Co-Authoring
Posted under: Remember that scene from The Lion King, with the three hyenas?
“Mufasa”
*shiver* “Ooh…Say it again”
“Mufasa, Mufasa, Mufasa!”
That same feeling of gleeful horror, of delicious dread, should come over any professional author, editor, reader, or agent who hears the word “Co-Author”.
What Is Co-Authoring?
First off, what is co-authoring? The definition ranges wildly. In some cases, one of the authors did little more than offer their monicker to the outside cover. In some cases, authors trade off chapters (such as the much beloved Sorcery and Cecelia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot, which is a series of letters between two characters). Sometimes the authors work together very closely, crafting each sentence as a team. It can also flail randomly between these three points.
In all cases, however, co-authoring means that a book is attributed to more than one person.
Why is Co-Authoring Scary?
Co-authoring is scary to agents because what if they only represent one of the authors? Agents get a cut of book sales to publishing houses – how do you finagle the legal hassels of having two agents for two seperate authors?
Co-authoring is scary for editors because let’s face it – trying to convince a single panicked “parent” to change or edit their “darling novel” is difficult enough. Adding in another ego and set of neurosis that needs to be soothed in order to make a change is a nightmare.
Co-authoring is scary for readers because, let’s face it, most writers have a very distinct “voice” when they write. Finding two authors who can meshthose distinctive voices into a single cohesive whole is incredibly rare. Have you ever read a co-authored book, and halfway through, you could pick out the scenes that were written by the different authors? Did you ever find yourself skimming past one of the authors in order to hurry to the one who writes the way you prefer? (As an interesting side note, people will often say they can tell the difference, and point to scenes that…well…were written by the same person. This is a dangerous trap for co-authored books, as readers will sometimes read two names on the cover and spend more time ferreting out who wrote what than just enjoying the story.)
Co-authoring is scary to authors for a ton of reasons, all of which are magnified if you’re actually co-authoring with a friend or loved one.
Why is Co-Authoring Scary for Authors?
That may seem like a bit of an oxymoron – writing with other people is fun, right?
Yes, but there are a lot of hidden dangers with collaborative novels. You have to decide ahead of time how you split the “ownership” of the book you write. And the world you write. And the concepts and characters that you write.
You need to decide ahead of time who is going to do what work for the book. A collaboration takes a LOT more effort than solo-writing a book, as every idea, every genious plan, every inspiration needs to not only be okay to you – it needs to be okay to the other person as well. If you wake up at 2am in a cold sweat, thrilled with the realization that you need to take Jack Stillwater and his rescued Amazonian princess in an unexpected submarine trip around the world, but the original plan was to have them rapel down the inside of Dr. Dastardly’s volcano hideout…and then your collaborator doesn’t agree with the change, what do you do?
You get frustrated. You get angry. You get upset.
What do you do when your collaborator all of the sudden can’t make the time committment to keep writing? When you agreed that you’d write a chapter a month, but you’re looking at month three and you’re not even halfway through chapter 2?
You get frustrated. You get angry. You get upset.
What do you do when your collaborator pops in with this great side project they’ve been writing, in which your beloved Jack Stillwater gives up his profession as an adventurer and not-quite-alcoholic womanizer in order to become a professional clown and work children’s parties?
You commit murder and the cops find you dancing naked around a fire, tossing pages of the offending manuscript into its flaming maw.
All of these situations are bad. All of them are (at least in spirit) plausible. All of them are much, much worse when you’re dealing with someone you love, because you don’t want to hurt their feelings (or kill them).
And then, of course, there’s the fact that authors don’t make a ton of money in the first place (publishing dynamos aside) – cut that profit in half for a co-authored book. That’s right. It takes almost twice the effort to produce a co-authored book, and yet the book rarely sells almost twice as many copies as a single-authored book. Profit is the same overall, but split between two people.
So…why Co-Author?
I make it sound horrid, don’t I? I mean, who would want to co-author anything after all of that?!
I’ll tell you why.
It’s joyous.
It is. It really is. You can share this thing – writing – that you absolutely love with someone else who absolutely loves it.
It’s uplifting in a way that is hard to find. Working together for a common goal, building something that you know is stronger than what you could build alone. The companionship, the shared effort and the shared fun…it’s intoxicating.
You have to know the pitfalls to avoid them, and you can’t go into a collaboration with your eyes closed, or you’ll end up slamming your face into a wall you didn’t even realize existed.
But if you can find someone that not only loves writing as much as you do, loves the same kind of writing that you do, AND whose writing meshes powerfully with your own…
…well, there’s no drug in the world that can possibly compare.
I can’t help but be reminded of the story of the two college students assigned to write a story together, and her parts are about enjoying a nice cup of tea while his are about space aliens blowing up the planet.
@Michael
*laughs* co-authoring is dangerous, dangerous business. Although I must admit, the contrast of the tea and the alien bits could make for a very interesting short story!