You did it! You successfully co-wrote a book, revised it, chose a publishing path, put it through the production process, and now it’s coming out into the world. Hooray!
Now it’s time to tell the world about your work! Promotion can feel like shouting into a void sometimes—and it can easily eat up all your time and money if you let it. But if you want eyes on your book, you have to make promotion work for you—and if you’re working with a senior partner or a publisher, you may be contractually obligated to do so.
Let’s talk about some of the main ways authors promote their books, and some of the unique challenges and decisions that co-authors face in the promotion process.
Social Media When your book comes out, one of the first thing most authors do is announce it on social media. Why? Well, because social media announcements are generally free and are a good way to promote your book to people who already follow you, as well as get the word out to people who haven’t heard of you yet. If you use social media platforms as part of your launch strategy, you’re probably going to also do some posts and promotions on social media leading up to and following your launch. There are multiple ways you can organize this as a partnership. You can each do separate posts to your individual social media accounts. This may make sense as a strategy if you each have platforms that don’t have a lot of cross over. You each talk to your own audience and hopefully get those audiences interested in the book.
If you’re working together on a series or on more than one book under the same brand, you might consider creating some joint social media specific to the project as well. The downside to doing this is that it can be a lot of work to keep up with separate social media accounts—do you post enough to keep multiple accounts active? Does your partner? Who will do the posting on your joint accounts? How much should each of you post on your individual accounts during a launch and after? Designing a joint social media strategy will help you to get the most out of your existing social networks without burning yourself out or breeding resentment.
Advertising One of the biggest arguments for opening social media accounts for your joint brand (even if you don’t post to them regularly, and save most of your activity for your individual accounts) is to run ads from them. If you plan to run ads for your book on a platform like Instagram or Facebook, you’ll need an account from which to run the ads. You may want to keep those ads separate from your personal ad account. You may also want the name of the account to be consistent with your joint brand, rather than your personal one. Whatever you decide to do, you’ll want to consider the options and choose carefully, because the way you organize social media ads will affect your workload, the ad message, and your payment structure.
If you’re going to engage in paid advertising for your book, you have several other decisions to make. Where will you run paid ads, and who is going to manage them? Running profitable ads can be incredibly time-consuming, especially when you’re in the testing and tweaking phases. You’ll have to decide not only how to divide this labor, but also how to pay for it—if you have an LLC and a partnership bank account, you can pay out of there, but otherwise you’ll have to determine who’s going to foot the bill, and how they will be reimbursed for their investment.
Paid ads are one of the biggest barriers to the royalty model—if you each make fifty percent of the royalties on your book, that’s great! But when you run ads, you might only make 10% of your income on that your first book as profit—or you might even take a loss on book one and depend on the readthrough to the rest of the series to make a profit. That changes things—how will you calculate the money that gets divided between you? Are your royalties paid only on profit? How will you keep track of income and expenses, and, perhaps most importantly, who will be responsible for all the accounting required to keep good records of the money coming in and the money going out?
There are no right answers to these questions, but if you want to run paid ads for your books, you’re going to need to sit down with your partner and find an answer that feels good to both of you, and make sure it’s laid out in your contract or contract addendum.
Newsletter Marketing Many authors keep newsletter lists so they can contact their readers when they release new books or put books on sale. If you have individual email lists, it makes sense to email them! You’ll want to consider if you’re going to rely only on your individual lists, or if you want to build a separate email list for your partnership or series brand.
If your individual lists are composed of people who are likely to love your joint books, it might make sense to use those alone. But if the audience of your joint work is different from your individual work, you might want to consider building a new list to avoid putting off your existing readership with a lot of information about a genre they’re not interested in.
The downside of this is that you’ll have to maintain (and regularly contact!) multiple separate email lists, which can double the work you’re already putting in to email marketing. You’ll also need to decide if you’ll use your existing newsletter client or open a separate account as a team. Who will pay the fees for your newsletter subscribers? Who is going to do the work of writing the emails, and how often?
Again, there are no right answers, but you’ll want to look at your individual and joint circumstances and make a newsletter marketing plan that makes sense for you as a team.
Book Signings and Appearances If you have physical books in bookstores, you might want to set up some book signings! Even if you don’t, you might want consider ordering stock and scheduling a book launch at a local independent bookstore, or staffing a booth at a convention or other local event to sell your books to readers.
Personally, I think doing events as a team is a nice way to celebrate your work. Doing signings as an individual author can be lonely, especially if you don’t already have a hungry, dedicated audience that will turn out in droves. Selling books with a partner gives you an opportunity for moral support, and also lets you rave about how awesome your partner is if you feel uncomfortable selling yourself.
As part of your marketing plan, you’ll want to discuss your local opportunities to sell books in person, and also your individual comfort levels with doing such events. If one of you is enthusiastic about in person events and the other hates them, you’ll have to negotiate and find a solution that works for you both. Be mindful of resentment: don’t say yes to things you’ll resent your partner for later, and don’t ask your partner to do things they’ve expressed they’re uncomfortable with. Remember that what doesn’t work for both of you doesn’t work for your partnership, no matter how good an idea it might seem to one of you at the time.
There will also be organizational things to discuss: who is going to set up book signings? What is each of your availability and tolerance for attending these events? Will you attend them together or separately? How will you publicize them? How much book stock will you order and who will pay for it? If travel is involved, who will pay for that? How will the money from in person events be handled?
There are lots of equally valid ways to do signings—and you don’t have to do them at all, unless you’re contractually obligated. But if signings are something you enjoy and you have the opportunity to do them, they’re a great opportunity to showcase your work to new readers as a united team.
Even if you can’t do signings, or can’t physically be in the same location for events, you can also consider scheduling podcast or video appearances, or doing guest posts for blogs and websites. All these things can go in your joint marketing plan, but remember to be mindful of who is putting in the work, and to keep things in balance with your overall partnership workload.
Don’t Forget to Celebrate A word of advice from my writing teacher Chris Crowe: don’t forget to celebrate. In publishing, by the time exciting things actually happen, they are often old news. Books come out years after you sell them, offers often can’t be announced until months after you first hear of them. You may feel tempted to delay celebration until something feels real and solid and final. But if you do, by the time things are final enough to celebrate, the moment is past. The accomplishment feels like old news.
The only functional solution is to celebrate everything. Celebrate the moment you finish the draft. Celebrate the moment you get an offer on your book, or the moment you upload it. The moment you announce your book deal; the moment you announce your release on the internet. Absolutely take a moment from your busy promotion schedule on release day and celebrate your success as a partnership. Do whatever feels celebratory to you: order pizza, go out to dinner, have a dance party. But take a moment as a partnership to pat each other on the back for all you’ve accomplished.
Once you have a revised book and have decided on a path for publication, it’s time to put the book into production. While the book is in production, there will be a number of tasks you’ll have to divide between you as partners. Let’s take a look at what sorts of tasks you’ll need to take on as a partnership and how you might go about dividing them.
Editing and Proofreading If you’re publishing your book through a publisher, you may have an editor who will offer feedback on your book. But someone is going to have to go through those edits and approve them, and make the necessary revisions to the manuscript. Moreover, you will still be expected to make final editing passes of your own on the book to catch any errors. After that, there will also be copyedits, which may be done by a copyeditor paid by the publisher, but which will still need to be approved by someone in your partnership as well.
If you’re indie publishing, you’ll either have to pay someone to edit your work or edit the work yourself. You can use volunteer proofreaders to catch errors like dropped words, but an amateur proofreader is not a replacement for professional editing. In indie publishing, you have three options for tasks like editing and cover design: you can pay a professional, you can become a professional, or you can put out unprofessional work. There really aren’t any other options, and all of them have their upsides and downsides.
When I say you have the option to become a professional, this doesn’t mean you need a degree in the subject, or you need to take on client work for hire. What I mean is that you need to develop skills to produce a minimum viable product—the ability to produce work that is of professional quality. You’ll probably never be as good as the best professional cover designer, for example, but if you put in the time and seek the necessary education, you can learn to put out a product that is professional and appropriate to the market. It’s a matter of how much time and effort you want to put into developing these skills, since that time will of necessity take away from the time you spend developing your writing.
I have sometimes paid for editing and cover design on my indie books, but because I’ve been unable to afford it for every book, I’ve also put in the substantial work to develop professional-level editing and cover design skills so that my work can look professional even when I can’t afford to pay. In the absence of better options, sometimes putting in the time and money to learn the skills yourself is the best solution for the job.
If one of you is already a professional editor, dividing this work will be much easier! With that partner’s permission, you can lean on those skills, but the partner who is not a professional editor should perform other tasks to balance out the work their partner puts in. If neither of of you is a professional, you’ll either need to develop professional editing skills yourself, or resign yourselves that your product will not be up to industry standards. (My personal opinion is you should always pay a professional or become one, never publish unprofessional work, but in the end the decision is obviously yours.)
If you decide to pay a professional, you must decide who is going to pay them, and how that person is going to be compensated. In my partnerships with Megan, we opened LLCs and each put in an equal amount of startup money, which paid our costs until the books began to make enough revenue to cover the costs of the next project. In my partnership with Brandon, associated costs were covered by his company, Dragonsteel, because Dragonsteel owns the IP and the property. When James and I published The Bollywood Lovers’ Club, he put in money while I contributed labor: I did the layout, book design, and cover design while he paid for the stock art and other assets necessary for me to do that work. We were both happy with that arrangement, so it worked for us.
It doesn’t really matter how you divide this work and the costs involved: what matters is that you are both satisfied with the arrangement, the work gets done, and no one feels resentful for how it was divided.
Cover Art and Book Design If you’re publishing with a publisher, they may ask for your opinion on the cover design, or they may not. If you’re indie publishing, coming up with a cover will be entirely up to you and anyone you might hire to help you with the process. Someone is also going to need to do your book layout, whether it be one of you or someone you hire for the job. It’s important to decide upfront who is going to do the labor involved in cover design and layout, who is going to pay for it if necessary, and who gets to make the creative decisions about how your book is going to look.
People sometimes get emotional about book covers, and it’s understandable why. They want to like their own book cover. They may have daydreamed what it would look like. They feel attached to their ideas and may be put off by certain types of covers or certain artistic choices. These emotions can run very high, and even if you don’t experience them, your partner might.
