Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 61

The Business of Writing: Executive

7. Executive - This has to do with strategic planning and overseeing everything else.

 For writers, the Executive area means keeping an eye on all the other categories to make sure nothing is left out and everything stays in balance (which can be quite a trick for a one-person business). This is also where long-range forward planning goes, which is a whole set of choices that usually get lumped under "managing your writing career."

Exactly what is an Executive decision and what falls into one of the other areas of business is a slippery thing to determine - and generally unnecessary, as well. As long as you decide whether to let the publisher have e-book rights or whether to hang on to them and published the e-books yourself, it doesn't matter whether you call it Operations, Finance, or Executive. The important thing is that the decision gets made.

Larger decisions fall squarely within the Executive category, especially those "managing your career" decisions. There are a lot more options than many would-be writers think of, ranging from basic and fairly obvious decisions (self-publish or traditional publishing? Large, regional, small, or micro-press? E-books or paper? Short stories or novels?), to things that affect specific areas like Finance (go for the highest possible advance, or trade high advances for a better royalty rate, or even a royalties-only deal?) or Publicity (focus mainly on online, or offline? Push early and often, or wait until there are more books to push?), to career development (strictly original fiction, or work-for-hire? Under your name, a pseudonym, or multiple pseudonyms? In one genre or several? Working with other writers, packagers, etc., working solo, or some combination as opportunities arise?).

All these decisions can and do get revisited periodically, and sometimes they change as circumstances change. You may decide initially that you're going to stick strictly to novels, and five years later unexpectedly get asked to participate in a prestigious short-story anthology with some of the most prominent writers in your field. You might still end up turning the opportunity down, but I guarantee you'll want to think really hard about it first.

This is also where I'd put managing the backlist, which is a key element in making a living for any writer who's been at it for a while. Your backlist is all of your older titles; it of course includes the stuff that's out of print, but it also includes stuff that's been in print for a couple of years, and maybe even some of those "trunk stories" that never sold at all. Older titles can be resold to new publishers once they go out of print; if you and/or your agent put some elbow grease into it, subrights like audiobooks and foreign translations can provide a surprising amount of income. And then there are e-books and print-on-demand, which have opened up a lot of options for the backlist…but again, you need to put some effort into getting things out there and maintaining them.

One of the most important aspects of the Executive area is keeping everything else in balance - making sure that Publicity isn't taking over the time that needs to be spend on production/Operations, that the Finance and Administration paperwork is kept up to date, that Sales is covering the backlist as well as the current work, etc. This is especially tricky because in writing, all of this stuff comes in waves: Finance is pretty dead for most of the year, bar an hour or two a month for record-keeping, but it suddenly becomes a critical activity in April when taxes are due. Quality Control has a big surge right before a new book comes out (with the copyedit and galleys to go over); Publicity and Marketing usually have their surge right after. And so on.  So you can't assign X hours per week to each area, week in and week out. You have to put a lot of hours into whatever is "hot" at the moment, while keeping an eye out to make sure the stuff that isn't currently swamping you gets enough attention that it won't blow up into some other kind of crisis.

Long-range planning is a major component of the Executive area. What do you want your eventual writing career to look like? Some writers make as much or more from giving workshops, speaking engagements, writer-in-residence gigs, and teaching as they do from the books they write; others make their money cranking out titles in multiple genres under multiple pseudonyms; still others work in multiple areas, writing screenplays or comics or RPG scenarios as well as short stories and novels; some stick to one much-loved series or set of characters; and so on.

There isn't a one-size-fits-all way of managing your career, because there are many different possible goals and many different paths to reaching each one. Also, no two writers I know have ever been faced with the exact same set of opportunities and challenges coming out of the blue, nor have they made the exact same set of choices when faced with similar opportunities.

