1) She's a woman and I don't know if our spouses would be bothered by us working closely together, like perhaps spending time at each other's homes, etc. (not necessarily dragging the whole family along because...that sort of defeats the purpose).
This one’s all on you. You could check in with your spouse, but presumably she’s already seen you guys talking about writing. Ideally she already understands this is a professional relationship, not a personal one.
If your spouse is like mine, she’ll be secretly relieved that I have all of these writing friends to nerd out with so that my spouse doesn’t have to do it with me as much. Now that I think about it, I was the only guy involved in the book with my co-author. Our publisher, two editors, graphic artist, and foreign-rights agent are all women.
I thought this collaboration was going to be a discussion about using Google Docs. Is there any reason for you guys to spend time physically together, let alone in each others’ homes? You might get a lot more writing done individually if you weren’t commuting somewhere and hosting each other. It also avoids the coordination issue if one of you is a morning writer and the other prefers writing at night.
2) The possibility of losing my friend as a friend. So many things could go wrong. We'd have to iron out a lot of details. And eventually the collaboration would end, as all things do (perhaps I'm a bit fatalistic about things like this, considering the end before it's even started). I would hate to lose her as a friend. We vibe really well, we have similar creative energies, and she's in a similar life situation (with kiddos, etc). I'm nervous that if one of us views ourselves as doing more of the work, or dragging the other along, etc., the friendship would be damaged.
You could ask your co-author if this book will wreck your friendship, and then share your respective feelings about it. That’s more of a venting session than a problem-solving discussion.
You’re seeing the downsides of collaboration. What about the upsides? Why does it have to end?
You’re presumably going to collaborate on the audiobook edition, even if it’s just a foreword in your voices. You’re both going to market the book, ideally for years. What if it’s a hot seller, optioned for movies & TV serials, and the first of a series?
Look at the writing partnership between Lee Goldberg and Janet Evanovich. They’ve collaborated on a half-dozen books but they also work with other authors and still publish their own.
3) Just collaborating in general. I can imagine how hard it is to get on the exact same page (pun so intended!) with another person to where you feel each is bringing something to the table that you can't bring yourself. Otherwise, why collaborate? What is one of us works faster than the other? What if one of us wants to take a story in a direction the other just can't get behind?
Any thoughts? Anyone been in a similar situation?
My (adult) daughter and I wrote a non-fiction personal finance book in 2018-2020. It’s my second book and her first. Because we dislike deadlines, we wrote the manuscript first and then sought an editor & publisher.
I’ll share a few paragraphs on what we did and then add the lessons learned.
We started with a messy outline about the money tactics that we parents used with her, and then we wrote our perspectives from the parent & child sides. (Carol’s part included her reactions as both a child and later as an adult & parent.) We framed it as “stories around the kitchen table.” Everything went great when we were writing the manuscript-- even though she had more to write about, I was struggling to keep up with her.
Once we finished the manuscript and started developmental editing, I turned out to be a lot better at writing front matter & back matter (especially bibliographies and appendices). She did more work on her parts of the manuscript than I did on mine, while I did the front & back parts on my own.
Our developmental editor had a very negative reaction to our format. She wanted a unified voice and warned that we were giving up our authority (?!?) by sharing family stories instead of advising families on The Way To Do This. Our research and our reader polls gave us the confidence to push back for our two-voice format. The editor grudgingly went along and was probably even more... diligent... on the editing.
Our biggest challenge was being too close to the stories. We frequently told some of the other person’s story from our perspective instead of letting each of us tell all of our part from our perspective. We were too close to the project to notice it until the editor pointed it out (with entire paragraphs dripping in redlines). Once it was evident, we had no trouble carving apart the paragraphs and returning them to the right author.
Most of it was minor edits, although we had to hack one entire chapter into tiny little pieces and rebuild it. We talked out all of that in Google Docs comments and took turns working on it before we tossed it back to the editor.
I had the author/publishing experience (and maybe the credibility). I set up the stories (what parents want), while she had the most interesting parts (what kids really think). Because of this dynamic, I tried really hard to avoid going full “I’m an author” on her, and I generally followed her lead on the initiatives. She felt more comfortable sharing because I avoided critiquing. It’s a good thing I did, because Carol resonates much more strongly with parents of young kids than I do.
I never touched a single word she wrote. (I let the editor do that.) If she touched any of mine, I never noticed.
I turned out to react much better to editorial commentary. (I was as hotheaded at her age as she is, but I’ve had 30 more years to mellow out.) Carol and I would usually discuss what the editor had done, and then I’d handle the response.
We wrote the publisher’s contract for all the money to go to Carol. She’s in a lower income-tax bracket (so far) and I didn’t need the money. It turned out to be much easier to handle the paperwork with one author instead of two.
Here’s some lessons and topics to discuss between co-authors (and maybe spouses):
- Do you guys want to pick a lead author, especially since you’re in a new genre? Are you the experienced author trying something new with a junior partner, or are you helping to light the torch of a rising star? Or are both of you pulling equally in harness together?
- Which one of you is going to be more popular with this book? You with your experience, or her with her existing readers in her genre? This discussion between you is more important than a decision.
- Traditional publisher, hybrid, or self-publishing? You guys have done this before, so you could figure out that part now and think about who you’d like to hire.
- Do you want to pitch a publisher now, or write the manuscript first and then start the editing & publishing? This could help you handle the deadlines better, either by being free of them or by being under the editor’s deadline gun.
- Write at about the same pace, or carve up the assignments to match your individual writing speeds. If one of you writes faster then that person should probably tackle the longer/harder parts.
- Set a regular meeting time between yourselves (online or in person) for 30-60 minutes to review progress and the next steps. Maybe it’s weekly or biweekly. (The Y Combinator accelerator holds Tuesday dinner gatherings of the startups in their cohort, and the staff invites a guest mentor to talk about the glamorous founder life. It turned out that although the cohort’s founders appreciated the mentoring, they were much more motivated to have a progress report ready to share among their peers on Tuesday night.)
- Choose your perspective early in the format. First person? Third person? Will you both write about the same character or will you each write a character’s thoughts & experiences in your own voices?
- Since you’re writing as a team, here’s an idea. John Scalzi wrote an entire novel about a protagonist named “Chris.” He did it entirely in gender-neutral terms, and by the end of the book you still couldn’t tell whether Chris was male or female. Most readers assumed a gender at the start and never noticed the ambivalence.
- Are you using images in the book, and will this screw up the eBook or the audiobook format?
- Will you follow your published book with a graphic-novel comic format?
- C’mon, get an editor. You want unbiased opinions from a third party so that you two authors can sort out the solutions. If nothing else, it’ll unite you two authors against a common authority figure.
- How does the reader follow along in your story? (Hopefully you have a big beta-reader group.) Does each chapter alternate between characters or between scenes?
- Don’t edit the other person’s writing. (Don’t even fix grammar or spelling.) Share your questions & concerns and leave it to the other to make their changes.
- How are you doing the marketing? Are you starting a podcast together, or recording videos together, or guesting on other shows? Will you attend a convention together for your genre?
- Are you recording the audiobook in your voices or using voiceover artists?
- Who’s running the website and the social media? Or do you both promote the book on your own sites & channels?
- I’m assuming that you’re splitting the expenses and the royalties evenly. But I might be mistaken.
- How are you splitting other rights, like foreign-language translations and movie options?