This is at odds with the purpose of covers: the sole purpose of book cover design is to advertise your book and to attract the readers who will like it. Covers aren’t about what you personal like—they’re about telling your specific readers at a cursory glance that this book is for them. Because of that, book covers need to conform to genre standards—if you put the wrong cover on your book, the right readers will never even consider it, because it won’t catch their eye as they scan through all the many book choices, in person or online.
It’s important to familiarize yourself with other current and successful book covers in your genre. It’s a good time to take a trip to a bookstore or peruse the Amazon Best Seller lists in your genre and see what books are selling and what their covers look like.
If one of you is already a professional cover designer, that’s great! But you’ll still need to confer as a partnership to make sure you both agree on what marketing angle the cover should take and what sort of design decisions will be best for your work. Like with editing, it’s also important that the designing partner doesn’t feel like extra work is being heaped upon them simply because of their skills; the non-designer should make an effort to take on other tasks so that all the work for production doesn’t fall to the designer.
Market research can still be important to traditionally published authors: if a publisher asks for your opinion on a cover, you’ll be able to give a more educated opinion if you’re aware of marketing principles. If you can speak to market trends instead of offering emotional feedback, you’ll signal to your publisher that your opinion is worth considering. Your publisher may or may not listen to you, but your chances are higher if you communicate clearly and concisely using language that suggests you’ve done your research and understand that a book cover is an advertisement.
If you’re an indie partnership working with a cover designer, this is even more important. In indie publishing, it’s the author’s job to tell the cover designer what kind of a cover they want. The designers will almost never read the book and aren’t necessarily in the business of marketing—their job is to create a professional, polished, industry standard version of whatever kind of market-focused cover you request from them.
Both when you are giving cover feedback to a publisher and when you’re soliciting work from a cover designer, it’s best to confer as a partnership and get on the same page before you communicate your partnership decisions to outside professionals. Otherwise, you risk confusing your art director or cover designer, or worse, putting your cover designer in the middle of a partnership conflict. Together you should prepare a design brief for your cover designer including the cover copy (which one or both of you must write), example covers in your genre that hit the same market you’re hoping to reach, and any information about what you two envision. The more information you can give to your designer about what you want, the easier it’s going to be for that designer to give you a cover you’ll be proud to put on your book.
How do you settle disputes between you about what kind of cover to put on your book? As with story decisions, it’s good to step back and get at the why behind your opinions. Why do you dislike book covers in the style your partner prefers? Is your preferred style also valid for the current market? What are the merits and drawbacks of each style? For any cover, there are generally several valid design choices that would all work for the market, and infinitely more design choices that would not. Finding the intersection of what you like and what sells is a lot of work, and in the end, one or both of you might have to accept a cover that is not to your personal taste, whether because it’s the best marketing decision for your partnership, or because your publisher gives you no choice.
Distribution If you’re working with a publisher, distribution is probably decided for you. However, if you’ve gone indie, you’ll have to manage a number of decisions about what platforms to use for distribution. Will you crowd fund your release? Go exclusive to Amazon? Publish wide on many e-book platforms? Will you use Ingram for your print books, or KDP, or Draft2Digital, or some other option? Many paths are valid, and all have their benefits and drawbacks. If you’re in an equal partnership and publishing independently, you’ll have to decide between you what distribution decisions make sense for your project and your partnership.
It’s also important to recognize that all distribution decisions are going to involve some amount of work. Uploading files isn’t a complicated task, but it can take time to get them correctly prepared and to troubleshoot any files that might get sent back for corrections. If you’re wide, just the act of uploading the files to all the right places can take a substantial amount of time, especially when you include marketing tasks such as researching appropriate keywords and writing sales copy.
You’ll also need to make the decision of whether or not to put the book up for pre-order. There are benefits and drawbacks to running pre-orders—you can collect sales now, but you’ll also impose a deadline on your project, which can add to the stress of the production process.
There are no wrong answers to most of these questions, but they’re all questions you’re going to have to answer together—especially in an equal partnership, the decision-making process alone can be time-consuming and stressful. As you navigate it, remember to maintain respect for your partner and above all, communicate your opinions, your capabilities, and your needs. If there have been communications problems in the past, production is a stage where they’re likely to come to a head, so be on your guard for problems in the partnership and resolve them as clearly and thoroughly as you can, so they don’t ruin the most exciting part: the release of your book.
A Production Plan For all tasks in production, whether working with a publisher or not, the most important thing is to have a plan and to show up to the job. You’ve written an entire book together—this is not the moment to slack off and leave most of the work to your partner, or worse, let the project stagnate when most of the work is already complete. I’ve found it’s useful to build a schedule, even if you aren’t publishing under a deadline. Production can feel like an endless list of monotonous tasks, and building a schedule with milestones to hit can help grant a sense of progression. It can also help you both keep track of what you’ve promised to do and what your partner is doing to contribute to the publication of your book. Your schedule should include timelines for editing, cover design, proofreads, layout, upload, and publication. Be sure to give yourselves ample time for every step, so you aren’t adding stress to yourselves by doing everything in a rush.
Above all, have patience with each other. Publishing is stressful enough without heaping more pressure and expectation on each other. Know that there are no right answers, and do your best for your project, yourselves, and each other.
Now that your book is revised, it’s time to start preparing it for publication. At this stage, you’ll have to make final decisions about how you’re going to publish the book. Hopefully you discussed some of your intentions when you created your contract, but if you left some of the decisions for later, it’s now time to commit.
Both traditional and indie publishing are valid choices. Both require a tremendous amount of work by the author and neither offers any guarantee of success. There are authors finding success in indie and in traditional publishing, and also many who are finding success doing both. As you look at your publishing options, therefore, it’s not so much a question of which one is better. You want to consider instead which is a better fit for you and your partner.
If you’re in a tiered partnership, the senior partner may be the one making these decisions. In an equal partnership, you’ll have to decide together what publishing path you’d like to pursue. This is one area where it’s important to make sure your goals are aligned: what do you each want out of your publishing path, and what do you think is the best way to get there? Be sure to communicate not just about your preferences, but about the why behind them. If you have different visions of your path as a collaborative team, you’re going to need to work out a shared vision before you can proceed. Let’s talk about some of the challenges partners are likely to encounter as they choose between different publishing options.
Yes, You Can Try Both So often in the industry we talk about traditional and indie publishing as if they are rival sports teams, but you don’t have to pick a side if you don’t want to. The most common approach I have used with both my collaborative and single author books is to try both. I send the first book of almost every series I write to my agent, and he shops the book in New York. While it’s on submission, I work on other projects. I might also prepare to publish independently by doing prep work on (or even writing) some sequels. If the book doesn’t sell to a traditional publisher, I move forward with independent publishing. (No, this doesn’t mean the book wasn’t “good enough.” There are plenty of excellent books failing to find a home in traditional publishing for one reason or another.) I love indie publishing because it lets me move forward and find an audience for my work regardless of whether it fits what a publisher is looking for. I love to work with traditional publishers because of what they can offer in terms of production services and potential bookstore placement. Many paths to publication are viable and valid, and there’s no shame in pursuing one or all of them. The most important thing, as usual, is that you and your partner agree on your path and feel comfortable with it.
Working with an Agent If part of your team publishing plan involves traditional publishing, you will probably want to seek representation from a literary agent. As of this writing there are still a few places you can submit your work unagented, but those are dwindling and the biggest markets all require agented submissions. If one or both of you already have a literary agent, you’ll have to decide (and inquire about) whether one or both of them will represent your joint work. It’s possible to have the book submitted by both your agents together if they are amenable to that arrangement—in that situation one of them would do the literal submission of the book, but they would each represent their own client separately and take a commission from that client’s share of any proceeds.
Alternatively, one agent could represent both authors, with the other author’s agent agreeing not to be the agent of record on that particular project. In this case, only the agent submitting the book would receive a commission, likely from both author’s earnings. Both of these solutions obviously require the enthusiastic consent of both agents; you need to ask your agent what they’re comfortable with and be respectful of their answer, even if it isn’t what you want to hear, just as you are with all your business partners.
If only one of you is currently signed with a literary agent, that author could ask their agent if they are willing to represent your project on behalf of both partners. The agent might sign the unagented co-author as a client, or they might not, depending on the agent’s preferences. I’ve worked under both circumstances, and both worked out fine. If either of you is agented, you will want to keep your agent apprised of what’s happening at every stage, and also ensure that you’re following the terms of your contract. It’s always good to pull that agency contract out and read it again, and then ask questions if you have them.
If neither of you have a literary agent and you want to submit the book to traditional publishers, you’ll need to query the book. I often get questions from authors at the querying stage about whether they should query individually or as a partnership, and I always advise honesty. Will some agents decline your project because they’re leery of collaboration? Maybe! But if that’s the case, they aren’t the agent for your project anyway, so an attempt to obfuscate the situation in the hopes of signing with them are a waste of everyone’s time.
It’s fairly easy to adapt the standard query format to introduce yourselves as a team of authors. Use language that communicates your pride in your partnership and the unique influence it has on your work. When you give your credentials, you can offer a separate sentence or two for each of you listing your previous publications and any other relevant experience. Querying is tough at any stage, but enjoy the fact that there are two of you to share the work, and know that the right agent for your project isn’t going to turn you down simply because you’re working together.
Working With a Publisher Your relationship to a traditional publisher may vary based on the nature of your partnership. When I wrote the Skyward Flight novellas with Brandon, my contract was with his company, Dragonsteel, while Dragonsteel’s contract was with the publisher. This meant that I had almost no contact with the publisher, even though I wrote the books that they published.
In an equal partnership, you may work much more closely with your editor. You’ll have to decide as a partnership if one person will be the liaison with the publisher, or if you will both be involved in all communications. Regardless of what you decide, you’ll need to discuss communications with the publisher amongst yourselves before responding to the publisher (or your agent) about various publishing decisions. Your publisher doesn’t need to know when you disagree; go ahead and have your disagreement, pull out your communication skills, come to a consensus, and then present your decision to the publisher as if your argument never took place. This will help you to seem professional and united, even if your partnership (like most) can be messy behind the scenes.
Going Indie If you’re interested in indie publishing, you have different set of challenges to contend with. You’ll have to decide how you’re going to publish the book—and on whose accounts—and how you will manage royalties.