In the past thirty years, I've accepted or turned down various opportunities ranging from editing anthologies, to writing a work-for-hire, to helping a friend launch a small press, to teaching classes in writing, to writing a book specifically for a packager or a new line being developed by a friend/editor. Sometimes, my friends and colleagues thought I was crazy to take the risk I took; sometimes, they thought I was crazy for not taking advantage of whatever it was. At present, I don't regret any of the choices I've made; I think that's because I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do in the long run, and where I wanted to end up and why (if not always how to get there).

Another major component of the Executive area is keeping an eye on what the market is doing, and educating yourself about what it has done in the past and what possible directions it may be going in the future. Over my career, there's been a major, market-changing event about every ten years - the Thor Power Tool tax decision in the 1980s, the collapse of the independent distributors in the 1990s, the explosion in e-books in the 2000s. Some were predictable; some weren't - but all of them affected the way I handle my business (whether that means the kind of publicity I do, the way my agent negotiates various contract provisions, or which publishers I put at the top of my "I want them to publish my books" list).

Almost done; next is the summary, or Putting It All Together.

The Business of Writing: Public Relations

Before we get to today's post, I wanted to mention two things: first, some time in the next month I'm going to be changing servers. In an ideal world, this will be completely unnoticeable to all the readers of my blog and web page, but how often does everything actually go that smoothly? So if you have difficulty getting  in at some point, that'll be why. Second, I just uploaded added a couple of map pages to the Frontier Magic section of the web page, for anyone who's interested in where things are.

6. Public Relations - This has to do with the relationship between a business and the public in general - both the business' current customers and all of the rest of the people who aren't customers now but who may or may not become so at some future point.

Public Relations is subtly different from Marketing, in that PR is about the business as a whole, while Marketing is about one specific product. Obviously, there's a lot of overlap, because both of them involve the way customers and potential customers see the business.

Full disclosure: Public Relations/Publicity is probably my least favorite aspect of running a business, right up there with Sales and Marketing. So if you're looking for good tips and tricks, this is not the best place for them. This is just a basic overview; if you want to get really into this stuff, find somebody who's a natural and/or who really likes it, and ask them for advice.

For writers, PR is a lot more personal than it is for most businesses. The closest thing a writer has to a brand name is their own name on the book cover; this means that "self-promotion" (which many people are uncomfortable with, and which some other folks frown upon as "showing off" or "not being about the books") happens to some extent, whether one wants it to or not.

Being aware of this is half the battle, because PR becomes more and more relevant the more books one has out, the larger one's readership, and the longer one writes - and until they invent practical time-travel, you can't go back and fix any minor mistakes you made early in your career that snowballed into large problems as time went on.

For the un- and newly-published, PR is usually indistinguishable from Marketing. When you only have one or two books out, everything you do in public tends to be targeted at selling those titles, and larger implications seldom get considered. Also, when one only has one book out, one doesn't usually get invited to do the sorts of things that would fall under general PR as opposed to marketing a specific book. This gives the writer a chance to ease into the PR stuff, attending conventions as a pro and getting used to doing panels before having to worry about being Guest of Honor at a Worldcon or giving TV interviews on one of the major networks (unless of course your first book is a mega-hit bestseller, in which case you'd better learn fast. We should all have such problems.)

As with Sales and Marketing, there are two levels to consider when you're thinking about PR - professional (that is, the reputation/relationship the writer has with editors, agents, reviewers, other writers, and other industry professionals), and the general reputation that one has with fans and readers-at-large. There's a lot of overlap, of course, but sometimes it's useful to stop and consider for a moment. Dressing up in a clown suit and walking the streets wearing a billboard advertising your new book may get you some attention from local readers, but perhaps you'd be better off coming up with a PR gimmick that looks a little more professional from the editor/agent/etc. point of view.

