner will listen to your concerns and make concessions where they can. If they can’t, it’s better that you know in advance that the situation was untenable than to sign an untenable contract and later have to extricate yourself.

A Word about Work-For-Hire
Contracts are important in any collaboration, but when you’re entering into work-for-hire, especially in cases where the primary benefit to you is monetary, you want to make absolutely sure that the rights you are giving away are rights you feel comfortable losing. In cases where you receive no rights to intellectual property, no royalties, and no credit, you want to be certain that your payment structure is clear and tied to measurable goals and outcomes. And then you want to produce words and let them go without becoming too attached to them, because after you have fulfilled your contractual obligations, they aren’t yours anymore, and you only have the rights compensation that are outlined in your contract.

In these kinds of partnerships you can ignore everything I said earlier about irresistible deliciousness. You are not looking for creative spark. If you get a little spark out of the project, that’s wonderful, but in this case, the benefit to you is the money.

And there’s nothing wrong with that! When you are a professional, money is a powerful motivator! No one looks down on plumbers for charging for their work, and no one has a right to tell you that you have to prioritize creative fervor over money. We all need to support ourselves (and any family that might be dependent on us), and that’s a good and noble thing to do. But if what you’re getting out of the collaboration is money, make sure the money is going to be worth the work you put in or you may end up signing on to a project you regret.

What If Things Change?
If you leave anything out of the contract, or if your circumstances change and you both consent to change the terms, you’re not necessarily locked in. You can create a contract addendum at any time to add further stipulations or change previous ones, so long as you both consent and sign the addendum as well.

For example, it’s possible that you’re not sure if you’ll want to publish under a pseudonym, and want to wait to make that decision. In that case, you can put a clause in your contract that says something like, “Co-authors may, by mutual agreement, publish the work under a single pseudonym.” This ensures that, even if you haven’t made the decision yet, you’ve stipulated up front that you both have to mutually agree.

When Megan, Lauren and I first signed our collaboration agreement, we didn’t know if we would sell our book traditionally or decide to self-publish, so we threw in a line that we would make those decisions in the future “by mutual consent” and went on our way. Later, when we decided to self-publish, we signed a contract addendum that outlined exactly how we would handle setting up our publishing business, and elaborated on how expenses would be handled.

You don’t have to know everything today, but you do want to be sure you’re happy with everything in the contract at the time that you sign it. You can change things later, but only if you both agree to sign an addendum, so make sure that you’re okay living with the terms of your contract forever, because it’s possible it will always be in force.

Dealing with contracts may not be the most pleasant part of collaboration, but having it negotiated and signed in advance (or right now if you’ve already begun!) can save you both personal and legal trouble in the future. It may feel like asking for a signed contract shows a lack of trust, but a written agreement protects all parties, and ultimately is another way that partners can show mutual respect for each other, by making sure that everyone is comfortable with the terms and protected in writing.

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.

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.

While writing and publishing a book, any writer must make thousands of decisions, from story structure to word choice to publishing path. In a joint project, many of these decisions will need to be made as a team. While communication and mutual respect are fundamental to decision making, I want to take a moment to talk about some of the unique challenges to making decisions as a team.
Many decisions you make will come easily—the best course will be obvious, and you will agree about what to do. Let’s talk about what to do in those other times, when reaching a consensus requires communication and effort.

Care About Your Partner’s Needs
When making decisions in a partnership, it behooves you to care about your partner’s needs and look out for them with the same care that you look out for your self. It’s important to have boundaries, and I’m not advocating that you allow your partner to walk all over you. But respecting both your needs and your co-author’s will make you a more cooperative and kind collaborator, and set you up to treat your partner as a teammate and not as an opponent in the decision making process.

Decision-Making Styles
Like communication styles, decision-making styles can also vary. Some people make fast, instinctual decisions, while others like to take time to weigh all the evidence. Some people make decisions based mostly on how they feel, while others need to logically work out all possible ramifications before they can make a decision. There’s nothing inherently wrong with any decision making style—but if you make decisions differently from your partner, you’re going to need to recognize your differences and exercise patience with each other so that you can both come to conclusions you’re comfortable with.

I tend to trust my own instincts. On most matters, I come to decisions very quickly, and I don’t tend to second guess the decisions I make. This makes me very efficient when I’m working by myself, but it doesn’t make me the best communicator when it comes to making decisions as a team.

When I’m working with other fast decision makers, this is not a problem. Brandon and I can zip through ten huge decisions in a twenty minute phone call, because we both talk and think very quickly and come to fast decisions about what we’d each like to do. Even when we disagree, we tend to each state our cases immediately, and then either agree on what should happen next, or agree to revisit it at a later time after further consideration. That’s a wonderful asset, because I get limited face time with Brandon due to his busy schedule.

But not everyone thinks like I do, and when I’m working with a more methodical decision maker, I’ve had to learn to slow down and give time for my partner to think things through and get comfortable with their own decision before we can hash things out together. This isn’t an inherently better or worse way to make decisions; it’s simply different, and taking the time to accommodate both of our decision making styles allows both of us to fully contribute to the project at hand. Having patience for and awareness of our differences helps to avoid conflict and frustration as we each use our separate processes to get on the same page.

The State of Not Knowing
One of the biggest enemies to effective decision making, in my experience, is discomfort with the state of not knowing. When it comes to difficult decisions, it’s easy to focus on how much we wish the decision was already made. We’re nervous we won’t be able to come to a satisfactory solution. We’re afraid we will never solve these problems and will be unable to move forward. We don’t like being in a state of conflict with our partner (whether real or perceived), and we just want to agree already so the decision can be over. In this state, we fixate on what we want right now, which is to not have to have this conversation anymore.

This is, unfortunately, not a good mindset in which to make decisions. When we’re making decisions, our focus needs to be on brainstorming new solutions and weighing the costs and benefits of each. We need to be immersed all the way in the conversation, not trying to escape it.

Decision Challenges
Regardless of your decision making style, you will find that sometimes you agree and sometimes you disagree, sometimes you have strong feelings on what should be done, and sometimes your feelings are less strong. Especially in equal partnerships, the challenge of making decisions without a heirarchical structure can derail your progress on your collaborative project. Let’s look at some of the situations you’re likely to find yourself in when it comes to making partnership decisions, as well as some of the benefits and challenges of each.

You Have Different Ideas About What to Do
This is the situation everyone is most worried about, but in my experience it’s actually the easiest decision-making challenge to solve. If you both have different ideas about what should be done, that means you both have ideas! That’s wonderful, and something to be celebrated not feared.

The first thing to do is to listen to each other. It’s easy to let your emotions run away with you as you stew on the possibility that you won’t get what you want, but if you really listen to your partner, their perspective may change what you want so that you now want something else! Or it may not, but you don’t know until you’ve really given what your partner wants a fair chance.

As you each take turns making a case for the path you’d like to take, make sure to drill down to why you want the outcome you do. I’ve found that most often when my partner and I disagree about what to do in a given situation, be it a creative or business decision, it’s because we don’t understand the the reasons and logic behind the choices.

Once we understand the reason and logic, we can start looking for solutions that satisfy the why behind both our preferences. We might seem like we’re at an impass if one partner wants one thing and the other wants the opposite, but when we can see the intent behind the preference, we can start to look at decisions not as binaries, but as a nuanced set of possibilities. Keep discussing and brainstorming until one of you genuinely changes their mind based on the new information, or you find a solution that satisfies the why behind both of your preferences.

To find such a solution, you make need to back up until you find values you both share. If you’re making decisions about promotional opportunities, for example, your shared value might be that you both want to find new readers for your work, and you both want to try new promotional approaches as a means to reach those readers. One of you might think trying Amazon ads is a great next step, while the other might be afraid of putting money into ads at the risk of not seeing a return, but if you agree on the core goal, you have a place of agreement from which to base your discussion. Knowing the reason your partner objects—the why behind their opinion—can help you figure out how to mitigate their concerns and come up with a solution that suits both of you. Maybe there’s a different, less expensive marketing opportunity to try first. Maybe you can agree on a limited starting budget so the level of risk is in your partner’s comfort zone. However you compromise, your solution should take into account both of your opinions and the reasons behind them.

Be careful in your discussions that one of you doesn’t simply tire the other one out. The intent should be to make decisions that are best for both of you and the project, not to wait the other person out long enough to “win.” In fact, if one of you “wins,” everybody loses. If you find yourself (or your partner) ready to give in just to be done with the discussion, it’s time to shelve that decision and pull it out another day when you’re both fresh. Often, when your brain is sharp and rested again, new possibilities will occur to you. Your brain is likely to simmer on the problem in the background, and often you’ll both come up with new possibilities and perspectives if you give yourself a break and time to reset.

One Partner has a Strong Opinion; the Other Doesn’t
On the surface this is the easiest situation in which to make decisions. The partner with the strong opinion makes the decision, and you’re done. Right?