Splitting Royalties at the Source As of this writing, it’s not possible for two unincorporated writers to share a Kindle Direct Publishing account or split royalties through books published directly on Amazon. Hopefully that will change in the future, but currently, the most common way to have your royalties split at distribution and sent to each of you separately is to publish the books through another service like Draft2Digital, which takes a percentage of your total sales in addition to the percentage taken by Amazon or other publishing markets. This cuts down on your take home royalties, and also limits the options you can choose when going direct to Amazon. As of this writing, for example, it’s not possible to enroll the book in Kindle Unlimited through Draft2Digital, so if KU is part of your business model, this isn’t a good option for you. If you have an agent, you can inquire if your agency has an ebook publishing program. Some agencies will publish client books under their own retailer accounts and then split royalties and send them on. The downside of this is you lose some control over your accounts (not getting select your own settings, see your royalties in real time, and having to communicate with the agency any time you want to set the book on sale). It will also probably mean you’re paying your agent their commission on your indie book income, which may or may not be worth it to you, depending on your situation. But if your agency is willing to split the money and send it on to you individually, this will save you some accounting work in the long run.
The Royalty Model Another option is for one of you to publish the book on their personal vendor account and then pay royalties to the other. The disadvantage of this system is that it puts a paperwork burden on one partner—they will have to not only track sales and payments (which Amazon and other retailers do not make an easy task with their sometimes-convoluted reporting, especially when exchange rates are involved), but also have to provide reports and 1099s (in the US) to the other partner for tax purposes.
The partner taking on this burden is committing to do this paperwork forever—as long as that book is earning more than ten dollars in royalties in a given year, the forms will have to be filed. If any royalties are earned during the year, they will have to be tracked and paid on schedule. In fact, even if this partner dies, the work may then fall to their heirs. This is a significant commitment, and you’ll have to decide if you’re really okay with doing it. If neither of you are, then you’ll have to choose another option.
Under this model, you’ll also have to negotiate who will pay for any expenses your book incurs. Who is going to pay for cover or for editing? What about advertising? How will you track that money, and will it be reimbursed from royalties? If you do intend to reimburse expenses, that will add another layer of paperwork to consider, and is something that should be laid out in a contract or in a contract addendum.
LLCs and other Business Structures You can open a new KDP account if you have a separate tax number for your business. Amazon will close your account if they find out you’ve made a duplicate as an individual, but a new tax number makes you a new entity, which is therefore entitled to its own account. This means forming a legal partnership (an LLC or equivalent if you are located outside the United States), which makes you not just collaboration partners, but now legal business partners.
This is another layer of commitment, and should be taken with another layer of seriousness. Instead of adding a paperwork burden to one partner, if you incorporate as a partnership you will add a paperwork burden to both of you. Taxes will need to be filed for the business and individual income reports will also have to be generated for each partner to use in preparing their individual income taxes. All income and expenses will have to be carefully tracked.
There are a few benefits to doing this extra work, however. If you incorporate, you can open a bank account as a partnership, making it easier to track your income and expenses. You can then pay yourselves in disbursements rather than royalties—in my partnerships that function this way, we choose a bank account threshold with the amount of cash we need to keep in the business for monthly and yearly expenses. When income pushes the account above that threshhold, we cut ourselves checks for the excess in equal amounts. This is nice because it means we never have to negotiate who will pay for what—the expenses all come out of our business account, and we don’t make money unless the business is making enough to cover all of its expenses first.
But this does mean that you are legally entangled with your business partner for tax purposes, and sharing bank accounts requires an additional layer of financial trust. It might be a better fit for partners who write series together, as it’s a lot of commitment for only one or two books. Make sure you’re really okay with this level of entanglement before you form a business with your partner. Consider how you will feel if the partnership fails or your partner leaves the business and you become responsible for managing or closing down the business accounts alone.
Whatever path you choose, producing your book is going to be every bit as much of a challenge as writing it and revising it. Once you’ve made these business decisions and you have a revised manuscript in hand, you’re ready to move on to the important business of production, which will involve, as always, more compromise and coordination.
When at last you’ve finished a draft of your book, you have every right to feel accomplished. That was a huge amount of work! You not only drafted a novel, but you managed to navigate all the partnership challenges that come with writing a book with another person. Good for you! Pat yourselves on the back. Celebrate! You deserve it.
Your work, however, is not yet over. Unfortunately, what you have now is probably one variety of mess or another, and you still have to revise it before it will reach its fullest potential. Your revisions might include structural changes, removing content, writing new content, line edits (on the sentence level), and continuity edits (to make sure your story and prose are consistent). There is a lot to coordinate and a lot of work to divide at this stage, so you’ll want to use your best communication skills as you work to address the problems in your manuscript together.
Discussing Revisions As with all other steps of the process, it’s important to communicate during the revision process. When you’re preparing to revise, what do you see as the weaknesses in the work you’ve done? What do you think needs to be done to make the book the best version of itself it can be? You may already have some ideas of what a better, revised draft would look like, and possibly your partner does, too. Those ideas might be different from each other. You might be attached to aspects of the work that your partner thinks are not working, and your partner might want to change things you love as well.
It’s time, once again, to communicate. Sit down with your partner and work through what needs to be done. It’s possible you’ll both need to read the book and develop ideas about what needs to be fixed. It’s possible you already know a lot of what needs to be done. Maybe you need to re-outline pieces of the book. Maybe you want to break out your outlining tools and make a list of what’s currently in the book, so you can visualize the pieces that need to move around.
As with other stages of the writing process, you’re absolutely going to need to remain flexible. Remember that this book isn’t only your work—it’s a mix of your work and your partner’s. The final product needs to reflect both of your visions for what it can be. This means it’s still healthy to see your first draft as a collection of possibilities, some of which will remain in the final work, and others of which will need to change. If either you or your partner decide to rigidly insist that any particular element remain the same, you are no longer collaborating. You are now digging trenches where you should be building a bridge. It’s okay to advocate for the parts of the book you love, but that needs to be balanced with listening to your partner and making sure you understand their ideas and vision. As you did in the pre-writing process, seek to incorporate both of your ideas, and seek for new ideas that satisfy the why behind both of your visions. When you find changes you’re both happy with, you’ll be moving the book toward its full potential, and enjoying the best benefits collaboration has to offer.
Making Changes Like with drafting, you’ll need to decide how you want to divide the work of revision. Let’s discuss some common ways of dividing revision, and some things to consider about each method.
One Writer Makes All the Changes It’s possible one of you will do all the revision, particularly if the other one did all the drafting—if both writers agree, this can be a valid way to divide an equal partnership, particularly if the draft is rough and requires a lot of revision work. In a tiered partnership, it’s possible that the junior partner is responsible for both the drafting and the revision, with the senior partner offering notes on what they would like to see changed as revision progresses.
When one writer makes all the changes, less coordination is required, but the writer who isn’t revising should have significant input at the planning stages of revision. If they didn’t write the draft and don’t have input in the revisions, the book isn’t really a collaboration, but a single-author book being published under two names. It’s possible that in some tiered, work-for-hire scenarios this is the case. But unless this is your specific contractual arrangement, the revising writer needs to make sure to take their partner’s input into account.
You Each Revise Your Own Words If you divided the drafting work by viewpoint, it’s possible to divide the revision work the same way; once you’ve discussed a revision plan, you can each go over your own words and revise them. I have never written a book this way, but writers who are sensitive to having their words changed without their specific consent might be more comfortable revising in this manner.
One way to organize this is to revise in sections, with one writer revising a section they wrote and then providing it to their partner to review, and then that partner revising their next section to match. This method allows you to retain control over your own words but also be aware of the revision work your partner is doing as you progress through the book.
Full Pass Revisions This is the way I’ve most commonly revised with a partner: after discussing revisions as a team, one partner takes the draft and does a full pass over it. Then the other partner takes the book and does a pass themselves. This can be especially helpful if you’re worried about homogenizing voice at this stage. It also allows each writer to have input in the revision without having to look over each others’ shoulders as you work.
You’ll want to be sure both writers are comfortable with this method; some people will be more sensitive to having their words revised by their partner than others. But if you use this method, you can choose to divide up the work according to your strengths, with each writer doing the passes with which they are the most comfortable.
Play to Your Strengths In revision, it can be doubly beneficial to play to your strengths. In many of my collaborations, I do the first revision, in which we move pieces of the plot around and stitch them back together in a more dramatic and coherent fashion.
I love this kind of revision. To me, it’s like a big puzzle, and it’s satisfying to get all the pieces to click into place. I often go through and color code existing elements so I can visualize the existing plot structure and then move through making sure the elements are all set up and paid off in a dramatic and satisfactory manner.
I do that revision because I love it, and I’m good at it. Most of my co-writers have been all too happy to hand that draft over to me, because it’s not their favorite part of the process. (Maybe someday someone will fight me for it, but that day has not yet arrived.)
However, hand me a draft full of line edits—the picky little details that remove excess words and rearrange sentences for flow and clarity—and you will very quickly find me whining and complaining that I’d rather poke out my own eyes than have to fiddle with one more sentence. I hate microrevision. I get so bored cutting words out of sentences, rearranging sentences so they’re in an optimal order in a paragraph. I can do it, and it obviously needs to be done, but it doesn’t engage my brain in a way that I like.
So I am always so happy when I’m working with someone who enjoys that kind of detail work. I will do the large-scale content revision all day if it means I can pass the fiddly word stuff off to someone else. When you lean into these opposing strengths and each take the parts that you most enjoy, both your work and your partnership become stronger.
Of course, there may be parts you both like, or most unfortunately, parts neither of you want to do. In an equal partnership, try to divide these things as evenly as possible so everyone has something they enjoy doing and only has to do some of what they hate. Nothing can ever be entirely equal, and it’s unwise to try to measure these things exactly, but if the burden of all their least favorite parts of the job falls to one person, you may create a breeding ground for resentment.
As you communicate about the workload, therefore, you need to be honest about how the process is working for you so that you don’t fall into the trap of doing work you resent. A conversation when things start to go wrong may not be super pleasant, but it’s a thousand times more pleasant than the conversation will be after you’ve let things go wrong repeatedly over a long period of time.