A lot of early PR is basic courtesy and common sense: when you're out in public, don't be obnoxious; don't insult people; don't demand to be treated like a star; find the right balance between talking about your new book all the time and never mentioning it at all. "Out in public" most definitely includes Facebook, Twitter, blogs, comments on other people's blogs, and any other Internet venues, even if they're supposedly locked or private. This is especially important because the Internet is so very public - whatever you say can be easily seen by publishers, critics, agents, major authors, and important book buyers, none of whom, thirty years back, would have been likely to have much contact with a newbie author. It's a lot easier to shoot yourself in the foot nowadays.

There are writers who've made a point of creating an obnoxious public persona for themselves and succeeded anyway, but there aren't many. If you are considering something like this, you need to bear in mind that the way you present yourself in public, right from the start, will be with you for the rest of your writing career. If you get tired of acting that way, or decide that it isn't serving you well, it'll take an enormous amount of time and effort to change perceptions of you. There are possibly apocryphal tales of authors who had to change their names and start over because they couldn't stand the public persona they'd constructed, but couldn't persuade people to see them any other way. It's much easier to be yourself.

You can, of course, go whole hog on the marketing/publicity for your early books - hitting the convention circuit hard, coming up with ways to get you (and your books) talked about on social media, throwing big book bashes in unusual places for potential readers, etc. The problems with this are a) it takes a lot of time and energy, b) it takes money (in varying amounts, but very little of it is totally free), and c) if you don't know what you are doing, or don't have the personality/experience for it, this kind of thing can backfire horribly. Some writers are naturals at this kind of thing - I've know five or six of them - but for those who aren't, it's usually better to start small and learn it gradually, rather than jumping in with both feet and ending up with two muddy shoes stuck in your mouth.

As a writer's career develops and her audience expands, the scope of Public Relations gets larger. Rightly or wrongly, people associate writers closely with their books and assume that if they like/dislike the author, they will like/dislike the books (and vice versa). When making a positive impression may affect the sales of twenty titles, it's a lot more important than if one only has two books out. The kinds of things you get asked to do (or that you can persuade people to let you get in on) get gradually larger and more significant - instead of a talk to the six English and Language Arts teachers at your local high school, you're giving a talk to three hundred librarians from every school in your state, or to the the 50 folks who make major buying decisions for all the schools in their state.

Some writers (me included) find being "on" in public very tiring; other writers find it energizing. If you're one of the latter, you may need to remind yourself periodically that PR is not a line function, and you need to apply that energy to Operations. If you're one of the former, you need to know that actively doing publicity is not obligatory. You can become a writing hermit who is never seen in public - but that, too, is a publicity choice. In other words, you can minimize this area, but you can't get away from it entirely.

Next up: Executive

The Business of Writing: Administration

5. Administration - This is the overall organization of people and processes, including everything from office management to the human resources department.

 For writers, Administration covers most of the day-to-day tasks of making and tracking submissions, answering mail, returning email and phone calls, filing, organizing manuscripts, maintaining the web site and blog, and so on. This is where the famous Secretary Hat goes - the job of logging submissions and rejections and then getting the manuscript back in the mail.

Administration, like Finance, is often considered dull, unglamorous, and downright boring. It generally involves a lot of paperwork and organization, which puts a lot of folks off. But like Finance, Administration is something no business can do without. The most obvious part is the aforementioned getting the manuscript in the mail - as I've said before, editors do not do house-to-house searches for publishable manuscripts. If Admin doesn't get the manuscript out, the story won't get published.

There are, however, a lot more ways in which Admin is important. Keeping track of submissions, for instance - you probably don't want six novels all sitting at the same publishing house at the same time, even if it is your first choice of publisher. You certainly don't want to forget that this story was rejected by Editor A at Publisher A three years ago, and send it back as a "new" submission. You may want to keep track of which markets respond promptly and which take years, or which places have bought more (or paid more for) particular types of stories.