Maybe. It’s okay to allow the person who is more invested to make decisions . . . sometimes. But some people have more enthusiastic personalities—maybe they honestly care more deeply about more things, or perhaps they simply express that they care more exuberantly than other people.

I am such a personality type—my expression of my opinion can ere on the side of the dramatic. And I can tell you, if my partner defaults to my preference every time I express my opinion with more gusto than they do, this very quickly becomes a very big problem.

I’d suggest that the person who is more invested can safely make decisions that mostly affect them. At one point, Megan and I heard that TikTok was becoming a good tool for book promotion. Megan volunteered to check it out, and began the process of researching and posting. I offered suggestions, but ultimately I let Megan spearhead the push, because she was the one doing the work. She was the one whose workload was affected by the decisions. My personality is such that I can summon an opinion on virtually any subject at will, but it would have been inappropriate for me to primarily make the decisions when I wasn’t the one who was having to carry out the results of those decisions with my own labor.

In situations where you are both equally affected, if one person genuinely cares a lot more than the other, it’s fine to let that person have their way . . . as long as this happens about an equal amount of the time. If the same person always cares more, then they will overtime exert an undue influence on the project, and the work gets deprived of the more reserved partner’s influence. So go ahead and make decisions this way, but keep an eye on the pattern. If you find one of you much more frequently cares more and therefore gets their way more, you’re adding an imbalance to the partnership and depriving your project of one partner’s input. If that’s the case, you’ll need to stop making so many decisions based on strength of opinion alone.

What do you do then? Forget about how strong an opinion is. Remove that aspect from your conversation entirely. Really focus on the “why” behind your opinions, as you would do in a situation where you disagree, and keep discussing it until you find a solution that suits both your opinions, no matter how strong.

In this situation, it will probably be tempting for the partner with the less strong opinion to undercut the conversation by announcing something to the effect of, “I don’t really care that much anyway,” or “we can just do it your way, I don’t care!” This might be an attempt to avoid conflict, or an honest attempt to let the other person have their way. And if decisions get made that way on occasion, that’s perfectly fine! But if you’ve already identified this as a problem in your partnership, it’s best not to give in to that impulse. If you are the less forceful partner, you need to shift your focus to value your own opinion, even if you perceive yourself to be less invested. Offer your opinion with confidence, without worrying that it isn’t strong enough to be valuable. If you are the partner with the stronger opinion, gently remind your partner that you want to know what they think, even if they don’t perceive it to be a strongly held belief. Reassure them that you want to know because you value their input, and that you don’t require them to pledge fealty to a particular position in order to find it valuable to the project.

You Both Hate All The Options
Sometime, you may find yourself in a position where you both hate all the options, but you still have to make a decision. Maybe it’s become clear you’re going to miss a deadline and you have to figure out what to prioritize and what to let go. Maybe you’ve just discovered a massive plot problem that’s going to involve rewriting thousands of words, or abandoning everything you’ve written and starting over. Maybe your hoped-for publishing opportunity fell through, and now you have to pivot and form a new plan in non-ideal circumstances. I’ve had all these things happen, and it sucks! In publishing, things frequently go wrong and we have to move on to plan B, C, or Z, and it’s perfectly fine not to be happy with your options under those circumstances.

But, even in the face of only bad options, decisions still have to be made, and paths ahead still have to be forged. If you find that you don’t disagree so much as simply dislike the available prospects, I’d suggest you also focus on the why behind your feelings. Why don’t you like this option? Why don’t you like that one? Digging in to why you’re both less than thrilled with the available choices will help you figure out what would make the situation more palatable to both of you—or which of the bad options feel the least bad under the circumstances. Sort through the choices and stay committed to finding a solution that works for both of you—even if you’re passionately arguing for why you don’t want to do things, instead of advocating for things you do want.

No One Cares Either Way
In my experience, the hardest decisions to make as a team are not the ones where you disagree, but the times when no one has a strong opinion at all. I think of these as the “oh, I don’t care, do whatever you want” decisions. That’s a great and fine answer to get from your partner when you know what you want—the promise you are free to do it (so long as it is genuine and not masking deeper feelings), can be a real gift!

But if you also don’t care about the outcome, if you were in fact asking because you don’t care and you only wanted someone to make the decision for you, then having the decision kicked back to you puts you at risk of getting caught in a game of decision-making ping-pong where you both try to get the other person to make the decision.

Unlike with genuine disagreements, you don’t have any opinions to fall back on or drill down to the why. Why don’t you care? Probably because this decision matters very little in the long run, but it nevertheless has to be made, and one (or both) of you has to make it. And the more times you parry the decision back and forth, the more likely it is that one or both of you will become frustrated that something so unimportant is taking up so much time and effort.

The first thing to do in a situation like this is to make sure that you’re both being honest. If one (or both) of you is secretly harboring a deeply-held opinion that you are witholding from the other in an effort to be accommodating, you probably believe you are being helpful and considerate when you are actually being obstructive. Fundamental to decision making is the requirement that everyone must practice good communication—and that means being upfront and honest about your opinions and needs.

If you are both being honest and no one in fact cares about the outcome of this decision at all, then you need to examine if there is anything either of you really doesn’t want to be the outcome of the decision. Go ahead and rule out any options that either of you are truly opposed to. You should be left with only the choices that you’re both truly, one-hundred percent honestly okay with.

After that, you just need to pick something and move on with your lives. It’s fine to assign one person to do this, so long as the same person doesn’t always get stuck making all the decisions no one wants to make, because if that position is unwanted it can quickly build resentment. Flip a coin, if you must, but please, choose and move on before you get into an argument about something that doesn’t really matter.

It’s tempting in this circumstance to tell yourself you’re doing your partner a favor by letting them make the decision, but recognize that if you continue to give your partner no support except to announce that you don’t care, you’re actually shifting the mental burden onto them. Instead, show commitment to your partnership by offering to share in the decision, even if sharing means you dig out your own coin and do the flipping.

If flipping a coin sounds untenable to you, there’s probably some underlying anxiety surrounding this decision that’s affecting one or both of you. If it truly didn’t matter, deciding at random would be a great option! So if that’s the case, try to get to the root of the anxiety that’s paralyzing you, and recognize that it may be about something entirely different. Decision paralysis can be a symptom of a larger problem in your partnership, and if it is, you’ll want to openly and honestly communicate about that rather than convincing yourself it’s all about this inconsequential choice. There is nothing more frustrating or futile than trying to solve the wrong problem, so make sure you’ve correctly identified the conversation you should be having, so you don’t drive both you and your partner insane.

Fall Back on your Contract
When you begin a collaboration, you can’t possibly communicate about every problem that might come up in advance. There are too many variables and surprises inherent in writing and publishing to think of everything that might possibly go wrong. But there are some key things that you’ll want to have already decided before you write a word (or, if you’ve already written words, decided right now, don’t wait!)
I’m talking about your collaboration contract. In the next chapter, we’ll talk about why you (yes, you!) need one, what should be included, and how that will help simplify your communication about the project going forward.

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.

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.

Let’s face it, most people are not the best communicators. Even those who are good at communication in some circumstances can devolve quickly when they’re upset, stressed, or disagreeing about things that deeply matter. If you’re writing a book with another person, you’re bound to find yourself in all of those situations at one time or another. And when you do, you’re likely to engage in some unhelpful communication strategies in an effort to manage your own stress level and to get what you want—but when you do, you sabotage your own goals and your partnership.
Let’s start by talking about what our communication with our partner should not look like. Lest you think I’m judging you again, you should know that I’ve made all of these mistakes in my collaborative relationships at one point or another, so trust me, I know how easy it is to fall into unhelpful communication patterns, and how much better your communication can be when you learn to avoid those traps.

What Not To Do

Begin with Accusations
If you’re upset about something that’s going poorly in your partnership, one of the worst things you can do is begin that conversation with an accusation. Announcing to your partner that “You never doing any of the work!” or “You didn’t do any of the things you said you would do!” or “You’re being a bully!” will only serve to shut down communication and put them on the defensive. When you begin with accusations, you ensure that what follows will go poorly. If your partner is an ideal communicator, they might sidestep your invitation for unproductive discourse, but it’s not fair to rely on them to get the partnership back on course when you’ve so thoroughly disembarked from the path of productive communication yourself.

Assume You Know What Your Partner Is Thinking
This goes along with accusations, but one should never assume that they know what their partner was thinking, and should certainly never assume malice. When you accuse your partner of failing to write a chapter they agreed to out of spite, or intentionally ignoring a request that they may simply have forgotten, or pretending to be confused to manipulate you, you deprive yourself of really knowing what was happening on your partner’s side. Maybe they had a legitimate problem with that chapter and were waiting to talk to you about how to proceed. Maybe they simply misunderstood your request, or didn’t receive it. Maybe they honestly forgot. Maybe they are honestly confused.