Exercise Trust As important as it is to communicate, it’s also going to be vital that you trust your partner when it’s their turn to revise, particularly if you are revising each other’s words. You can absolutely save a version of the draft before they make changes in case either of you wants to refer to the way things were before. (James and I did this with each revision on every chapter for The Bollywood Lovers’ Club, which came out to a lot of copies of each draft.) If you want to, you can track changes or use compare docs to look at what changed. But you need to allow your co-writer to make the changes they believe are necessary and treat their new iteration as a new and valid draft. If you’re constantly policing what they’re allowed to change, looking over their shoulder fretting over what might be lost, or comparing what they did to the previous draft with nostalgia for the way it used to be, you’re only going to get in the way of improving your work.
Instead, when your partner has finished a revision, try to look at the new draft with new eyes. Evaluate how it’s working, not in comparison to how it was before (unless it’s a favorable comparison!), but based on how it’s working now. There may still be problems! It’s very common for books to go through multiple drafts. There may be a few things you liked that got cut, and you may want to go back and see if there’s a way to salvage a couple of things that got left on the cutting room floor. But, in general, it’s more productive to look forward, rather than stressing about what was lost. The term “kill your darlings” (meaning let go of the things you love about your work that just aren’t working) is just as applicable in co-writing, though in this case, sometimes you need to allow your partner do the euthanizing on your behalf.
For example, when I go in to move the pieces of a book around to improve its structure, I usually have a conversation with my partner beforehand about what I’m going to do to the book. But I don’t always know precisely what I’m going to do to the book before I dig into it. My brain processes the problems in the book as I work, so sometimes I’m up to my elbows in revision before I really know how I’m going to solve all the problems. It would be lovely if I could explain beforehand exactly what I’m going to do. But I can’t, always. That’s just the way my brain works.
This requires a measure of trust on the part of my co-writers. They have to believe that I’m going to do good things to the work, and not fear unduly that I’m going to destroy it. We can keep a copy of the original, of course, in case there’s something I cut that they want to reclaim. After the fact, I always bring them a list of the problems I found and the ways that I solved them, if they’re interested in knowing what I did. With some of my co-writers, I might text in the middle and fill them in about what I’m finding and how it’s going. If I run into problems I don’t quite know how to solve, or I’m fiddling between two options and I’m not sure which would be best, I might stop and have a conversation before I continue. But sometimes I need a little bit of trust that I won’t destroy anything great about the book, and it’s helpful when my co-writers extend that trust to me and let me do my thing.
Value Your Partner’s Work—and Your Own When you’re revising, be careful not to be harsher on the work of one partner over the other. If you rip up your partners’ sections but leave yours mostly untouched, chances are you’ll be writing some of your partner’s contributions out of the work without giving a critical enough eye to your own. I generally have the opposite problem—I have no problem ripping up my own work, but I tend to go easier on things my partner wrote. I’m never sure how my own work would read to someone who didn’t write it, but I am the first reader of my partners’ work, so if it worked for me, sometimes I want to defend it rather than critically interrogate how it could be better. This is true especially when it comes to incorporating feedback from my critique group; I have no problem hearing when my own work isn’t working, but when my partner’s work is criticized, I tend to get defensive. This is unhelpful. My work has problems, and my partner’s work also inevitably has problems, and I need to be receptive to feedback about both. This has caused me problems before—when Brandon gave me his partial draft of Bastille, I recognized that he’d been having some problems with the plot and cut several chapters of his words. When I sent my work to him to review, he told me I hadn’t gone far enough, and I needed to cut some more. I chalked that up to Brandon being harder on his words than was necessary—after all, I liked what he had written. Then, when feedback came from our editor and beta readers, they agreed with Brandon. I had to cut that material after all: I was too enamored of what he’d written when the words weren’t jiving with the structure of the rest of the book. In truth, when my partners and I both contributed to a draft and didn’t divide it by viewpoint, by the time we’re a few revisions in, I’ve often forgotten who wrote which line originally. (This sometimes leads to the unfortunate situation where I compliment a line, only to be told in no uncertain terms by my partner that I wrote it.) The book changes shape in revision and my perception of the book changes with it. I stop thinking about who wrote what and instead focus on how the book works as it is right now and as a whole, which is a much more helpful perspective than worrying about what my co-writer might be doing to my words.
Tone, Style, and Voice Revision is another opportunity to match tone, style, and voice to make sure what was written by two writers reads like it was written by one. If you are revising over your partner’s words as if they are your own, you should never seek to eliminate their voice, since that would take some of the partnership magic out of the work. But you can absolutely homogenize the voice a bit. When you fiddle with your partner’s word choice, making it sound a bit less like them, and a bit more like you, the work as a whole will begin to sound more like the collective you. A third voice entirely: your partnership voice. One that neither of you would truly replicate writing alone.
Now that you have a plan, you’re ready to write a book together. But how are you going to go about actually writing words? You have some choices about how to organize this work—and the different methods vary widely, ranging from writing every word together as a team to one partner writing all the prose with no help from the other. Obviously these two disparate choices would make for very different partnership experiences; the way you decide to put the words on the page will vary based on the type of partnership and your style of working together.
Here are some of the common techniques for drafting as a team, as well as some pros and cons of each.
Write the Book Together, Word by Word This is what many people imagine when I say I collaborate, and it is also the only method on this list I’ve never used. Why? Because it sounds torturous to me to write individual sentences by committee. I know some partners write this way, but they are by far in the minority, and for good reason.
This method will take a very long time; when you draft separately and then review each other’s work, you only have to talk about things you really love or really don’t like, and can avoid discussing all the baseline things that just work and don’t need to change or be celebrated. If you are writing the words together, every sentence has to be discussed, which will expand both the time you spend together and the amount of discussion necessary per word of the draft.
The counterbalance is that you both have a lot of control over the words as they go onto the page, which could be a good thing if that kind of control is important to you.
If this method is working for you, that’s great! But if it also sounds torturous to you, I have good news. There are lots of other more common methods to write a book together.
One Person Writes the Draft Most common in tiered partnerships, one option is for one partner to write the entire first draft. This makes it very easy to homogenize voice and style, because the style choices are all being made by the same writer.
The drawback, of course, is that this is a tremendous amount of work for one partner to do. In a tiered partnership, that might be appropriate; the senior partner might be responsible for the characters and the worldbuilding, while the junior partner writes most or all of the prose. Indeed, for many senior partners, this is the biggest purpose of co-writing: it allows them to produce more books under their IP without being limited by their own drafting time. All of my books with Brandon Sanderson were written this way, with the exception of Bastille vs. The Evil Librarians, of which Brandon had already written nine chapters before he brought me onto the project.
Most equal partnerships, however, want to find a way to share the drafting burden.
Each Partner Picks a Viewpoint This common strategy works well for books with multiple viewpoint characters: you can each pick a different viewpoint and write all the chapters from that character’s point of view. In this case, differences in style and voice can be an asset—your personal styles work to make the character voices distinct from one another. My romantic comedies with Megan were mostly written this way—I tended to write the male points of view while she wrote almost all of the female ones.
There are other advantages of this method—it allows you to each claim characters and dig deep into their viewpoint. When you’re outlining and brainstorming, you might each take a “side” and advocate for how that character would see things. This can be useful because it’s often difficult to see a situation from multiple characters’ viewpoints at the same time; you can each take responsibility for a given character’s motivations and advocate for them as you work out what each character will do in your plot. This can become a bad thing if it turns into a competition; you don’t want the conflict your characters feel to bleed off the page and affect the dynamic of your partnership. If you find yourself starting to get upset because the character is upset, you’ll want to take a step back and separate for yourself what emotions you are feeling because of appropriate book conflict and which need to be worked out separately. This can especially become a problem if you use the roleplay pre-writing method, because doing improv as the characters can make them particularly strong and dynamic in your mind.
Divide the Chapters Evenly Another option is to divide the chapters evenly without worrying about specific viewpoints. If there’s only one viewpoint character in your book and you’re both doing an equal amount of the drafting, this may be your best option. If you do have multiple viewpoint characters, you can divide chapters based on your individual strengths and weaknesses, or based on who is most excited about writing a given scene. Megan and I used this method for most of our fantasy books, and also our epic fantasies with Lauren Janes. Each week, we would look at the next chapters that needed to be written and each select two that we wanted to write. We each had characters that we tended to select more often, but that wasn’t the only criterion we would use. Megan was fantastic at writing scenes that developed interesting side characters, whereas I hated writing group scenes, so she tended to write both of those. Megan hated writing scenes where two characters had a long conversation with lots of ground to cover, so I tended to write those. There will always be some scenes no one wants to write, and those can also be divided based on who wants to avoid them the least. For Megan and me, those were usually action chapters where we weren’t crystal clear on the blocking. Sometimes I’d get stuck with one I wasn’t terribly excited about; sometimes she would. We’d try to keep this in balance so one person wasn’t getting stuck with all the chapters they were dreading all the time.
I’ve said we generally stuck to our own viewpoints for the romantic comedies, and that’s true, but sometimes one of us would fall behind, and the other would write a chapter or two of their character’s viewpoint to catch up. There were also sometimes chapters that one of us really didn’t want to write for whatever reason—usually ones with lots of side characters for me, or the long talking chapters for her—and our partner would step in and do a chapter or two of the other person’s character for that reason. For example, most of the group challenge scenes from our survival reality show novel, Starving with the Stars, were written by Megan, regardless of whether they were in Jillian or Alec’s viewpoint.
James and I also used this method when we wrote The Bollywood Lovers’ Club; we’d look at the next two chapters and decide between us who wanted to write each one. James had a lot of cultural knowledge that I lacked, so there were some scenes that were much easier for him to write than they would have been for me. If that wasn’t an issue for a set of chapters, we would choose based on who had a vision for what a scene should be, or who was most excited about writing it, whether or not they had a reason. However you decide to draft your book, the most important thing is that you’re both comfortable with your decision, and that you’re making progress. Remember the metrics of success: if you are both happy with your method and you are producing words, then your process is working. Congratulations. Keep at it until your project is finished.
Matching Voice, Tone, and Style Whatever drafting method you choose, you may be concerned about how to match tone and voice. This is the single most common concern I hear from writers who are considering collaboration, but matching tone and voice, in my experience, isn’t as hard as people expect it will be. This is for one very important reason: most writers already have a range of voice, tone, and style that varies from book to book, from series to series, from genre to genre. Changing your tone to match your co-writer is not very different from, say, changing your tone from snarky and sparse when writing a first-person comedic fantasy to more serious and stylized when writing a serious epic fantasy. In each case, you choose your diction based on your genre, so if you have experience writing in more than one genre (or even subgenre), you probably have experience adjusting your voice to fit the project.