You also don't want to lose track of how long things have been under submission - there's a point at which you really ought to query the publishing house to find out if the ms. got lost somewhere in the process, and that point is neither six days nor six years after you mailed it off. You don't want the email from the agent or the prospective editor to sit unanswered in your "in" basket for a week. You want your files and data entry up to date in whatever system you have, so that if and when somebody asks whether you own the Portuguese language e-book rights for a story you published twenty years ago, you can look it up without spending hours and hours digging through old piles of paper, only to discover that the contract you're after seems to have vanished.

Administration can also cover a lot of miscellaneous and occasional jobs, like travel agent, monitoring and reordering office supplies, mailing out ARCs (Advanced Reading Copies), correspondence, keeping the library in order, finding research materials, keeping the web page current, scheduling and coordinating whatever meetings or interviews or events need to be scheduled and coordinated, etc.

In a large company or corporation, pretty much every department has its own Administration section, because every department has paperwork, phone calls, and organizing necessities. For writers (and any small business), Administration doesn't have such hard edges. Deciding what to write next is Operations; but is keeping track of the story notes and supporting research Administration or part of Operations? Deciding on a list of publishers to query is Marketing; but composing and printing the letters is probably Administration. Doing the taxes is Finance; filing the receipts and entering income and expenses into Quicken all year could be considered either Admin or Finance. Etc.

It isn't particularly important that this area be broken out from all the others. What is important is that the work gets done - submissions get tracked, manuscripts get mailed, contracts get filed, the web page gets maintained, e-mails and letters get answered, and so on.

However you choose to keep all the various records and processes, it is generally easiest to set up a good system right from the beginning. The longer you wait, the more likely it is that your early work will never get properly entered when you finally get around to it. The problem is that the earlier one is in one's writing career, the more all this tracking and record-keeping seems like overkill, or at the very least, over-optimism. And besides, it's boring and it takes time and it's boring and it takes energy and it's boring. Nevertheless, if you stay in the writing business, your future self will thank you for doing it all right from the start. Trust me on this one.

Administration also includes the Human Resources department. Since few writers have any actual employees, this covers stuff like dealing with one's agent, accountant, and any other professional services one has contracted for, plus whatever skills development one decides to invest in for oneself. "Skills development" here refers to anything that's going to help the business. Writing skills are one obvious area; one can work on them deliberately in lots of ways, from doing informal experimental bits and pieces to critique groups to attending a seminar or workshop to taking classes in grammar or whatever other area you may feel weak in.

There are, however, lots of other business-related skills that are good for a writer to develop. Basic financial management is a fairly obvious weak point for way too many people; checking the latest marketing and publicity techniques never hurts; website management changes so rapidly that it's certainly worth reading up on every year or so, and maybe even taking a brush-up class periodically. Publicity and Marketing are areas where writers tend to be at one extreme or the other: either they're naturals, or they're floundering. There are books and classes on all these things, frequently in Community Ed centers (which are usually cheaper and less time-intensive than college-level night school).

If you're starting to feel overwhelmed, I'm not surprised. I started feeling overwhelmed about two posts ago, and all I'm really doing here is describing, in categories and a bit more detail than usual, the stuff I have to do to make a living writing. Seeing it all laid out in print makes me realize just how much I and all the other pros I know are juggling all the time…and there are still two areas to go.

Next up: Public Relations.

The Business of Writing: Finance

4. Finance - This has to do with all the monetary aspects of a business.

The financial end of the writing business needs and deserves a lot more attention than many writers give it absent emergencies. Especially the taxes part. I've said before that editors don't do house-to-house searches …but the IRS does, and they're not nice about it, either. Finances include a lot of record-keeping, starting with the must-do stuff for the IRS. They still like paper trails, so keeping receipts and printed records of income and expenses is vital.

However, Finance for writers isn't only about keeping good records for your taxes and making your estimated tax payments on time. This is easy for a lot of writers to overlook, because writers don't need a lot of cash flow to maintain the business - paper and pens don't cost much, and once you've gotten over the initial outlay for a computer and software, you're set for years. Really, the main thing writers need money for is their own income, and most think of that as a personal thing, not a business matter.