It’s hard enough to keep track of what’s going on in our own minds; it’s never helpful to assume what’s going on in your partner’s, particularly if you’re telling yourself an unflattering story. It’s tempting to make yourself the hero of the story, deserving of grace for your own failings, while painting your partner as the villain who did things to harm you on purpose.

But unless you are working with an actual super villain, this is unlikely to be the case. Generally people do things for legitimate reasons. Even if they’ve made a mistake, they probably didn’t do so to intentionally sabotage their business partner. Asking questions will get you a lot farther toward solving problems than baseless assumptions.

Address Issues in the Heat of the Moment
If most arguments start because the instigator is feeling a high level of stress and emotion, it stands to reason that most of us do better addressing issues after we’ve calmed down a bit. It’s tempting to jump in (often with an assumption and an accusation) at the exact moment your annoyance is triggered, which is why so many annoyances build up over time, only to be unloaded at the smallest infraction. This leaves your co-author feeling blindsided and attacked, and also gives the impression that you’re blowing the whole issue out of proportion.

And with good reason! They are being blindsided and attacked, and the things that trigger ire in the moment are rarely the soul of the issue at hand. You’ll have much better success if you swallow your outburst in the moment, do some soul searching about what’s actually bothering you, and present your concerns when you are ready to be kind and thoughtful, rather than when you’re filled to bursting with emotion.

Speak in Absolutes
As much as we all love to throw around words like “I always” and “you never,” these words are helpful even less often than they are true. Rather than generalizing a problem into something your partner “always” or “never” does, stick to the issue at hand. Did they do this thing this one time? Is it observable and true? You’re much more likely to get a positive response when talking about a specific instance than you are when you bring “always” and “never” into the equation.

In the event that you need to talk about a pattern of behavior, you can still avoid speaking in absolutes. “I’ve noticed when X happens you tend to Y, for example last week when . . .” will still get a better response than “Everytime X happens you always Y . . .”

Overgeneralizing raises the chances that your discussion will devolve into the definition of “always” or become focused on the times when your partner had a different response, which is not helpful and won’t get your problem addressed.

Sugarcoat at the Expense of Clarity
So far we’ve discussed aggressive communication strategies, and those of you who are less prone to outburst are probably feeling pretty good about yourselves! Alas, being too nice can be just as destructive to a partnership as accusations or attacks; when you sugarcoat your opinions to the point of obscuring them, your mangle your message so it won’t be clearly received.

Being too nice? Is this really a problem? It is, because communication cannot occur when one partner is so concerned about hurting the other’s feelings or causing conflict that they hide the full extent of the truth from their partner. Over time, unaddressed problems will build up, and the partner who doing the sugarcoating will be unable to get their needs met or their voice heard. At best, this causes resentment and confusion, which is bad enough, but it can be much worse.

I’m aware of one partnership in which the partner in charge of the finances was afraid to tell their team that they were having cash flow problems. Because the situation was sugarcoated, the team made several financial decisions they would not have made if they had understood the full truth, landing them in a mountain of debt, unable to fulfill their obligations to their customers, and leaving them on the verge of bankruptcy. In the worst cases, withheld information may result in grave errors that can be both traumatic and costly, potentially ending the partnership and having ramifications that outlast it.

It’s good to be kind and to care about your partner’s feelings, but the kindest thing in any circumstance is to make sure that your honest input is communicated clearly, even if you know your partner isn’t going to like it.

Stay Silent to Keep the Peace
A sister to sugarcoating, remaining silent about problems in your partnership will only allow those problems to fester. Contrary to the Disney wisdom, “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all,” in a partnership you must speak your mind. Communication is not limited to either speaking with accusations or remaining silent; we can all learn to speak clearly and kindly, even when we know our partner may not like what we have to say.

Give Up Too Early
Many partnerships end because, instead of trying to communicate more clearly and recognizing their own contributions to miscommunication, partners let resentment build until it seems the only thing left to do is walk away. Some partnerships must end, especially if one collaborator refuses invitations to communicate appropriately or demonstrate mutual respect over a long period of time. But many times, if we really look at our own behavior and make changes, things can improve and the partnership can continue. Giving up too early deprives everyone of the opportunity to grow, change, and discover what beautiful things might come out of the collaborative creative process.

A Word about Boundaries, Ultimatums, and Threats
Everyone knows you’re supposed to have good boundaries, but so many times when we go to express them, what comes out is not a boundary, but instead a threat or an ultimatum, both of which are destructive communication practices. So what is the difference?

A boundary is a clear expression of what you will do in a given circumstance. It is tied to concrete behavior, and very specific. For example, “When you speak to me in that way, I feel attacked. In the future, if you begin to take a harsh tone in your criticism, I will immediately end the conversation. We can continue the conversation later, when we’ve both calmed down.” Boundaries are a fantastic tool for communicating what you are and are not okay with in the context of a partnership.

But so often when we mean to communicate a clear boundary, we miss the mark. What comes out is an ultimatum, or worse, a threat. An ultimatum is a statement that unfairly leverages the future of the partnership in an attempt to change our partner’s behavior. Our previous example might morph from boundary to ultimatum thusly: “If you ever speak that way to me again then we are done working together.” Occasionally an ultimatum is a necessary measure, but it’s only appropriate when dealing with the worst kinds of behavior. It is perfectly fair (though hopefully unnecessary in most situations!) to say, “If you physically assault me, our partnership will be over.” But the vast majority of behaviors do not warrant this kind of leveraging of the relationship, and so ultimatums are best avoided in almost all cases. When they are used in unwarranted situations, they are a form of coercion. One partner is forced to capitulate to the other or risk losing the partnership entirely, which is manipulative, unfair, and will create an unhealthy working dynamic over time.

Of course, sometimes we don’t stop at ultimatums. Sometimes we slide even further down the inappropriate communication rabbit hole into threats. What makes a statement a threat? Unlike a boundary, which focuses on clear, concrete, and appropriate actions you will take, such as removing yourself from a harmful situation, a threat doubles down on the problematic behavior you’re trying to address and adds to it a promise that you, too, will also behave badly. “If you ever speak to me like that again I will post your response on the Internet so everyone will know what a big jerk you are!” Ouch. Now we’ve moved from taking clear steps to protect ourselves into retribution territory, and retribution has no place in a partnership. The old adage, “two wrongs don’t make a right” has never applied more. So when you’re ready to address problems in your partnership, check yourself to make sure your boundaries aren’t being communicated in the form of ultimatums or threats, because doing so will deeply mar your message and greatly reduce the likelihood your communication will be favorably received.

This kind of communication also increases the likelihood of escalation, where both of you devolve into poorer and poorer communication strategies. This, my friends, is how partnerships come to miserable, dramatic, and unnecessary ends.

What About Your Partner?
As you read this, chances are you’re seeing yourself in some of these strategies. That’s okay! It’s even a good thing; it puts you miles ahead of the writer who is certain their communication is always perfect and pure. It also arms you with information you may need to improve your own communication in your partnership.

But what if you’re also seeing your partner in some of these problems? What if your partner also sometimes puts you on the defensive, assumes what you’re thinking, or stays silent when they should speak up?

First, it’s again important to remember that we can only change ourselves. If we try to change our partners, we will cause new problems rather than solve old ones. Secondly, we can’t even make suggestions about our partner’s communication when we are embroiled in poor communication strategies ourselves. Drowning people are better helped when their rescuers have solid footing; if we start to make suggestions about our partner’s poor communication when we are, ourselves, issuing ultimatums or beginning with accusations, they will be quick to point out our hypocrisy, and our message will be obfuscated.

So, much like with mutual respect, we need to first work on our own communication failings, and then decide which, if any, of our partner’s communication problems need to be brought up in a clear way at a time when we are not currently on fire with emotion about them.

And then, once you have clearly presented your partner with your suggestions about how they might also help improve communication between you, it’s up to them whether they want to take you up on your suggestion and make changes. You aren’t responsible for anyone’s behavior but your own, but if you’ve made kind suggestions on multiple occasions, without accusation, assumption, sugarcoating, or emotional charge, and your partner isn’t receptive to hearing what you’re saying or respectful of your boundaries over a period of time, then it might be time to consider whether the partnership can be saved.

What To Do
We’ve covered what not to do, but it’s difficult to avoid unhelpful behaviors unless we can replace them with tools that are more useful and likely to succeed. Let’s talk about some of those.

Say What You Mean
This may seem simple, but it’s amazing how much of the time, especially in casual speech, we say something completely different than what we mean. And despite our imprecise language, we then want to hold other people accountable for what we said, even though in many cases we didn’t actually communicate the things we meant in the first place.

Don’t complain to your partner about their bad grammar when you’re actually upset at them for making a story decision you don’t like. Don’t open a conversation with “this is probably a stupid idea, but . . .” unless you think it is, in fact, a stupid idea. Don’t begin a sentence with “this isn’t a big deal, but . . .” if it is, in fact, a big deal. Definitely don’t threaten to abandon your partnership unless you are actually ready to quit, and have thought this through and made that decision at a time when you were clear headed instead of the heat of the moment.

