Why Collaboration Can Be Dangerous for Writers (and How to Do It Well)

People traditionally see writing as a “lonely” art where we put words to the page by ourselves in a corner somewhere, but many authors work together all the time — we use collaboration just like most professionals do. Many staff writers collaborate every day, particularly in news journalism.

But for us, collaboration isn’t just about the ability to grow/stretch, be more creative, or achieve more by merging different types of talents — it’s genuinely become a matter of basic survival. Especially now when algorithms make visibility harder to achieve, working with someone else is a competitive strategy that allows each writer to take advantage of the audience the other writers on the project already have. Tactics like blog tours, coauthoring books, or even being a guest on author podcasts are normalized.

Everybody wants to work quickly and be more competitive these days. But in this video, I explain why collaboration is especially dangerous for writers, given the economics and timeframe of writing, and how too many voices ultimately can distort the clarity and effectiveness of the work.

[Transcript summary]

In the business world, we usually think of collaboration as being this really positive thing, and it does have benefits. You can get a lot of different viewpoints that help you to innovate.

But when it comes to writing projects, you really have to be careful how many proverbial cooks you put in the kitchen. Because in my experience, what happens is, people want to be nice to each other. So, as you get all of these ideas swirling around, your draft ends up ballooning, and it becomes really hard to get it trimmed back down again. Because then what you end up is, too, is — you don’t want to hurt people’s feelings by taking their material out. So, it becomes this conflict. So, that’s one thing.

The other thing is, timeframe for books. Most people now are saying, to make it profitable in terms of income, you have to be producing a book, something crazy, like 12 to 18 months every single time. So, if you are taking all of this time to get all these things sorted out, that’s gonna make it’s almost impossible to get that happening. When — by the time you edit and then you go through formatting, it’s just almost impossible.

So, my advice? Just keep it simple. You can have collaborators, but when push comes to shove, just have a couple people, just one or two people who are making the final decisions about what that final draft is going to be. Keep your collaboration minimal where you can. Take care. Bye.