The trouble is that if you don't pay attention to where the money is coming from - which titles and formats are selling, which publishers pay more and on time, etc. - you can easily end up missing opportunities and/or find yourself suddenly unable to pay your bills.

It is also perilously easy to live in the moment if you don't have a reality check. Publishing tends to have a much longer pipeline than most jobs, and if you aren't shoving stuff in now, you can easily run out of cash three or five years down the road and have to scramble - or start hunting for a day job - to cover day-to-day expenses. Paying attention to one's projected future income lets you know that this was the last of the advance payments, and you only have until it runs out to sell a new proposal to someone.

Expenses are another problem area. I cannot tell you how many people have said to me "But you're a writer, so that's tax deductable; why aren't you buying it?" What they don't get is that "tax deductable" does not mean "free." It means it's an offset to whatever I made; if I didn't make money (or if I've already accumulated enough expenses this year), the benefit is zero this year and maybe a loss carryforward next year…IF I make enough money next year to cover it. And you don't want to pile up too many losses in a row, or the IRS gets interested and you may lose all your business deductions for several years.

The rule of thumb I use is "If I wouldn't buy it on sale for 20% off, I shouldn't buy it just because it's tax deductable." This is a little conservative, because as a self-employed person in the US, I pay both halves of the FICA (that's Social Security tax), which adds up to 15%, and on top of that goes whatever my marginal tax rate is likely to be that year. So really, the "buy it if it's on sale" rate should be a bit more than 20% off, but I prefer being conservative. Writers in countries other than the U.S., of course, have to work out their own percentages based on their particular tax situations.

If you're self-publishing or hand-selling your own books, you have a lot more record-keeping because you'll need to track inventory (unless you're only doing e-books) and sales. I know more than one writer who's gotten caught at tax time because for some reason they thought that as long as they spent all their sales income on more inventory, it wouldn't count as income. If you are one of these, run, do not walk, to a reliable accountant and get them to explain to you what you can and cannot do and how to do it, or you will end up paying a whole lot more than you have to in taxes.

There also seems to be an unfortunate tendency for writers to underestimate how much they're going to need to live on. They overlook things like insurance and emergency funds and retirement savings when they're figuring out how much income they need to generate. But if you only include the expenses that come around weekly or monthly, and you spend your entire advance on them, you're in for a nasty surprise when the car, homeowners', or health insurance bill arrives, or when you have to spring for Christmas presents, or when the car breaks down. If you aren't making enough from writing to cover this stuff, then you need a day job, and you're far better off admitting it than pretending that the car will never break, you'll never get sick or have an accident, and that Scrooge was right about the whole "bah, humbug" thing.

Cash flow is a particular concern for most writers, because either you know how much money you're going to get (advance payments), but not when you're going to get it, or else you know pretty much when you're going to get it (semi-annual royalty payments), but not how much they're going to be. What this means is that a) you shouldn't count on having money to spend unless it's actually in the bank (I know writers who've had trouble making rent or mortgage payments because they charged a large purchase, figuring the advance would come in time to pay for it…and then the advance took another three months to arrive), and b) you need to budget what's in the bank to last for however many months it'll be until the next payment is likely to arrive. Getting a $5,000 advance check doesn't mean you can spend half of it on a new laptop if you aren't likely to get any more income for the next ten months (unless you really can live on $250/month - do the math).

An especially vital aspect of cash flow management is putting aside enough to pay the taxes. I generally dump half my incoming checks straight into the tax account (which I keep in a separate bank from my regular checking account, to make extra-sure that I'm not likely to tap it for day-to-day expenses and then end up owing the IRS hundreds or, in a good year, thousands of dollars, and being caught short). It's hard to do, but boy, does it make quarterly estimated tax payments less painful…and if I'm going to have to live on beans and rice for three months in order to make those payments, I know it right away, instead of having it come as a nasty surprise.