Many misunderstandings can be headed off if we take the time to make sure what we’re saying is what we actually mean—and that we’re getting at the core of the issue instead of dancing around it complaining about things that ultimately don’t matter.

Speak to Your Own Experience
Instead of attacking your partner or assuming what they’re thinking, you can stick to your own experiences. “I was frustrated when I didn’t receive that chapter on time,” is much more likely to get a helpful response than “You don’t respect our agreements.” One makes an assumption about your partner’s intent, while the other speaks only to things about which you have firsthand knowledge. Likewise, when addressing your partner’s behavior, you can use words that recognize that you don’t have access to what’s going on in their mind. “You seem upset about . . .” will get you a lot further than a certain accusation about your partner’s inner thoughts.

Be Open to Your Partner’s Perspective
Chances are, your partner also has things that are bothering them, things they may not have addressed with you yet. Some of these things may be connected to the same things you’re experiencing, and others might be things that aren’t bothering you at all. Regardless, we need to enter conversations open to our partner’s ideas and perspective, not only when we’re brainstorming the work but also when we’re troubleshooting challenges.

If we want to be heard in our partnerships, we need to be equally willing to listen. If we want our partners to be receptive to our ideas, we need to be equally receptive to theirs.

Seek to Deescalate
If ultimatums and threats can escalate a conflict, then kind, understanding, patient words can have the opposite effect. If you notice anger is brewing and communication is devolving, take a moment to ask yourself what the most kind, helpful, and understanding response might be. How can you—without ignoring the conflict at hand—begin to deescalate the circumstances of the conversation so that communication can happen in a calm and clear manner? This starts with an intention; so many of the unhelpful communication strategies stoke the fires of conflict or burrow into the sands of avoidance. Instead, when we actively commit to fostering understanding and deescalating conflict, we can steer derailed conversations back onto a more productive course.

Address One Issue at a Time and Stay on Topic
When you begin to discuss a problem in your partnership, it’s tempting to pull out every single problem that has been bothering you and pile it on top of the heap. While we’re all uncomfortable, might as well be uncomfortable about everything at once, right?

Wrong. When we jump around from problem to problem, we risk confusing our partner or causing them to feel ambushed, which will make everyone less capable of handling the situation maturely and proposing intelligent solutions.

Beginning with one problem and resolving it will help to get that one problem solved in a calmer and more logical fashion. It might mean we need to have multiple conversations, but many conversations in which problems are solved are miles better than one conversation which only buries you deeper.

Have Your Partner’s Best Interests At Heart
Disputes with your partner should be about finding compromises and solutions that work for both of you, not about winning a debate. At all times, we should treat our partners as human beings with needs and desires that matter to us, whether they match up with our own or not. When you care as much about your partner getting what they want as you do about achieving your own goals, you’ll slow down, listen to their perspective, and be eager to find compromises that work for both of you.

Speak Up For Yourself
But definitely don’t give up everything you want in an attempt to make your partner happy! This, like silence and sugarcoating, will only do a disservice to your project and lead to more problems down the road. Your ideas are also important, and you deserve to be heard! When you are each valuing and listening to the other’s perspective, that’s where the magic happens, so be sure to speak up—kindly and clearly—so that your ideas and your needs don’t get lost.

Back to boundaries—it’s important that you respect yourself by clearly communicating what is and isn’t okay with you, and taking reasonable, non-threatening or relationship-leveraging steps to protect yourself, like ending a conversation that has gone off the rails to return to it at a later, safer time.

Keep Talking Until You Reach a Consensus
Part of the social contract in your partnership, particularly in an equal partnership structure, is that neither of you will try to end a conversation early as a means of trying to get your way. You might end the conversation for the moment so that everyone has time to think, calm down, or brainstorm new ideas. You certainly should have boundaries for when it’s time to give it up for the day and come back later. But no negotiation can be truly laid to bed until both people have agreed without being pressured, manipulated, or coerced.

In all conversations, it’s important that we remain flexible without being people-pleasing. If we’re too rigid, we’ll use manipulative tactics or giving up too soon. If we prioritize keeping the peace over finding a consensus, then the decisions we make as a partnership will be worse, and we will also feel worse about them. Decisions made under coercive circumstances or made quickly just to please our partner almost always come around to bite us later in the form of resentment, which will we address in chapter ten.

That was a lot of strategies, both positive and negative, and chances are you’re great at some of them and less so at others. Like with mutual respect, we would all love to work with (and be!) a partner who uses only helpful communication and avoids all destructive communication strategies at all times. Unfortunately, that person also does not exist. We all communicate with a mix of helpful and unhelpful strategies, with our own unique fingerprint of strengths and weaknesses.
The good news is that communication is a skill like any other, and you can change your behavior and do better in the future. Learning to communicate clearly and kindly will help you prevent a whole host of partnership issues, and will make those that can’t be prevented a whole lot more pleasant (and possible!) to work through.

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.

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.

We talked about mutual respect somewhat in the last chapter, but it’s important enough to merit a chapter of its own. We’ve established that many collaboration contracts take it as a given that you each respect each other’s work. Otherwise, why would you work with this person? This is as true in a tiered partnership as it is in an equal one—if a senior co-writer has no respect for their partner’s work, they certainly should not have selected that person to work on one of their projects.

If you’ve decided to work with your partner, even after considering the questions in the last chapter, there must be a central respect that underpins your collaborative relationship. The question, then, is not whether your respect your partner in principle, but whether you respect them in practice.

It’s all too easy for partners in a collaboration to have theoretical respect for each other but fail to demonstrate that respect in their actions. Below are several ways in which creative partners ought to show respect to each other, and a summary of the things that might go wrong if either partner is failing to respect the other.

Creative Input
This is perhaps the most obvious but also one of the most important; each partner in any collaboration needs to respect the creative input of the other. That means that equal partners both voice their own ideas and continue discussing them until everyone is happy with the conclusion. Partners who dominate the conversation or insist on their own ideas are disrespecting their partner by failing to value their ideas. Partners who withhold their own ideas, rushing instead to agree with the other person, disrespect the collaboration process by withholding their own contributions from the shared space. Both problems will inevitably result in a product that is less than it could have been, and will probably also result in conflict, hurt feelings, and a partnership that doesn’t function as it should.

Respect might look slightly different in a tiered partnership, but it is no less important; one partner may have more power to make their ideas heard and reflected in the final product, but that only means they should be extra careful not to derail the collaboration process by being overbearing. An overbearing senior partner can silence their co-writer’s input, to the detriment of the product and the relationship alike.

To show respect for your partner’s creative input, listen to and value their ideas. In an equal partnership, be sure the book reflects the best of what you both bring to the table, and champion your partner’s ideas as strongly as you do your own. In a tiered partnership, senior partners should value their co-author’s unique contributions, and junior partners should seek to create a product that honors their co-author’s vision.

Process Differences
When one partner demands that their process is the only way they can work—telling the other partner that they must do it that way or not at all—that partner is demonstrating a lack of respect for their partner’s needs. No collaboration is going to proceed exactly like a solo work. Writers who insist that they can only write in One True Way are going to struggle with co-writing, because in a partnership each author needs to adapt somewhat to the needs of their partner, rather than only their own individual needs.

Partners should instead be sensitive to each other’s needs, and prepare to be as flexible as they can be to accommodate other ways of doing things. Sometimes this will mean trying new strategies and tactics, or working in ways that are not perfectly ideal for either of you. That’s okay! Most of the work that gets done in the world happens under less-than-ideal circumstances. Human beings, fortunately, are very capable of adaptation. The success of your partnership will depend not only on your ability to grow and change, but on your willingness to do so.

In some tiered partnerships, the junior partner may be entering into a pre-existing collaborative process; senior partners who frequently collaborate may have a set method by which they work with junior partners, and they may not be open to change. In these cases, the senior partner can show respect for the junior partner by being upfront about those expectations, so the junior partner can effectively evaluate whether they will be able to work within that framework before work begins. Senior partners can also show respect for their collaborators by making exceptions where appropriate and necessary, to the extent that they are able. If the partnership is healthy, junior partners should still be able to request adaptations to the process, even if not all adaptations can be accepted.

Time Commitment
Everyone has a different schedule, different life demands, and different priorities. You may have all the time in the world to devote to writing on your shared project, but your partner may not, and it’s important to be respectful of your partner’s availability and writing speed. A collaboration has to move forward at the speed of the slower partner. If you’re the speed demon in your partnership, you’ll need to adjust your expectations and be patient. If you’re dealing with a large mismatch in writing speeds, it can be beneficial for the speedier partner to have other projects ongoing, so they have something else to occupy them while they wait.
You can also respect your co-writer’s time by showing up on time to meetings, staying on task during planning sessions, and communicating about problems in a timely fashion rather than letting them fester and derail the writing process. Make sure to complete your own work on time. When you meet your mutually agreed-upon deadlines, you show respect for your partner by honoring your commitments. Of course, sometimes things happen and you won’t be able to meet your commitments. In those cases, it shows respect to your partner when you communicate about delays promptly and with clarity.