In the case of your collaboration, you’ll both need to decide what you want the tone and voice to be, then try your best to match it. This may be a challenge, and may require concentrated effort. But most writers have a range, and that range can be expanded through practice. The more similar you are in writing style to begin with, the easier this will be, but even if your voices are somewhat different in your single-author work, you can grow to a middle place with some effort. If you’re struggling with this, practice, and, like with most things, it will become easier over time. (And, in the places where you fail, there’s always revision. More on this in chapter seventeen.)
Another thing you can do if you’re struggling to matching styles is to study your partner’s work and make an effort as you draft to do more of what they do. When I wrote Bastille vs. The Evil Librarians, I took a careful look at Brandon’s prose and sentence structure, at the way he crafted jokes and the way he structured his chapters. Then, as I wrote, I did my best to emulate his style intentionally. I can’t be Brandon Sanderson, but I tried to be like him as much as I could.
Fortunately, with that book, I had the benefit of writing from a new point of view—which meant that any voice differences between me and Brandon became a feature rather than a bug, because they accentuated the voice differences between Alcatraz and Bastille. In these cases, it’s possible you don’t want your voices to match. If you’re each writing a different viewpoint, your differences in style might be a feature, in which case you should lean into those differences, accentuating what makes your individual styles unique.
When I began work on the Skyward Flight novellas, I didn’t benefit from this quite as much. Brandon had written from the point of view of one of my main characters before, and since I was writing three different points of view, any differences in my work that were common across all three protagonists would stand out as a voice difference between me and Brandon rather than a feature of the narrative.
So, as I wrote, I paid a lot of attention to the way Brandon told stories, to his balance of drama and humor, to the way he wrote dialogue in group scenes and the way he wrote introspection. And then, I did my very best to emulate that, so our voices would be indistinguishable. When it came time for revisions, I asked my beta readers to flag for me any parts that sounded like Brandon didn’t write them, and I adjusted my language and sentence structure in those places to blend better into Brandon’s existing work in the series. I consider it the highest compliment when readers tell me they read the books without realizing Brandon didn’t write the prose, because that sort of seamless transition was exactly what I set out to accomplish.
Megan and I had a very similar writing style, so I didn’t have to work terribly hard to match her voice. But she was a lot better at setting and description than I was, so I learned a lot about those elements from studying the way she set them up in her own work. I did my best to emulate her skill, trying to bring our styles more in line. This was immensely helpful when I pivoted to writing Skyward Flight, which required a lot more description than my other books, and has also trickled into some of my single-author work. Ostensibly I was putting in the work so my chapters would match Megan’s, but working on my own weaknesses made me into a better writer overall.
Adjusting As You Go However you decide to draft your book, you’re probably going to have to adapt to each other as you go. You may discover that your tone needs some work to match. You may discover that, even if you outlined meticulously, you run into snags where one of you pictured things one way and another a different way, and you have to stop and nail down your own continuity for the sake of consistency.
It’s important, as you draft, to remain in communication. If one of you is writing the entire first draft, this will be less of a problem, as your partner can review the draft as a whole after its finished. But if you’re both writing words, you’re likely to write in slightly different directions, and like two lines setting off at slightly different angles, if you let that incongruence continue you can end up in very different places by the time you’re done.
If you’re drafting together, it’s therefore important to read each other’s chapters and have regular check ins where you talk about the direction of the book and keep your visions for future chapters aligned. It can be tricky, though, to talk about the problems in a draft when the words are freshly written.
Giving Feedback Some communication about draft problems is going to be necessary. It’s inevitable that you will read your partner’s work and ask, wait, is this right? Is that how that works? Does this make sense? Your partner will likely be asking the same questions of you. If you don’t discuss these problems, they’re only going to magnified as you continue to draft, but it’s also important to be sensitive to the way your partner best receives feedback.
As we’ve discussed, I wouldn’t recommend working with someone who can’t take feedback at all, but many people have trouble taking feedback under certain circumstances. It’s perfectly reasonable for our partners, especially in an equal partnership, to expect us to deliver criticism in a manner that is not only respectful but tailored to their individual needs.
For example, not everyone can hear criticism immediately after they’ve written a chapter. Some people might need a few days to decompress. Or, they might be okay with hearing some feedback, but need it to be limited to only the feedback that is absolutely necessary to discuss at the time, while other feedback that won’t have a ripple effect through future chapters is noted and set aside until the rest of the draft is done. These are both reasonable requests, and if we can change our behavior in small ways that will allow our partners to be more receptive to hearing about problems in their work, we should do so.
If you notice your partner becoming defensive, rather than doubling down on the point you’re trying to make, it can be helpful to take a step back and ask questions about the process. Yes, the product needs work, but if you can change your process slightly to eliminate defensiveness and make the feedback easier for your partner to hear, everyone will benefit in the long run. Instead of being frustrated with your partner’s defensiveness, try to be curious about where it’s coming from so you can learn what might be a better approach to take in the future.
On the flip side, when our partner is the one criticizing our work, it’s perfectly okay to ask for accommodations that will help us to be able to hear that feedback better. Maybe you are the one who can’t hear criticism for a few days after writing a chapter, or who needs to hear ten good things about the chapter before you’re ready to hear what’s wrong with it. That’s perfectly reasonable, but it will help if you communicate that to your partner in clear terms, so they aren’t left guessing why they offended you, or worse, sending you into regular emotional disequilibrium which will eventually wear on both your creative process and the health of your partnership.
In addition, try not to take the feedback too personally. Every writer needs feedback. Everyone’s work has problems. It’s not a measure of your ability as a writer; books have so many moving parts that it’s impossible to get all of them working perfectly on the first try. This is another stage at which it’s important to leave your ego at the door and really listen to what your partner honestly thinks of your work. If they’re a good partner, they’re not saying this to hurt you, but rather so you can come to an agreement about what the book should be and make a plan for future revision.
Lastly, it’s important to be honest in your feedback. Don’t be unnecessarily cruel; you can learn to phrase your feedback in ways that are both clear and kind. Conversely, don’t obfuscate the issue, sacrificing clarity in the name of kindness. Don’t tell your partner it’s okay when it isn’t okay. In the end, that will only create confusion and more work and conflict in the long run for you both.
In the same vein, it’s good to keep forward momentum, but in collaboration, you might want to think twice on the common wisdom that you shouldn’t revise a single word until you’ve finished the first draft. Yes, you should push forward. No, you don’t want to get stuck in the revision phase eternally, never making forward progress. But you also don’t want to draft the entire book and then discover it was the wrong one, so don’t be afraid to discuss, critique, pivot, and even do some light revision when you find your work is wandering off course. You’ll thank yourself for it later.
One of my favorite things about collaboration is the pre-writing process, because when I write on my own, I am genuinely terrible at it. When I’m writing a solo book, I don’t generally do a ton of pre-writing. I’m impatient to get started; I like the process of telling the story a lot more than planning the story, and I don’t want to sit down and work out the hard knots before I get into it. I jot myself down an outline of a page or two and then I write.
And, frankly, I make a mess. My first draft turns into half a draft, at best. I have to rewrite large portions once I get things figured out—sometimes I have to rewrite the entire draft.
Co-writing helps me to slow down. Instead of letting myself believe that my half an idea might turn out to be a whole one if I just start writing, I have to sit down and articulate my ideas to my co-author, which helps me notice where the holes are before I write myself into a corner and have to toss thousands of words.
For our purposes, we will define pre-writing as everything you do before you begin to seriously draft a project. This can include idea generation, structure decisions, character development, note taking, outlining, and even the beginning stages of exploratory writing that is focused on defining tone and creating characters, conflicts, or setting. When pre-writing, it’s helpful to have two minds at work—where one of you might let your excitement carry you away, the other can step in, pull back, and ask questions. With two sets of eyes on the work, you can identify overlooked elements of the planning stage that are going to cause you problems later on.
Communication is always important, but in the pre-writing stage, it is absolutely crucial that you both talk and listen to each other. If one of you does all the invention, your process will be lacking important input. If you both do more talking than listening, you’re likely to pull the project in different directions, to the detriment of the product. If neither of you is comfortable contributing ideas, the pre-writing process will devolve into a frustrating game of “I don’t know, what do you want to do,” and progress will be stymied. The goal during pre-writing, as always, is to be flexible and get everyone’s ideas on the table. Phrases such as “what if,” or “yes! and . . .” can help you express your own ideas tentatively and give validation to your partner’s contributions. If you criticize each other’s ideas without giving them fair consideration, you might miss out on creative directions that could have greatly benefited your project. At this stage, it’s incredibly important that you communicate respect to your partner, and make the environment safe for everyone to share their ideas.
All Ideas are Important I am not going to tell you that all ideas are good. Many ideas will, in the context of your project, be profoundly bad ideas. But bad ideas are also important, because they can lead you to the good ones. How does that work? You reaction to an idea—the reasons you think it are bad in this context—will tell you something about what a good idea for this particular situation might look like. For example, if you’re trying to come up with a conflict between two love interests in your contemporary romantic comedy—some issue to really push them apart and drive up the tension when they’re getting close to getting together—you might reject any number of ideas before you find the one you want to go with. An alien invasion would be a tremendously bad idea in this context, because you’re writing a contemporary novel, not science fiction. You’ll want all of your chosen ideas to complement the genre, not fight against it. So unless you’re prepared to change to writing a science fiction novel, you’d want to reject that idea.
Still, you learned something. You need an idea that is consistent with the genre. What ideas are consistent with the genre? Asking this question opens up more information about what a good idea would look like, taking you one step closer to finding the idea you’re looking for.
Of course, this is an obvious example. You probably won’t have this exact conversation, because you’ll both already know you want a solution that is genre appropriate and won’t make suggestions this far afield. But it illustrates a point—if you think an idea is bad, ask yourself why you don’t like it, and what you would like to see instead. That’s a much more helpful response than telling your partner you don’t like their idea, period, with no feedback.
Ideas are not inherently bad. They become bad ideas because of the context—the way that they work in the story. In one of our Extra series sequels, Megan Walker and I were planning to have a character investigate a murder. There’s nothing wrong with this idea—in fact there are millions of books that have been written about investigating a murder.