And then there's the other stuff: checking royalty statements, keeping track of advances and subrights sales so you can bug the publisher if the payments are taking too long, watching sales trends so you can tell which of your publicity efforts are having an effect and/or figure out when it's time to ask for new covers, a reprint, or a new push for a title (or do some of that yourself). A lot of writers consider this optional, mainly because they don't want to bother with all the record-keeping and reviewing.

I don't consider any of this optional. Especially checking royalty statements; over the years, I've found something like $5,000 worth of errors (all of which the various publishers corrected promptly and without argument when they were pointed out). And the unexplained discrepancy that looked at first glance as if I owed the publisher $300 turned out to be a more complicated error that meant they actually owed me $1,000, so yes, I report everything I find, whether it looks as if it's good for me or for them. Computerization has eliminated errors in addition and subtraction, but it has resulted in a lot more data entry problems, so the checking still needs to be done.

Keeping good records allows you to know how your business is doing financially - and quite often why, which can give you an idea what to do about it. It also provides essential input into lots of decisions, from whether to attend a bookstore event/autographing, to whether to change publishers or agents, to which of two equally tempting ideas might be better to work on next.

Note that I didn't imply that all of these decisions should be made strictly on financial grounds. You may be well aware that the autographing at a local bookstore will take three hours (what with driving time), and you're only likely to sell two hardcovers to folks who wouldn't have bought them anyway (meaning you're working for around $1.30 per hour, less gas money), so financially it'd be a dead loss. But you may want to do it anyway, for the publicity, for contact with your fans/readers, for goodwill with the bookstore and its employees (who may be more willing to hand-sell your book once they've met you), or just because you get such a lift out of doing this kind of thing that you always come home and write six times as much for the next three days.

On the other hand, if you're paying $300 to fly to another city for a similar autographing, the expense is so much greater than any goodwill generated that it's probably not worth doing. On the third hand, if you're going to be in some other town anyway, it may well be worth the good publicity to set up a couple of local autographings or unpaid library appearances (especially if you can do enough of them to justify deducting some of the travel expenses).

Crunching the numbers is something many would-be writers think of as boring and uninteresting, but it is surprising how fascinating all those figures can be when it's your book, your sales, and your money.

Next: Administration

The Business of Writing: Quality Control

3. Quality Control. This is where products and processes are tested for defects.

For all writers, Quality Control obviously includes all of the editing and revision parts of the job; for the self-published, it includes packaging details as well - everything from design (page layout, font/typeface, cover design) to things like the choice of paper and cover materials.

QC isn't considered a line function, most places, because it doesn't directly generate sales, but it's still a vital support function. Even if one's overall business strategy is to produce vast quantities of minimum-quality stuff, sell them cheap, and make money on volume, there's still a point below which customers just won't buy. This is as true of writing as it is of any other field.

A surprising number of beginners think they can neglect quality control at some level - most often, the line I hear is that "it's the editor's job to fix my grammar, spelling, and punctuation." What these folks are forgetting is that editors are their customers too. And as I said, all customers demand a minimum quality level in the manuscripts they buy.

That minimum applies to every aspect of the manuscript, from formatting and mechanics (grammar, etc.) to the more subjective aspects like "is it a good read?" The format and mechanics stuff is easy enough to find out about - check the publishing house's submission guidelines and/or ask your editor, or get a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style. Fixing the mechanics, on the other hand, can be a long and tedious process, depending on the exact problem (if you don't know what a comma splice is, for instance, you're going to have a fairly hard time finding them, let alone fixing them).

This is one of the reasons why so many writers recommend learning grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc. really thoroughly, until getting it right is unconscious and effortless. It will save you enormous time and effort in the long run. If you haven't a clue about grammar, you can try finding a tame English major who is willing to go over your ms., trade proofreading with a writer friend, or in a pinch you can hire your own copy-editor. Hiring one's own copyeditor is relatively expensive, and not recommended unless you are self-publishing, in which case it's part of the production costs that a traditional publisher would handle for you.