Life Circumstances
No two people have exactly the same set of challenges and circumstances, and it’s important to have respect for each other’s outside demands and work/life balance. One writer might have the ability to drop everything to meet a deadline, while another might have outside commitments that prevent them from doing so. Some partners may have only one creative project, while others may have many writing projects competing for their attention, each with their own set of demands and deadlines.
Life circumstances aren’t static—they can change either gradually or dramatically at any time during the duration of the partnership. Illness, disability, and bereavement are all circumstances that may, temporarily or permanently, alter a partner’s ability to meet their deadlines and complete projects. I personally have worked with multiple partners through a variety of life-changing health events—in the midst of a personal or family health crisis, it does no one any good for partners to place pressure on each other to be able to work through as if nothing had happened. Partners show respect for each other by remaining flexible and allowing the terms of the writing process to change to fit new and evolving circumstances.

When You’ve Lost Respect
I’ve talked about co-authorship beginning from a place of respect, but it’s possible that you didn’t have a choice in your partner. If you’re coming to writing collaboratively from a corporate setting or some other framework where you’ve been assigned a partner, you may not respect their work, or they may not respect yours. Perhaps neither of you begin with respect for each other. Perhaps you did choose your partner, but things have gone so poorly that you can’t remember why you chose to work with this person in the first place. You certainly wouldn’t choose to work with them knowing what you know now, but you also don’t feel ready to abandon the project.

What then?

In truth, I believe your project is doomed to be a very frustrating experience—and probably produce a less-than-optimal product—unless you can find some mutual respect. You’re not going to be able to listen to each other and find synergy—or even compromise—unless you can come to respect each other’s strengths and value what each of you brings to the table. You may think your assigned partner is a bad writer, or a bad communicator, or a bad project organizer. That might even be true! But unless they are in fact illiterate and unable to form a sentence, they have something to contribute. And even then, they might have some ideas to add that you didn’t think of yourself.

If you find yourself lacking in respect for your partner, I recommend you begin by accepting that you can’t change your partner; you can only change yourself. Continued efforts to get your partner to contribute more or differently or better are going to result in frustration for both of you until you step aside, consider what you could be doing to help the project go better, find respect for your partner whether they return that respect or not, and proceed in an intentional and kind manner.

To begin, make a list of your partner’s strengths. Every writer has them, and chances are as you’ve focused on all the reasons you don’t want to work with this person, you’ve let those weaknesses seem a lot bigger than the things the other person brings to the table. Be honest with yourself, and recognize the things that your partner does well, and what you appreciate about their work. Dig deep if you have to; somewhere down there are the seeds of mutual respect, and you have to nurture them if you want them to grow.

Take your time if you need to, but make a list of as many things you admire about your partner as you can think of. Then, when you’re done, make a list of your own strengths, the things you bring to the table. Resist the urge to frame this as comparative: you can note that you are excellent at organization without having to assert that you are better at organization than your partner. Even if its true, reminding yourself of your own perceived superiority is going to breed resentment, not respect.

Once you have those lists, start with your own weaknesses. Again, be honest about your own failures and habits. This is where you’re going to find humility; it’s easy to be frustrated with your partner about their own failings while turning a blind eye to all the things that make you difficult to work with. We all have weaknesses—things that make us frustrating to deal with sometimes. I certainly have these traits, and you do, too. Taking some time to be honest with yourself will help you to have perspective on your partner’s traits that you find difficult. And, while you’re at it, if you find you’ve had a hard time making a list of things to admire about your partner, you might want to add “critical” or “judgmental” to the list of your own weaknesses.

Chances are after reading that last paragraph, you may be feeling judged by me! In fact, if I were to make a list of my own weaknesses, I would certainly list “critical” among them, so I’m certainly not judging you if that’s something you need to overcome for your partnership to flourish. Having a critical eye is an asset for a writer, but it becomes a problem when it gets aimed at your co-author rather than the work. We’ve all got things we need to work on about ourselves, and we will be a whole lot less frustrated (and more successful!) if we work on and recognize those things instead of focusing fruitlessly on changing the other person.

But does that mean that we need to accept the other person’s behavior wholesale? Absolutely not! Now that you’ve got your three lists, now and only now is it time for the fourth one; list the things that bother you about working with your partner. Go ahead and put down all the things that frustrate you, all the reasons you’re struggling to find respect for them.

Once you have that list, I would encourage you to consider if any of the items on it are truly terrible things to which you should not continue to subject yourself. I would never suggest that all weaknesses are things to be worked around or put up with. If among your partner’s weaknesses, you’ve listed anything that puts you or others in danger, anything that amounts to abuse or harassment, then you should do everything in your power to extricate yourself from that partnership. I think we can still find respect for people who have odious qualities. Every human being is a complex person worthy of a basic level of respect. But some things are deal-breakers in any working relationship, and if you see any of those extreme sorts of behaviors on your list, it’s time to find a path out, however hard that might be.
If you don’t, however, it’s time to put your problems in perspective. You’re not looking at terrible abuses, but you are looking at things that are bothering you, things that are standing in the way of your optimal co-creative process.

Take a good look at that list, and be honest about what’s really bothering you. Is everything on the list of equal weight? Or are there some things that you could safely ignore, as you would hope that your partner would overlook some of your own list of weaknesses? Try to focus on only the top one or two things that are really causing a problem. Then remind yourself that having weaknesses is human—you have a whole list of your own weaknesses to remind you of this, after all!—and that having weaknesses doesn’t make a person unworthy of respect.

Try to find that respect in yourself, and recognize that you’re dealing with a human being with feelings and goals of their own, and that, especially if you’re going to continue to work with each other, you need to get yourself into a place of baseline respect before you can move forward with the project.
Star for yourself those (maximum of) one or two things that are really bothering you about your co-writing relationship. Then go to your own list of weaknesses and star a couple of things that you want to work on, things that are really getting in the way of producing the best project you can, and your own enjoyment and fulfillment in the context of this partnership.

Now that you’ve found both respect and humility it’s time to move on to the second-most important aspect of your partnership.

It’s time to communicate.

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.

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.

When looking to form a specialized team, it’s wise to be careful about who you invite to contribute. Any co-writer will bring unique strengths and weaknesses to the table, but you won’t enjoy collaborating with literally everyone. Choosing a co-writer who doesn’t work well with you is bound to end in drama, hurt feelings and a whole lot of disappointment.

So what should you look for in a partner? Here are several benchmarks to consider. I’ll list them first, and then elaborate on each.

Do I respect this person? Do they respect me?
How do we communicate? Can I see myself bringing problems to this person and having a productive conversation that works toward solutions? How does this person respond in situations where we disagree?
Can this person take feedback on their work? How will I feel when they offer criticism of mine?
Does this person finish what they start? Do I trust them to stay committed for the duration of the project, however long that might be? Do I believe we are equally committed to working through challenges, roadblocks, and partnership struggles to see the project through?
How does this person’s experience level compare to mine? How will that affect the way we work together?
What are my goals for this project? Do they align with this person’s goals, both for this project and their writing in general?
How will I feel if this partnership doesn’t work out?

Let’s talk through each of these and how they might affect your decision to work with (or not work with!) your prospective partner.

Mutual Respect
I’m going to cover mutual respect in depth in chapter six, but I’ll say a few words about it here. Mutual respect is so important that many co-writing contracts begin with some variation of “whereas both parties respect the work of the other.” It’s not a contractual obligation that you respect each other so much as a contractual presupposition. A prerequisite. An assumption.

There’s good reason for that. If you don’t respect the work of your co-author, how are you going to feel about their contributions to your shared work? If they don’t respect your work, how are they going to respond to yours?

Any co-writing relationship is built on the basic assumption that you both have strengths to offer and that those strengths are invaluable to the partnership. We also all have weaknesses, and finding humility and the ability to admit when we’re wrong will be instrumental in any collaborative endeavor.

Communication
There are thousands of decisions that go into writing and marketing a novel, and when you’re working with a partner, you’ll need to communicate about all of them. Even if you divide the responsibilities, you’ll still need to communicate about what that division of labor will be, and about your individual progress as you work.

For that reason, it’s worth looking at how you communicate. In your existing relationship, do you feel comfortable bringing problems to this person? How do you witness them treating others when they experience conflict? A good rule of thumb is that people will treat you the way you see them treat others; if your co-writer has a habit of gossiping to you about problems they have with other people but never seems to address those problems with the people directly involved, that’s a huge red flag, and should give you pause about entering into a business relationship.