The idea wasn’t a great one for our series, though, because it’s romantic comedy, not romantic suspense. The idea was steering our book in the wrong direction, so we considered replacing it with something else. However, this bad idea taught us three things. One, the right idea would fit better with our series. Two, the right idea would have more comedic potential. And three, the right idea would not put our main character in immediate danger and steer the book toward romantic suspense.
While we were mulling over other possibilities, I had what I thought might be a truly terrible idea. But, knowing the use of tossing around bad ideas, I gave voice to it. “What if,” I dared to ask, “we removed the murder, and replaced it with an outbreak of pubic lice?”
Megan looked at me like this was the most ridiculous suggestion I had ever made, and maybe it was. But, as we mulled the idea over, we realized it did fit better with our series. It did have comedic potential. It did not put our character in any immediate danger, and it certainly did not steer our book toward romantic suspense.
So it was that we scrapped the murder investigation from our outline and replaced it with a crabs epidemic.
Yes, we really did that. Yes, we published it that way. Yes, we were happy about it. Objectively, writing a book about investigating an outbreak of public lice is a much stupider and worse idea than writing a book about investigating a murder. The plethora of murder mysteries and the utter dearth of crabs outbreak mysteries is proof enough of that. But in this context it was a good idea, because it allowed us to keep the mystery aspect of the book while still maintaining the tone of our series, in which people do not generally encounter dead bodies but do with great frequency encounter mishaps of a sexual nature.
As a partnership, you should not be afraid of bad ideas. Bad ideas can be worked with. No, your biggest fear should be a lack of ideas. When neither of you can come up with a single thing that could possibly solve a given plot or character problem, that’s a sign that you’re tapped out for the day, and it’s time to put the problem away, let it simmer at the back of your minds until your next planning session, and come at it fresh. Continuing to chase after it when you’re both worn out will only lead to frustration, and often fresh brains solve very easily problems which worn out brains would have circled forever.
You Can Discovery Write . . . And Rewrite I advocate for extra planning for most collaborations, but if you both agree that you want to discovery write, you absolutely can. I’ve known of several collaborations that began as a letter writing game—one writer wrote a letter in the voice of a character, and then the other writer wrote a letter back, with no preparation. There’s nothing wrong with using this or any other discovery writing technique as a team, as long as it passes the test for a working strategy: it produces work you are both happy with, and you both feel positively about the process. If both those things are happening, feel free to discovery write. But here’s the big caveat: be aware that you will almost certainly have to rewrite large portions of your work. A lot of discovery writers use their first draft as a pre-write and then rewrite their books. Others, though, can bring together a story as they go, and their first drafts end up with conflict and character arcs and mostly intact plots, requiring only an average amount of revision.
This is very unlikely to happen with collaboration. This is because you aren’t dealing with one mind that can guide the story in the direction it needs to go, but with two minds that will guide the story in two different directions, because they cannot coordinate with each other unless at least some planning takes place. People, as it turns out, cannot read each other’s minds, so if you want a cohesive first draft, you will need to do some planning. If you are okay with using your first draft mostly for idea generation and then tossing all the parts that didn’t work on the cutting room floor, discovery writing as a team might work for you, but if not, you may want to reconsider.
One wonderful thing about writing tools is that most aren’t mutually exclusive. If you are committed to discovery writing but aren’t wild about the mess you are likely to make if you try to discovery write a whole book without coordinating, you could discovery write a few chapters, enough to generate some conflicts and characters, and then sit down and talk about what you like, what’s working, and which conflicts and characters you want to make central to the rest of your work. You can then make a plan, and take advantage of the best of both strategies. In fact, most writers I know use a mix of these two strategies anyway; the key is finding an effective mix that works for you as a team.
Brainstorming Techniques The technique you’re going to use the most when you brainstorm, of course, is conversation. This will be almost universally true—in order to run ideas by each other and settle on a few, you have to talk about them, whether in person, in text, or by phone. Your brainstorming will probably begin as a series of unorganized conversations where you begin to articulate what the project means to each of you, and what shape you each envision it taking. These conversations can be about the general shape of the project or about small details; all of it will help you form a shared vision for what the book is going to become, and that vision will help guide all the conversations, decisions, and work that will come after. It’s helpful in these initial conversations to create a sort of north star for your project, a pitch that tells what it is. If you know you’re writing a romantic comedy about an outbreak of pubic lice, you’ll have a guiding principle to govern your other brainstorming, which can help you avoid trying to combine ideas that don’t fit cohesively together.
You’ll also want to watch out for creeping egos. Those should have been left at the door, but occasionally you may find that one partner has come to pre-writing with a rigid idea of what the book should be, and is resistant to changing anything about their original idea. If the rigid partner is also the senior partner in a tiered collaboration, this may be something the junior partner can work with, or it might be cause for them to decide this isn’t the best co-writing situation after all. In an equal partnership, it’s never appropriate for one writer to dictate the direction of the entire project, so either the rigid partner needs to find some flexibility and work on checking their ego, or the project is going to encounter some serious roadblocks and resentment is likely to build.
Once you’ve had your initial conversations, agree on a general concept, and are ready to really buckle down and flesh out your ideas, here are some ideas for brainstorming as a team, followed by a list of details to make sure you cover before you start putting together an outline.
List What You Know One of the most important things you can do at the brainstorming phase is write down everything you already know. Sometimes you may think you have a fully formed book, but when you write it down, you discover you only have a few ideas with lots of gaps between them. Other times you may think you’re missing major pieces, and write them down only to discover you’ve actually got a lot more formed ideas than you thought you had. Ideas are ephemeral that way; pin them to the page and your situation will become more clear. Don’t worry too much at this stage if some ideas are contradictory, or “bad.” Just focus on collecting all the stray ideas you’ve generated in your conversations about the project. Collect them from your email and your text messages, try to recall them from your unrecorded conversations. The more you can get down, the more pieces you’ll have to begin to move around.
Identify gaps Once you’ve recorded everything you have, emptying both of your brains, it will become more clear what elements are missing. From there you can identify questions that you still need to answer. Are nearly all your notes about the plot, but your characters are still a black hole? Do you have lots of notes on the characters, but no idea about the plot? Do you have some plot points well fleshed out while others remain hazy? Once you know what your gaps are, you’ll have some clear topics for future brainstorming sessions.
Pick a Gap and Generate Ideas When you need to round out elements of your book, it helps to have focused conversations. Now that you’ve identified some gaps, you can sit down (in person or virtually, in real time or in text) and begin to flesh out the parts of your project that are still undefined. Keep track of your ideas by writing them down, whether it’s in a notebook, on Post-Its, or in a notetaking app. Interrogate your bad ideas so they lead you to better ideas—why don’t they work? What are you looking for instead?
You’ll know when you hit a really good idea because it will make you both light up—the moment when you think, yes, that’s it, that’s the perfect thing. That moment is golden, so make sure to take note of those ideas and expand on them as you flesh out the missing pieces of your book.
If you’re writing tragedy, you’ll know when you’ve gone far enough when one of you raises an idea and it stabs you right in the heart. I knew Brandon and I had hit on the ending to ReDawn when he suggested killing off some characters that would deeply impact my main character for the following book. The ripple effect of that moment made me reimagine Evershore entirely—so I knew it was the gut punch we were looking for.
If you’re writing comedy, you’ll know when you’ve struck comedic gold when you’re both laughing so hard your sides hurt. Megan and I were still laughing about some of our more ridiculous comedic moments years later—if you’re not laughing together, will your audience?
In some of my partnerships, I’ve used role-play as a tool to generate ideas for character arcs and conflicts. This is an advantage you have as a partnership—you can each give voice (either verbally or typed in a chat) to one of the characters, and play off each other. If both partners are comfortable with it, this type of roleplay can help you get into the heads of the characters and gain insight into what they think and feel, which can then in turn enhance your characters’ conflicts and decision points. This method isn’t for everyone, but if it appeals to you, it’s worth a try. See chapter fifteen for a more thorough analysis of how this works (and how it doesn’t.)
Pruning and Narrowing Some ideas are, of course, mutually exclusive. You can’t throw everything in the book, so making certain choices will mean dismissing other possible options. Ever seen a superhero movie that suffered from having too many villains? You can’t put everything that excites you into every book, so you’re going to have to make some choices together about what to include.
In my experience, what you keep is more important than what you cut. As you look at your pile of unformed ideas, the most important ideas to keep are not necessarily the objectively best ones. The most important ideas to keep are the ones you are each most excited about.
I may have some bias in this. I tend to be that writer who latches on to very small ideas and gets unreasonably excited about them. This is something that my co-writers have to live with: they are all accustomed to me announcing in the middle of brainstorming that a given character desperately needs an undead bear to ride as a mount and another character really needs to see the ocean for the first time, can we do this, pretty please, I need it. The good news is, most of these ideas don’t take an incredible amount of space in the book, so when my co-writers let me have what makes me excited, I’m more engaged with the work and simultaneously perfectly happy to compromise on things that I care less about . . . like the plot.
It’s very possible that you and your partner will be excited about the same things. In this case, you definitely want to include those things in your book. It’s also very possible you’ll be excited about different things, and in that case, you should also try to include all of those things in your book. When you look at the combined list of those things together, you have the soul of your story, the parts that speak to you most as a team.
You do need to be careful about how quickly you move from brainstorming into pruning and narrowing—some people have a tendency to want to brainstorm forever, while others want to narrow too soon, cutting off the creative process before it really has a chance to bear fruit. You have to strike a balance between generative exercises where you add to your pile of ideas and selective exercises where you choose between them—too much or too little time spent in either exercise will leave at least one of you feeling frustrated and your project underdeveloped. Where that balance is struck will depend on your individual personalities and your team dynamic—remember to watch for the signs of an effective process. If you’re developing a story you’re both happy with and you both feel comfortable doing it, then you’re hitting the right balance.
What to Plan Remember as you brainstorm that anything you don’t plan upfront as a team will by default be decided by each of you individually as you write. This can be a good thing—if we include word choice there are hundreds of thousands of decisions being made on any given project, and unless it becomes an issue in revision, you probably don’t want to spend your precious partnership time debating the use of the word chasm versus ravine every time you need to talk about a big gap in the ground. Decisions that granular are best left to whoever is doing the drafting (or subsequently revision) of a particular passage. But there are a few basic things you want to make sure to cover before either of you begin to write, so that the work you do as you draft matches the work your partner contributes.
Here are a few topics you want to cover before you begin to write, to be sure you and your partner are on the same page.