Many writers spend most of their QC time and effort on the subjective aspects of the story, which is fine as long as they're reasonably sure that the format-and-mechanics part doesn't need attention. The subjective aspects are what most revisions are about, and they're also where first-readers and critique groups come in. Since "is it a good read?" is a subjective question, it's generally a good idea to get other eyes on the manuscript at some point to double-check that what the writer thinks is "a good read" is coming out as "a good read" for other people, too - and for many writers, getting those other eyes early in the process is better than later. Those who don't possess a temperament that allows for taking critique/comments from others have to work much harder to compensate for the lack of alternate opinions.

In pretty much all cases, Quality Control is a matter for more than one set of eyes. By this I mean that if you try to do it all yourself, you are highly likely to miss things, whether they're dangling participles or stylistic problems. The author does get to decide whether or not to take the advice of others to heart, but it is a really good idea to a) find someone to ask for help and b) think really, really hard about rejecting that help once it's been given.

Quality control is something that can (and probably should) be applied at every stage of the production process, so long as it doesn't interfere with production. For writers, that means that any early brainstorming sessions, redrafting and rearranging chapters, major structural fixes, etc. are just as important as critique groups and final polish - and that editorial revisions requests also count. The trick here is to remember that quality control is not a line function; production is. That means that if the quality control part (also known as the Internal Editor) is getting in the way of production, QC gets pulled back and put off until later, after the production part has been done but before the product goes out to potential customers (i.e., editors).

It is also common for writers to place too much emphasis on quality control - to demand perfection (or at least a much higher standard of work) than is necessary or desirable. Perfection is not achievable; it is certainly not achievable in one's very first story or novel. As long as you do your best, you can't expect more than that. This time. If you finish something and aren't satisfied - and I know very few writers who are - spend some of your between-books time working on your skills in whatever ways you find useful. After all, QC also includes making sure the production people are capable of doing the jobs they've been assigned.

Oddly enough, in writing, quality has very little to do with the absolute speed of production. Every writer has a speed that can be considered "too fast" - i.e., if they write that rapidly, the quality of their work suffers - but how fast is "too fast" varies wildly. I know writers for whom one book every two years is "too fast," and others for whom a book in two weeks works fine, but twelve days is just too short a time period. It depends on the writer…and sometimes on the story. This means you have to be hard-nosed about looking at the actual quality of whatever you've produced, and not get distracted by how fast or slow you produced it. Sometimes, this means not telling your crit group that you wrote the last six chapters in two days until after they've made their comments.

In addition to the editing and revising parts of the writing job, QC also includes less obvious things like motivation, confidence, getting enough sleep and exercise, working at one's writing skills, eating properly, taking a break now and then - all things that make a surprisingly large difference in the overall quality of one's writing output.

Exercise, food, breaks, and sleep are particularly important because they are things that aren't clearly part of the production process and that sometimes seem as if they're actively interfering with it. If you neglect them, however, both the quality and the quantity of your production tends to drop like a rock. This is also an area where you cannot make comparisons with other writers. Everyone has different biochemistry, and the fact that Joe Pro can get by on two hours of sleep a night, four gallons of coffee, and a diet composed exclusively of Twinkies and still crank out high quality prose doesn't mean you can. Be realistic about what you need, and then make sure you get it.

Next: Finance.

The Business of Writing: Sales and Marketing

2. Sales and marketing. Sales is defined as "the act of selling a product in return for money or other compensation." Marketing is the strategy that the business uses to get to the sales part.

 Sales and marketing is generally considered the second of the two line functions in business, because it generates income directly. The Sales part is pretty obvious: you give someone something - a proposal, a manuscript, a book or e-book - and they give you money. The Marketing part is all the various research, techniques, and strategies that you use to get the sales.