Likewise, think about how you’ve witnessed this person handle disagreements with others. Some people are direct communicators; they’ll tell you exactly what they think, no matter what it is. Other people are indirect communicators; they’ll try to gently suggest a problem without stating it outright. Both can cause communication problems: direct communicators tend to step on toes and hurt feelings, while indirect communicators may mask issues, never fully admitting there’s a problem until it becomes enormous and difficult to solve.

Based on what you know of this person, how do you feel about their ability to handle disagreements as they come up? How do you feel about their communication style? Do you have confidence that you will be able to foster an environment where everyone can be heard? If the answer is no, you will want think twice about partnering with that person.

Writing and publishing can be stressful, so it’s very likely that you and your partner are going to see both the best and the worst of each other. There have been moments in all of my partnerships where I’ve had to deal with my partners’ worst traits, and they have certainly all had to deal with mine. Think about what you know about your prospective partner’s worst behavior, and ask yourself if you can handle working with that. Be honest! Even if someone is the world’s best partner ninety-five percent of the time, if you’re unable to handle working with them the other five percent, the partnership isn’t going to function.

Feedback
Likewise, how does this person take feedback? When you give them suggestions about their work, are they defensive or receptive? We’ve talked about how you’ll need to leave your ego at the door—do you think this person is capable of setting their ego aside to listen to your input?

The truth is, not all writers are equally good at taking feedback. We can’t control our emotional response to it, but we can control how we express that emotional response to others. Your partner doesn’t need to love being told that their work needs, well, more work, but if you can’t imagine them taking it well and being receptive to necessary changes, you are likely to run into problems sooner rather than later.

Commitment
Here’s a hard truth: more people begin to write books than finish them. If you want to finish a co-authored book, you need a partner with good work habits. Have they ever finished a book-length project before? Do they stick with projects all the way through, or do they wander when the shine wears off? Do they endure through challenges, or do they give up on projects as soon as the going gets hard?

One of the benefits of collaboration is social pressure—some people stick with projects much better when they know someone is counting on them, so their ability to finish solo projects may not be entirely indicative of their ability to commit to a collaboration. But it’s still something to consider, as you don’t want to invest your heart and soul in a book only to have your partner wander away when the first act is done. In fact, this is the most common problem I hear about when I’m approached for collaboration advice at events: my partner was really excited in the beginning, but now they’ve wandered away. Do some thinking about your partner’s track record (and your own!) before you begin, so you can prepare yourself for what to expect.

Comparative Experience
If you wait to find someone who has your exact same level of experience, you may be waiting for a long time. Even in an equal partnership, experience levels may vary, and this can be a good thing! Partners with less experience can receive significant mentorship while still holding an equal stake in the project—but it’s still worth considering if your prospective partner has enough experience.

Personally, I won’t collaborate on a novel with a partner who has never finished one on their own. I’ve written over fifty books, and most of my co-authors have not. That’s fine, but I want to know that they have the basic skills required to finish a novel; I want to spend my time developing this book, not teaching my partner how to write a book in the first place.

Likewise, if you are the less experienced partner, you might want to consider if you have enough experience to feel confident collaborating. Don’t underestimate your own ability to contribute, but also make sure you feel comfortable in your own skills before you begin working with a partner.

If you’ve never finished a book and your partner is similarly inexperienced, that could be fine! You’ll learn together. But I recommend taking a minute to consider your relative experience and how that might change what you expect out of the partnership.

Goals and Ambition
It’s also good to compare your individual career goals. A driven partner who is looking to make a career as an author can absolutely engage in a fun project with a writer who isn’t interested in anything more than a good time, but it’s important to be aware of that going in, so everyone can adjust their expectations.

What are your hopes for the project, and how do they compare to your partner’s? Do you want to publish, and if so, how? Will you seek representation? Do you want to submit the project to publishers? (More on this in chapter eighteen.) Are you hoping to continue working together, creating a series or brand that will sustain your career?

None of these things are required—there’s nothing wrong with writing books for fun! But you want to be on the same page when it comes to future plans. And if one of you sees this project as a lifetime endeavor while the other just wants to write one book for fun and move on to the next thing, you might want to consider whether this partnership is going to meet either of your needs in the long run.

What if it doesn’t work out?
Finally, consider how you will feel if the partnership doesn’t work out. This is especially important when it comes to equal partnerships between friends. Writing books with friends can be a wonderful experience. But when work issues begin to bleed into the friendship, it can also cause stress and hurt feelings.
Even the best suited partnerships sometimes fall apart. Even the most experienced writers sometimes have collaborations that don’t work out. Thinking through the potential consequences of failure ahead of time will help you decide if it’s a risk you’re willing to take, and make some plans for how you might handle the worst if it happened.

If your partner bailed on the project, would you be able to separate your feelings about the work from your personal feelings toward them? How would you feel if your partner (however legitimate their reason) dropped out of the project, and you had to abandon the book halfway through? How would you feel about never getting to finish this book?

Nobody’s Perfect
Obviously, we would all love to work with a partner who always shows an ideal level of respect, communicates clearly and kindly at all times, has complementary experience and ambition to our own, loves to have their work critiqued, is overjoyed at new suggestions, is perfectly committed, and sees every task through to the end. This person, unfortunately, doesn’t exist. Or if they do, I certainly have never worked with them—and I’m not providing that to my co-writers, either!

So it’s not really a question of whether your partner embodies all these traits like a paragon of collaboration. They are going to have flaws. You are going to experience mismatches. You and your partner are both going to be better at some skills than others—and sometimes you may both suck at the same things! The question is, can you live with the differences? Can you work with your partner’s foibles and feel safe and happy while doing so?

If not, it doesn’t mean your prospective partner is a terrible person. It’s not a judgment of their moral fiber. It just means you’re not well suited to make a partnership work, and that’s okay.

There are no ideal partners. There are things about me that are obnoxious to deal with, and I’ve discussed projects with partners who ultimately decided that working with me wasn’t for them. This may happen to you, or you may be the one deciding that this particular collaboration isn’t a good fit. That’s okay. Everyone can still be friends (and if you can’t, you’re definitely better off not working together!)
But what if you’re already in a partnership . . . and it’s not going well? You don’t want to walk away from the project, but there are things that bother you, and you’re not sure how to handle them.

Over the next several chapters we’ll talk about using some of the principles we’ve discussed here to make bad situations better, and good partnerships great. It’s okay if you and your partner aren’t perfect—or even good—at communication or respect or taking feedback—the good news is, you can change, you can learn, and you can grow.

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.

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.

If I were to give you one rule for collaboration, it is this: there is no room for your ego in co-authorship.
You are working with another person, ostensibly, because you want their input, you value their ideas, and you desire their contributions. You’re also working with them, theoretically, because you want them to weigh in on your ideas, help you vet which ones are the best ones, and build upon them.
If you don’t want those things, you would probably be better off working alone. When you assert your ego, valuing your ideas over your partner’s, or becoming defensive about feedback and criticism, you shut down the collaboration process.

It’s easy to do this. Novelists especially are used to their ideas reigning supreme in their own stories, and no one likes to be told that their own inspiration is, well, uninspired. But once you’ve entered into a collaboration, your job is to champion your partner’s ideas, look out for their interests, and above all, listen to and value what they have to say.

Does this mean you should keep quiet about your own opinions? Should you champion their interests at the expense of your own? Absolutely not. If you do, then you’re denying your partner the opportunity to return the favor, and denying the project the full scope of synergy that is possible when two people share openly and truly value each other’s contributions.

How do we do this? There are many ways, but I’m going to highlight three: adjusting our expectations, letting go of control, and trusting our partner.

Adjusting expectations
It has been said by people wiser than me that expectations are disappointments in embryo, and this couldn’t be more true when it comes to collaboration. If you have a full vision of exactly what you want a project to be and can’t stomach the idea of it straying from your vision a hair to the left or a hair to the right, that project is not a good candidate for collaboration. Even if you were to produce it as a senior partner in a work-for-hire partnership, your hired writer is going to exercise their own creativity within the parameters you give them—that’s their job! And, moreover, you should want them to, because that shared creativity and the interesting results thereof are one of the main benefits of co-authorship. Stifling the flow of differing opinions is a fool’s errand; you’ll only anger your partner and frustrate yourself.

So how do we manage our own disappointment when projects take turns we don’t expect? First, I try to view my own ideas of what a project should be as tentative and malleable. I come to collaboration meetings with ideas, but try to maintain the mindset that none of them are the idea. The one true idea is still out there, ever elusive, and it’s our job to bring our individual ideas together and combine them.
If my partners love my ideas, that’s great! But many times they have ideas that are even better than mine. Even more frequently we hash out a combination of my ideas and their ideas that are even better than either of our ideas were in isolation. That’s the magic of collaboration, and if I came to meetings defensively trying to shove my own ideas to the forefront while ignoring my partners’, I would be doing a great disservice to my partners, the project, and myself.