Genre Because genre will inform tone, style, voice, character, point of view, and virtually every other choice you might make, it’s good to decide together upfront where your book would be shelved in the bookstore. After all, how will you know what is a good or bad idea if you don’t know if you’re writing a romantic comedy or an alien invasion? Deciding on genre and subgenre in advance will help you bring your two minds with different ideas into sync with each other. Make sure you are both familiar with your genre, and if one of you isn’t, that partner will need to read some good examples as part of the pre-writing process to get themselves up to speed.
When I wrote The Bollywood Lovers’ Club with James Goldberg, James assigned me a lot of Bollywood movies to watch, since I’d never seen one, and they played a big part in the novel’s plot. In return, I assigned James a bunch of young adult novels to read, because it wasn’t his principle genre. The research we each did helped us form a shared vision of where our book would fit in the genre, and how it would interact with the culture in which it was situated.
Tone, Voice and Style Especially if this is your first collaboration together and the first work being written in this setting, you’re going to need to decide on a tone and a voice. We’ll talk more about different ways to divide the work in our chapter on drafting, but let me say this here: even if you’re going to each do half of the drafting and be working on chapters at the same time, it might be helpful for one of you to write one chapter before the other starts writing, so that you both have something to aim for in terms of tone. (We’ll talk more about how to match tone when we discuss drafting in chapter sixteen as well.)
Another way to homogenize tone is to agree on a comp title, or a book written by another author that fits the style that you’re both trying to achieve. If one of you is trying to be James Joyce while the other is trying to be James Patterson, you’re going to have a problem, but if you both know what the general goal is, you stand a much better chance of striking similar tones from the beginning.
Your goal of tone and style must be within reach for each of you—if one partner writes incredibly flowery prose and the other writes sparsely, one of you will need to tone it down while the other will need to step it up so you can meet in the middle in a place that’s a good tonal fit for both of you. All writers have a range, and all writers can learn new skills, but no good will come of one writer trying constantly to match a voice that is terribly unnatural for them. Choose something that is comfortable for both of you, and the product will be cleaner and the process smoother.
Point of View Who is your point of view character, and from what perspective will they tell the story? You need to sit down and have a conversation about whether you’re writing in first person or third, and how close the point of view is going to be. This may seem obvious, but sometimes the obvious things are the easiest to overlook. When James and I first started drafting The Bollywood Lovers’ Club, we each claimed one of the first two chapters, went our separate ways to write them, and then emailed them to each other and set up a meeting to go over notes.
It wasn’t until we read each other’s chapters that we discovered one of us had written in third person and the other in first. Our first conversation about each other’s work was about which we actually wanted to use, and whose chapter needed to be rewritten to match.
Character and Conflict For fiction, you’ll need to decide who your characters will be, and what arcs they will have over the course of your story. You’ll also need to settle on a core conflict. Even if you’re going to discovery write aspects of your story, it will probably be good to have decided “we are writing a science fiction novel about an alien invasion” upfront, rather than trying to wing every single aspect of the story.
In pre-writing, I tend to focus on the protagonists, and sometimes forget to spend the time making sure my story has a good antagonist (or antagonistic force) who complicates the story in interesting ways. Taking the time as a partnership to define what the antagonistic forces in your story are and in what ways they will work against the protagonist will go a long way toward making sure your book has clear stakes and a coherent conflict.
Setting and Worldbuilding If you are writing in a contemporary setting, you’ll want to establish where the book takes place. If one of you knows much more about the setting you’ve chosen, you’ll be able to rely on that partner to fill in the gaps and add details.
If your book takes place in a historical setting, you’ll need to agree on sources of research. Either you’ll both need to read sources and establish familiarity with your setting, or one partner will need to be designated the period expert and go over the other partner’s work, filling in the gaps, correcting errors, and adding details. Regardless, at least one of you will need to already have or develop expertise in your historical period in advance as part of the pre-writing.
If your story takes place on another world entirely, you have a lot more coordinating to do. You’ll need to look at the worldbuilding together, agreeing about what is possible and what is not possible, fleshing out what the world looks like. You’ll want to go over details like economy and ecology, magic system (if any), technology level and culture. It will be impossible to iron out every detail in advance without developing worldbuilder’s disease (the tendency of fantasy writers to build forever and never finish a draft). Some continuity will inevitably have to be fixed in post, but you’ll want to fill out a basic sketch so that you each have some familiarity with the setting you’re working in, as that setting will inform your characters, plot, and conflict.
Organizing an Outline Once you’ve generated ideas and have a pretty good idea of the shape of the major parts of your book, it’s time to congeal your ideas into an outline.
The outlining process will vary some depending on the type of partnership. In some tiered partnerships, you may be handed an outline of the project that your senior partner has already written. You may or may not be asked for feedback on that outline, and the amount of leeway you’re granted to change the outline may also vary. In those cases, it’s good to get clarity on how much freedom you have to vary from the outline before you begin to write. Are you allowed to take the plot in a different direction? Are there places that you can change the plot as long as you hit certain benchmarks? Knowing this ahead of time might save you a lot of rewriting down the line if it turns out you have less freedom than you thought.
In other tiered partnerships, the junior partner might be the only one writing the outline. That outline might need to be submitted to your senior partner for approval, or for feedback. In this case, you’ll have a lot more freedom to shape the story, but you’ll also be responsible for a lot more of the outlining work!
In an equal partnership, you’ll need to hammer out the outline together. Sometimes its helpful for one partner to synthesize your brainstorming into a rough outline ahead of time to streamline the process. Other partners may prefer to sit down together to begin putting the pieces together into a plot. You can use any plot structure guideline as a basis for your outline—I’m partial to the beat sheet from Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat, but you can use virtually any plotting paradigm that works for both of you.
Your outline can be as simple as a list of scenes and what you plan for them to accomplish; the purpose of the outline is for you both to know what each chapter is going to entail so that as you draft your part, you’re not duplicating or contradicting your partner’s work. (Some duplication and contradiction is of course inevitable, but by agreeing to an outline in advance, you can minimize the problem.)
Pre-writing can be one of the most exciting parts of the storytelling process. The ideas are shiny and new and full of possibility, and you haven’t yet hit the snarls of drafting or the tangles of revision. For collaborations, it can also be stressful—this is one of the parts of the process where you will need to work most closely together, and if there are problems in your communication, those may begin to show.
When disagreements arise, remember the fundamental principles of co-authorship—abandoning ego, showing respect, and communicating actively—to work through the disagreements and find ideas that you’re both excited to write. Taking your time in this phase will pay off later when it’s time to put those ideas into action.
Remember that as you move on to the drafting stages, you will inevitably find parts of your project that still need more development. The beautiful thing about brainstorming is that you can return to it at every stage of development: as you draft, as you revise, and as you polish your final work—to help solve problems and refine your book. The skills you build together as you pre-write your first project will be the foundation of all your communication as you move on to those other steps, so don’t be afraid to take your time, refine your process, and of course, take time to enjoy the ride.
Now that we’ve gotten all the principles out of the way, we can move on to the fun part: the business of actually writing. Now that we’re prepared to balance work respectfully and communicate effectively, it is, at long last, time to start writing! In this section, we will discuss many strategies and techniques to work together as a team. Chances are that some of these strategies will work for you and some won’t. That’s okay! As with all writing processes and writing advice, some tools with mesh better with your individual and team writing styles than others.
So, here you are. You haven’t even begun your book and you’re already encountering your first negotiation. It’s time to pull out your mutual respect and communication skills, and figure out what your pre-writing process will be. If you are in a tiered partnership with a prolific co-writer, your partner may already have an idea of how they’d like things to go. Depending on the rigidity of the situation, you may have to adapt to their process more than you would in an equal partnership. Everyone else will need to do some negotiating and experimenting to figure out the best writing process for their team.
Be Flexible and Try New Things As you begin, it’s important that you both be open to trying new things. Writing a book together is not the same as writing one on your own—the truth is, neither of you know what will work for you yet, because you haven’t written a book together. It’s possible that things you’ve tried in the past and disliked will work much better with a partner. It’s possible that your tried-and-true writing strategies won’t work at all when you try them as a team. You don’t know until you try, so you’re going to need to do some experimentation. This book will give you lots of suggestions; choose the ones you like, confer with your partner about which are exciting to them, and then do some writing and see what works for you.
Flexibility is of the most important attributes of a collaboration partner when it comes to writing process. Much like when we left our ego at the door, we need to leave behind all of our preconceived notions about the right and wrong way to write a book. It’s always a dangerous thing to codify your writing process to the point of inflexibility. If this is what you always do and it’s the only way you can write a book, what are you going to do if that particular method fails? You’re either going to quit or you’re going to discover that your immutable process maybe wasn’t so immutable after all. You’re going to discover your own adaptability.
Both you and your co-author come to collaboration with some already established habits and processes. Every experienced writer will have developed their own way to write books, and this may change and vary over time as skills develop and life circumstances change. Regardless, you each have a process, and those processes are likely to be different from each other. Maybe one of you is a confirmed “pantser,” or discovery writer, (a term for writers who plan very little and instead fly by the seat of their pants and discover the story as they go) while the other is a die hard “plotter,” or a writer who outlines extensively before they begin.
These labels are helpful when you use them to describe processes that are beneficial to you as you work. They are less helpful when you let them limit you. Just because you are a “pantser” does not mean you are deathly allergic to all outlining activities and will have some kind of anaphylactic reaction if you sit down and put some ideas on paper before you begin to draft. Just because you’ve been a plotter in the past doesn’t mean that you couldn’t benefit from some exploratory early writing, or let your partner write through a couple unoutlined chapters to see if they can solve a tough plotting problem.
The good thing about all writing tools is that they are each just one tool in the toolbox. You may own and prefer a miter saw, but if your friend has a table saw handy, some jobs may be easier if you let them lead for a minute with their preferred tool.
How Do I Know If It’s Working? For our purposes, we’ll designate a process as working when it both yields words consistently of a quality you’re happy with and leaves both partners feeling good about the process. This means that if a process makes one of you happy and yields words, but drives the other person nuts, it is not a working process for your team. Both partners must be happy with both the product and the process for that process to be called a success. This also means if a process makes both of you really happy but doesn’t produce a product of quality, that’s not a good process either, as it isn’t getting you any closer to your writing goals.
It’s worth noting that the quality of the product needs to be judged according to the stage—you wouldn’t want to declare a process useless because it didn’t produce a publishable first draft! Almost no one produces a publishable first draft—most works need substantial revision. But if your process doesn’t produce a first draft that is ready to go on to revisions, then you have a problem. If your pre-writing process doesn’t produce ideas that you can use to begin shaping a book, you likewise have a problem. And, of course, if either of you is unhappy with the way the work is going, you also have a problem. It’s important that both partners treat this as a problem: just because you are happy doesn’t mean that you should argue that your partner should be happy. In a partnership, we have to make the comfort of our partner a priority, just as much as we prioritize our own.
Here is another cardinal rule of collaboration: if one of you is unhappy, something needs to change. The happy partner can talk all day long about why they’re happy, but if it doesn’t solve the problem for the other partner, both partners still have an unsolved problem and need to proceed accordingly.
Process vs Product Another thing to consider when you run into challenges is whether the issue you’re encountering is a process problem or a product problem.
All books will have issues that need to be ironed out in revision. If a chapter came out poorly, it’s possible that one or both of you have some kind of process problem—the pre-writing or outlining was not sufficient, the drafting schedule is onerous, the communication between the two of you isn’t going well and it’s showing in the work. It’s also entirely possible you have none of those problems, and the chapter just turned out poorly because chapters do that sometimes. You have a product problem only, but your process is working fine and you just need to keep at it. If you have a process problem, you’ll want to communicate and adjust the process so both of you can turn out quality work and be happy about it. If you have a product problem, you’ll want to sit down (when it’s time to revise) and look at what’s wrong with the work and make plans to revise it into something that will be a better fit. (More on that in the chapter about revision.)
But try not to make the mistake of treating a process problem as a product problem, or vice versa. Most writers will write poorly if the process isn’t going well. Most writers will also turn out work that isn’t great even if the process is going well. You’ll need to diagnose what you’re dealing with first, and then apply a solution, because trying to change up your process to make sure chapters are always perfect is unnecessary (and won’t work). Likewise, trying to fix the product when the process is the problem will leave the real problem undiagnosed and continuing to fester. In general, it’s good to check in with each other periodically and make sure the process is working for both of you—and be open to making adjustments as necessary to keep things running smoothly for both of you.
The purpose of this book is to help you make your partnership work, but it must be said that in some cases, it won’t. We’ve discussed some of the red flags that might signal a need to end the partnership, but let’s take a hard look at some signs it might be time to give up.
Communication Fails, Over and Over Again One communication failure isn’t necessarily a harbinger of the end, but if you’ve tried all your best communication practices (and even some new ones!) on multiple occasions and your partner still doesn’t seem to hear you or take your ideas into account, your partnership may not be reparable. In my experience, communication breakdowns are the single biggest problem that partnerships face, and if you can’t communicate with your partner in a consistent, respectful manner that gets everyone’s ideas heard and integrated, then it’s possible what you have is a terminal case of partnership mismatch. It’s worth giving it some time, though, and really working at it to see if the communication barriers can be overcome. If everyone is willing to work on the problem, change is possible, but if one party isn’t, it may be in your best interest to move on.
Lack of Commitment Repeat after me: I cannot make my partner write.
You cannot make your partner do anything, but you definitely cannot make them prioritize your collaborative work, meet their deadlines, produce words, or follow through with their other commitments to you.
There are a lot of reasons why people don’t write when they mean to. What sometimes gets mysticized as “writer’s block” is actually a diverse set of very real problems. Maybe your co-writer is struggling with anxiety or depression. Maybe they are chronically overscheduled or mismanaging their time. Maybe they take on too much because they have a hard time saying no. Maybe they suffer from crippling self doubt. Maybe they have health concerns that are getting in their way of functioning at their best.
You can absolutely empathize with this. You can slow down and work at your partner’s pace. You can put a project on hold (even for years!) until they are in better place to contribute. You can even occasionally do a job that was supposed to be theirs because life happens and it’s good partnership practice to help each other out.
But when you’re bailing your partner out more often than not, or when your best efforts to accommodate their writing speed have still not resulted in them keeping their commitments, it’s time to admit that you can’t carry the project on your own. If you wanted to carry a project entirely on your own, you would be writing a single author book!
It’s okay to admit to yourself that your partner isn’t committed enough to the project (even for entirely understandable reasons!) and give yourself permission to cut your losses and move on to other things. It doesn’t make you or them a terrible person—it simply means that the project didn’t work out, and that’s okay.
You Want Different Things It’s possible that, over the course of your partnership, you’ll discover that you have wildly different goals. If one of you only wants a hobby co-writing fan fiction and the other wants to be the next Stephen King, you’re going to have a very hard time agreeing on even the simplest of decisions. How could you agree when you’re both trying to take the project in different directions?
Not ever writer needs to have career ambitions, and not every collaborative project needs to be professionally published. But it is important that you both agree about where you want to go with the project, if you want to continue to write more books together, if the project is going to be a series, and how it will make its way out into the world, if it does so at all.
If you’ve communicated clearly about those goals, and they still don’t match, that’s okay! It doesn’t make one of you better than the other, but it does mean that, unless you can agree on some common goals for this project that meet both of your needs, continuing with your project might be a bad idea.
You Heart Is No Longer In It We’ve talked about the ways your co-writer might disappoint you, but sometimes you might be the one who no longer has room for this project in your life. Your life and career situations may have changed since the project began, or you may simply have run out of enthusiasm. If you’ve moved on in spirit, it may be tempting to ghost your partner or to string them along because you don’t want to disappoint them.
You will only prolong the disappointment by dragging things out. Be honest with yourself and your partner; if you know you’re no longer able to collaborate on the project, say so upfront and begin to dissolve the partnership. As the least interested party, you can be generous about the terms of your departure. While you will no longer be able to contribute, you should consider whether you’re willing to give your partner permission to continue with the project on their own, and what rights, credit and compensation you would be willing to waive if they choose to do so. Don’t offer anything you’ll resent in the long run, and make sure to get everything in writing, but if you’re already checked out of your collaboration, do your partner a favor and make it official.
Your Partner is Abusive Last but certainly not least, if you’ve discovered that your partner has taken a lack of mutual respect to the extreme, or if you’re unable to establish mutual respect after repeated tries, or if their communication toward you continues to be hurtful despite your best efforts to communicate why it is a problem, then you should leave that partnership for your own well-being. There is no payoff in the world that is worth the cost of your mental health. Some people come off as harsh or critical but can learn to change their ways when their mistakes are pointed out to them, but other people bolster their own self-image or control their own anxieties by tearing others down, and the latter is not someone you ever want to work with.
The Sunk Cost Fallacy One huge barrier to leaving is the sunk cost fallacy. “I’ve put so much into this project and this partnership,” you tell yourself, “so I can’t give up now!” The trouble with sunk cost is that, while you can stay and continue to dump more time, energy, and work into the project, the ship just keeps sinking. And each time your use this reasoning to keep yourself stuck there, you add more and more to the pile of irretrievable losses. As the wisdom goes, don’t be committed to a mistake just because you spent a long time making it. It’s okay to cut your losses and move on. There will be other projects, other books, even other collaboration partners. It’s not worth tying your boat to a sinking ship. You can cut your line and row away, and while it might hurt to do it, it’s better than going down with the ship.
I don’t want to underestimate how much this can hurt. It’s gut-wrenching to look at years of work that you poured your heart and soul into and have to accept that it’s done, it’s over, that you will never be able to write another single word of your future plans in that series, that hundreds of thousands of words you have put your blood, sweat, and tears into will never see the light of day. It sucks. It hurts. But trying to work in a truly untenable environment hurts more, so sometimes, even in the worst of all possible situations, you have to find a way to let go.
Looking to the Future Once you’ve decided you need to end a partnership and walk away from a collaboration, much of what happens next will depend on your contract. This is one reason it’s so important to have one; your partner may be amenable to calmly discussing a division of assets in a way that benefits you both once the partnership is dissolved, but you can’t count on it.
Hopefully you have a contract that tells you who controls the IP and what will happen with money and credit. If you are in control of the IP and your contract is clear about that, you may be able to go on and write more books in that setting, with those characters, or even finish that book on your own so long as you meet your obligations to give your co-writer credit and compensation as previously agreed. If you don’t control the IP, you’ll have to reconcile yourself to the idea that you may have to let go of that world and say goodbye to those characters. You can kindly ask your partner how they would feel about giving you the rights to the IP, but the answer will vary based on the circumstances and on your partner’s inclinations.
If they do agree to let you move forward with the project or another project in that world without them, be sure to get this in writing in the form of a contract addendum. The addendum should note that this contract supersedes the terms of the previous contract, and it should make it crystal clear what you are allowed to do with the work, and what credit and compensation your partner is due, if any. You may want to get a lawyer to look at this contract—it’s never a bad idea to do with any contract, but it’s especially useful in cases where you are moving forward with assets that might be contested later, and you want to make sure you don’t find yourself facing a lawsuit on shaky legal ground.
If your relationship with your partner has deteriorated to the point that you can’t negotiate with them over your partnership assets, and your contract doesn’t protect you in the way you would like it to, the only thing you can do is walk away. Unless you are already wildly successful, it’s very unlikely it would be worth fighting over in court, on either a monetary or emotional level. For goodness’s sake, don’t infringe on your partner’s rights by continuing ahead with the project unless you have the clear rights to do so—doing that would only open you up to legal repercussions in the future, and is a terrible way to treat a partner.
People with whom our relationships have deteriorated are still people, and they still deserve our respect, just as everyone does. Take the high road; in all of your interactions, be sure to continue to follow the principles of healthy communication. Even if you can’t have what you want, you will still be better off being the bigger person and conducting yourself with professionalism and respect even if your partner behaves otherwise, no matter how tempting it might be to strike back with threats or bad behavior of your own.
Instead, find yourself a new project. Renew your creative momentum with new stories. Find something to work on, something to be excited about. You may never be able to feel good about the way the partnership ended, but you don’t have to dwell on it forever or let it destroy the future of your own career.
Not all books get finished, much as we might want them to. There will be other books to write and other stories to tell. One of the best thing about writing books is that there is always another idea to develop, another set of characters to meet, another world to explore. Pick yourself up and jump into something new. You’ll make something beautiful as you rise from the ashes of what you left behind.
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.
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.
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