Let Go of Control
Let’s face it; the publishing industry can turn you into a control freak. There are so few aspects of our careers that are in our control, while the rest spin somewhere outside it. We have no control over whether an agent likes our work, whether a publisher wants to publish it, whether the Amazon algorithm favors our books, whether readers show up to read them. There are certainly things we can do to influence these things, but at the end of the day, all methods can fail, and we can be left with disappointment.
The only thing we have real control over is whether or not we are writing our next project. We can control which projects we decide to pursue and whether or not we produce words. While we are working on our projects, we can control our own narrative choices; which words we put on the page, and what stories we tell with them.

No wonder it’s so hard to give those things up when it comes time to collaborate.
In a co-author relationship, you have even less control, because you’ve voluntarily given some of that control over to another person. Why? Because in exchange for that loss of control, you receive the labor, support, creativity, and ingenuity of a second person. And if you’re working with the right person, those things can more than make up for that loss of control.

When we feel the desire to steer and control the direction of our partnership, we can take the time to stop, acknowledge our desire for control, listen to the needs of our partners, and consider how our need for control is impacting our partnership.

Resist the urge to look over your partner’s shoulder or second guess every decision they make. Allow your partner to make decisions without expecting them to seek your permission. As the work progresses, recognize that it’s okay if not every detail reflects your personal vision. Celebrate your partner’s contributions, even when they steer the product in a different direction than you anticipated.

When we choose to give up control of some of the process to our partner, we’re able to fully participate in the collaborative process with considerably less stress and interpersonal conflict. Through a combination of letting go of control and adjusting our expectations, we can turn ourselves into someone who is much more pleasant to work with. Much as we might want it to be otherwise, at least half of the problems we will encounter in our partnership will be caused by ourselves. It takes two people to have conflict, but the only person we can change in any conflict is ourselves, so if we focus only on what the other person is contributing to a problem, we will never be able to do our part in finding a resolution.

Trust your partner
When James and I were ready to publish The Bollywood Lovers’ Club, we needed to design our cover. We had a conversation about using an image of a girl in a chunni and a background with indian fabric designs. It turned out we had very different ideas of what this was going to look like when it was finished, because when I put together a mock up with a silhouette of a girl in a chunni, and I was happy with my work. I sent it to James for feedback, and he hated it.

He tried to explain to me why he hated it, but I had a hard time understanding. In my mind, the mock up was exactly what we discussed, but to him, it hit all the wrong notes. During our conversation, James offered to go with what I’d done—he wasn’t being able to articulate what was wrong with it, after all, and maybe I was right and he was wrong.

I could have congratulated myself for winning the argument and gone with the cover as it was. But I trust James. I knew that if he said there was a problem, then there was a problem, whether he was currently able to explain it to me or not. I asked him to continue trying to tell me what was wrong, so we could pivot and go in another direction.

James thought about it, and when he came back, he told me the problem was the silhouette—when the chunni was reduced to an outline, it looked heavy and dark. Chunnis, culturally, are represented with aesthetics of lightness. There’s nothing technically wrong with a silhouette on a cover, but that silhouette on that cover was culturally inappropriate, which made it a bad design. If I had let James let me have my way, we would have ended up with a cover that was completely inappropriate for the book. Armed with that information, I created another mock up that used transparencies rather than silhouettes to emphasize the light aesthetic, and that’s the cover we went with for the final product.

You work with your partner for a reason, and hopefully that reason is because you trust their judgment and value their input. Every collaboration can benefit from the attitude that if your partner says there’s a problem, there’s a problem, whether you currently understand what the problem is or not.

Does This Look Different in Tiered Partnerships?
There’s no place in an equal partnership for ego, because a project in an equal partnership should be a mix of both people’s ideas and talents. But even if you are the senior partner in a tiered partnership, your ego still has no place in your collaborative relationship.

Sure, the senior partner has more control over the project. The senior partner might even deserve to have more control, given their established track record or financial stake. But no one wants to work for a boss who can’t take feedback, who doesn’t want to hear the contributions of their collaborators, or who throws their weight around when they could instead have been polite and considerate.

I have written several books with publishing giant Brandon Sanderson. I don’t bring this up to tell you how great I am, but rather to emphasize how great he is: the man has an entire company of people whose job it is to execute on his vision. His books have a fan base that is both wide and devoted. His business and storytelling brilliance is basically unparalleled. If anyone has a right to have an ego in a partnership, it’s him.

But, universally, in all of my interactions with Brandon, he has treated me with respect. Yes, he has the final say in all creative and business decisions, but he listens to me and tries to accommodate what I need and want out of the partnership and the creative work wherever possible. When he can’t, he takes the time to explain why and to help me get on board with his decisions instead of handing down orders or laying down the law. And if Brandon Sanderson can set his well-earned ego aside and treat his co-writers with respect, then surely you can, too.

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.

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.

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.

Hopefully now you have an idea of some of the benefits of collaboration, as well as some of the pitfalls. I want to take a minute before I jump into the details to admit that while everything I said in the last chapter is true, I may have slightly misled you. Yes, I believe collaboration can produce excellent results. Yes, I think partners can produce books that are better than what either of you would have produced on your own. Yes, I enjoy the benefits of not having to do absolutely all the parts of the process I hate, and the privilege of relying on other people’s strengths to make my books better.

But is that why I collaborate?

Not really.

I didn’t get into collaboration because I thought it would make my books better. I certainly didn’t think it would reduce my workload. (As I mentioned, I initially worried that the result would be a train wreck that required twice the work to produce, and I was right on the second count.) I wasn’t looking to increase the brilliance of my work through the magic of synergy. And I wasn’t trying to pawn off the parts of the process I hate. (Though maybe I should have been. It’s a nice perk.)

No, I collaborate for the pedestrian reason that I enjoy it.
I like working with people.
I like listening to other people’s ideas and figuring out how to build on them.
I like the social interaction.
I like playing in other people’s settings and with other people’s characters.
I like having someone with whom to share the highs and lows of the book business.
I just like it.
And if you don’t, probably all the objective benefits in the world aren’t enough reason that you should do it.

That said, I would caution you against deciding you don’t like it if you’ve never tried it. Or if you tried it once or twice, had a bad experience, and decided the whole co-authoring thing wasn’t for you. I have also had bad experiences, and if they had been my first experiences, I might have decided this myself, and then I would have missed out on all the many positive experiences I’ve had with various co-authors.
There might be any number of reasons why a given collaboration experience was a negative one. You might read through this book and see a number of things you might try to do differently with your current or future partners that could turn what was previously a poor experience into a great one. You might discover that with the right project and the right partner, you enjoy collaboration after all.
But I also wouldn’t encourage you to continue collaborating if you discover in practice that you hate it. You’re never required to have fun a hundred percent of the time while working on any creative project (and anyone who tells you otherwise deserves to be put permanently on mute), but if you’re not being fulfilled by collaboration on at least a basic level, it’s probably not for you.

One of the benefits of co-authoring, for me at least, is the joy of it. I genuinely value my co-writer’s contributions. I treasure the privilege of getting to play with ideas, worlds, characters, and settings that I never would have thought of on my own. There’s something energizing about having someone to share the excitement with when things are go well, and to share the misery with when things go poorly.
I didn’t start with that expectation, though. I started with a project I couldn’t get out of my head.
I met James Goldberg in graduate school. It was his first semester and my last, and we were taking a class on writing for children and young adults taught by accomplished young adult author Chris Crowe. In that class I workshopped part of the (still unpublished) novel that was my master’s thesis and the first draft of what would become Chasing the Skip, the first novel I sold in New York. James wrote pieces of several stories, one of which was about a Sikh teenager who questioned her commitment to her faith and her heritage and the Mormon boy who fell in love with her. We only read a few chapters of the book before James abandoned it, but the story stuck with me.

Over the years, as James and I went on to do critique group together, I would periodically ask him when he was ever going to finish that book. James did not make any more progress on the project. At some point, it occurred to me that I was more invested in it than he was, and I bemoaned that I would never get to read the rest of the story.

Seven years after I’d graduated, I had gone to the library to work on a draft of my YA spy thriller A Thousand Faces. At the time I had a two-year-old, so the easiest way for me to get uninterrupted writing time was to leave the house. I was sitting in the library, minding my own business, revising my ending, when I had this thought:

You should ask James if he wants to co-write that book with you.

My immediate response was to tell myself this was a terrible idea. Writing a book is hard enough. Writing a book with someone else would be much more difficult. Plus, I didn’t want James to feel like I was trying to take over his project. (I kind of did want to take over his project, if only to see it finished.)
I went home from the library and told my husband about my idea, and asked him specifically to tell me it was a terrible idea and I shouldn’t do it.
He liked the idea.
I ran the idea by James, suggesting that he should tell me it was terrible.
He loved it.
As a last line of defense, I told him to go home and ask his very wise and wonderful wife, Nicole, if she thought the idea was terrible.

Around the time I received word that she also thought this was a wonderful idea, my husband made a very good observation. “You know this is a good idea,” he said. “You just want it to be a bad one so you don’t have to put in the work.”

Touché.

The truth was, I wanted to write that book with James. The moment the idea popped into my head, I couldn’t let it go. Difficult as it was (and we’ll get to that immediately following this chapter), it was the one and only correct creative decision to say yes to that project. It was, as Amy Tan said in her memoirs, “the right and irresistible thing.”

In fact, if a collaboration is not irresistible to you, I would encourage you to resist it.
You’ll know the right projects when they come along. You will want to do them because you will know that only an idiot in your position would refuse. You will want to do them so much you will be able to taste it. Collaboration is a commitment, and like with a romantic relationship, you should not feel lukewarm at first. There will be plenty of time later when things get challenging to dither about whether or not this was a fantastic decision. When you first jump into it, it should feel like a delicious decision. It should feel like your one-true creative passion (or the one-true thing that is going to fill up your bank account) to write this particular book with this particular person.

If it doesn’t, you are very likely to run out of creative steam when things get difficult. If you’re already having concerns, there may be good reasons for those, and you should listen to yourself before you rope you and your partner into a situation you both would have been better off avoiding.

There are as many ways to collaborate as there are individual collaborators. If you are excited enough to say yes to a project, there are many ways to structure that partnership, and even more methods of writing books together.

Now that we’ve gotten the why out of the way, let’s start to talk about some of those different ways of structuring your work together, so that once you say yes, you can maximize your chances of success.

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.

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.

Let me be honest: collaboration sometimes gets a bad rap. Among authors and readers alike, there are individuals who turn up their noses at co-authorship. Some readers are unwilling to try a book written by more than one author. Some authors swear they would never want to co-write a book as long as they live.

Everyone has their own preferences, and that’s fine! The bias is understandable; most of us remember being students assigned to group projects, partnered with classmates we hardly wanted to sit by, let alone collaborate with. Even when we were able to pick our own partners, often we’d discover that our friends, while fun to eat lunch with, were lacking in communication skills and possessing of disparate work styles, when they bothered to do the work at all. It’s no wonder most of us balk at the thought of a group project, let alone a group novel. It’s hard enough to write books on your own, let alone bring someone else into the equation.

Reader Bias
We’ll deal with the writer’s objections in a moment. For now, let’s view this from the reader side. Some readers are all too quick to tell you they’re not interested in reading a co-authored book. If their favorite author writes a collaboration, they’re afraid the new author’s work won’t be as good. Even if both authors are unfamiliar, they may still object for reasons that are often vague. The basic assertion is that co-authored works are just worse somehow, and that having one person in charge of every aspect of the work makes for a better product.

Does collaboration really produce lesser results? Can the vision of more than one creator enhance the work, or does it always get in the way?

First, let’s broaden our vision a little. When it comes to novels, it’s still standard for one writer to do most of the work. In other industries, collaboration is the standard. Very few films are made solely by one filmmaker—writing the script, holding the camera, and playing all of the parts. Similarly, while most books have one author’s name on the cover, many are also to some degree collaborative. Most authors work with teams of beta readers and editors who contribute to the style, voice, and narrative choices of the work. The author may contribute the most, but they are usually far from the only voice.

So our entertainment diet is a little more saturated with collaboration than we often want to admit. That doesn’t necessarily mean that’s a good thing—let’s move back to the core question: are individuals better at making decisions than groups? If my personal experience as a student was all I had to go on, I would certainly say yes.

Research says otherwise.

In fact, studies have shown that groups of collaborators make better decisions than any of the contributors would make on their own. The effect of bouncing ideas off each other increases the quality of those ideas, and therefore the quality of the final product. For simple tasks, individuals might be more efficient, but as the complexity of a task increases, group efforts become not only superior in quality, but more streamlined and effective as well. Working with just anyone, like we were so often forced to do in school, might not be effective. Groups of grade school friends who picked each other for social reasons might not fare any better. But teams of people who have common goals, complimentary skills, build an environment of cooperation, and promote the free-sharing of ideas can create a synergy that will increase the quality of both process and product, which will benefit everyone, reader and author alike. In short, in a good collaboration, everybody wins.

Many authors like to hole up in private to do their writing. They may believe that co-authorship is an extrovert’s game. Not so says behavioral scientist Francesca Gino from Harvard Business School. Extroverts may be more naturally interested in group interaction, but introverts tend to be better at empowering the contributions of others and helping groups to be more cohesive and benefit from different perspectives. Basically, extroverts might be more inclined toward working with others, but introverts have distinct skills that make them a vital and necessary part of collaborative teams.
So, if teams consistently produce better results more efficiently for complex tasks, why is there such a bias against collaboration?

My hunch is that it comes down to an is/ought fallacy. Most novels have traditionally been written by individuals. Even now, most of the books in any given fiction section have only one author’s name on the cover. Therefore, this must be the better way, right?

The trouble with this fallacy is that it’s, well, fallacious. Just because this is the way things have been done doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do them, and it certainly doesn’t mean it’s the only way. Unfortunately, the bias against co-written books does make some people less likely to try them, but the more authors turn out excellent books through collaboration, the more collaboration will start to become a norm.
Sadly, confirmation bias will mean that readers who don’t like a given co-written book are more likely to attribute their dislike to the co-authorship. Meanwhile, no matter how many single-author books a reader has despised, they are unlikely to decide that they just don’t like single-author stories, and only want to read books written by more than one person. This bias is unfortunate, but there are enough writers succeeding wildly while co-authoring that it’s clearly not preventative to success.

And the more of us do it, the more we’ll prove that teams can be just as successful in writing as they are in other forms of art.

Writer Bias
That’s all well and good for the reader, but what about from the writer side? Is the experience of collaborating better for the writer than solo work?

This will depend on many factors, including the specific co-writer relationship, the preferences of the individual author, and the impact on the project at hand. Let’s be honest, solo writing isn’t always a picnic either, and I’d be lying to you if I told you that your collaborative efforts were guaranteed to go smoothly and produce only wonderful results which will be successful beyond your wildest dreams. These kinds of results are never guaranteed in publishing, and collaborating will not magically fix that.

I understand skepticism about the process. When I first considered co-writing, I was skeptical myself. I estimated that it would be twice as much work to write a book with another writer, and make the whole experience needlessly complicated.

Was I right?

Yes and no.
First, let’s deal with the question that was on my mind when I first considered co-writing: is collaboration easier than writing solo?
I have no data for you here, but I can speak from my own experience. My collaborative writing projects have been easier in some ways, and harder in others.

Benefits
What’s easier about collaboration? One of my favorite benefits of working with a co-writer is that I don’t always have to do all the parts of the job I hate. Some of my co-writers have been fantastic at writing setting details and character descriptions. I am the worst about remembering to put those details onto the page, and I also hate doing it. When my co-writers actively enjoy going back through my work and filling in some of those details I’ve left out, the writing I’ve done gets both better and easier. Everybody wins.

The same is true for other aspects of the process. I despise making copy edits. My brain feels disengaged, and I become quickly bored as I do the tedious work of entering changes. I’ve worked with co-writers who are much happier to do that work than some of the other parts of revision, like restructuring chapters or moving large chunks of prose around and stitching them back together. That happens to be my favorite part of the entire writing process, so when our likes and dislikes align in a complementary way, both of our jobs become much easier and more enjoyable.

This extends also to business tasks. If one partner enjoys running ads while the other prefers to write emails or make social media posts, the division of labor helps everyone to be happier and less overwhelmed. There are bound to be some tasks that neither of you want to do, but dividing those tasks in half mean that you only have to do half as much of the work you hate, which is certainly easier than doing all of it yourself.

If you’re in a partnership where you are both drafting the book, two people writing words on a schedule can get those words done with each partner only spending half the time at the keyboard that they would have spent otherwise. This means you can get books drafted and into production faster, with less work done on your part.

Drawbacks
That all sounds pretty good, right? So why do I say that collaboration is also harder?
Because often times, the time you make up in having two hands typing the words, you spend trying to get two minds to agree on a single vision. And the closer you work together, the more hours of your time that’s going to take.

It turns out, part of what makes the product better also makes collaboration harder. All that benefit gained from different perspectives coming together to make better group decisions requires time, patience, and communication. It takes the maturity to prioritize your partner’s contributions as equal to your own. It takes two (or more) people who are both committed to working things out, to finding a middle ground, to sticking with a discussion until you find the solution that complements both of your visions, or a brand new vision that you both like better than your original, disparate ideas.
That’s hard. And beautiful. One of the highest privileges of collaboration is getting to be in those conversations—in the room, so they say, where it happens.

I hope you’re excited to put in that work, and see those beautiful results.

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.