Sales, for writers, splits into two categories: licensing and direct, or selling-to-editors vs. selling-to-readers. Early on, in the traditional publishing industry, it's all about licensing. The writer sells (licenses) his/her work to a publisher/editor, who handles the actual production of the physical book, as well as a lot of the things that come under Quality Control. Selling to an editor involves the grunt work of sending the manuscript out over and over until you get an offer, followed by the contract negotiations over exactly what rights and subrights the author is licensing to the publisher. Eventually, most of us get an agent to handle this part, but that doesn't mean it goes away entirely. The author still has to OK the deal, and then review and sign the contract, and there's often a lot of networking on the author's part that goes into getting the offer in the first place.

If you're self-publishing, the whole licensing area drops out (except possibly for subrights); instead, you have expanded the Operations area and vastly expanded the Marketing and Publicity areas, in order to do all the things a traditional publisher would do.

Either way, direct sales-to-readers don't come into the picture until there's an actual physical book available to sell. For the traditional publishing industry, the publisher handles the vast majority of selling-to-readers, too, but there are at least some genre writers who generate direct sales themselves, at personal appearances or by setting up their own sales tables at conventions and book fairs. Usually, this kind of direct marketing-to-readers works best if one is in a genre such as SF (which has lots of conventions) or children's/YA (school and library book fairs). For the self-published, there's all of that plus the getting-the-book-into-bookstores part, which takes considerable time, effort, and persuasive ability.

Direct sales are also something that one has to watch closely. While it can be very satisfying to talk to readers and watch them buy your books, you have to sell at least one hardcover or two to three paperbacks per hour just in order to make minimum wage for the time you're spending at the table. Add the same numbers for every hour you spend getting to the convention, hauling books in and out, setting up and tearing down, collecting and paying sales tax, and for most writers, it's just not cost-effective. (I'm assuming here that the writer bought the books wholesale from the publisher at the standard author discount rates.)

For ebook publication, there's nowhere near as much time and effort involved in distribution and direct sales; you sign up with the big e-retailers, put a link on your web site/blog, and you're pretty much set. On the sales and distribution part, anyway.

Which brings me to the marketing half of Sales and Marketing.

There are two basic types of marketing: push marketing, in which one tries to get the book prominently displayed in as many places as possible, so as to encourage potential readers who pass by to pick up the book and buy it, and pull marketing, in which one tries to get a lot of potential readers to go to bookstores and ask for the book, "pulling" it into the store. Most of the marketing publishers do has traditionally been push marketing to bookstores and wholesalers. Authors do both: push marketing to editors and pull marketing to readers.

Like Sales, Marketing splits into two parts: marketing a manuscript to editors/publishers/agents, and marketing the book to readers. For writers who don't yet have an agent, marketing a manuscript basically means doing a bunch of research to find out which publishers/editors/agents are most likely to be interested in their particular book, and then polishing their query letter/proposal. Those of us who have agents are not exempt from this; there are always questions of strategy that only the writer can decide. Would a collectors edition be feasible, or is it too early in the writer's career for anyone to be interested? Is it better to do a free podcast now, as a promotion, or try to sell audiobook rights later? Will that high-profile work-for-hire generate enough visibility to be worth the lost time working on one's own original series?

This part of marketing can also include choosing new products, which for writers means picking what to write next. Depending on your overall strategy for your writing career (see upcoming post on the Executive area), that might mean working out what's "hot" in the current market, drumming up a work-for-hire contract, or settling down to whatever one is most longing to work on next. Whichever route you've chosen, it will require some thought.

The second part of Marketing - promoting books directly to readers - is where most writers focus their efforts once a book comes out, and it will eat your life (and every bit of cash you make on the books) if you let it. There are horror stories about writers who wrote their first book, and then had their careers collapse because they spent three to five years after it came out doing nothing but promotions and answering fan mail.

Direct promotion covers everything from autographings to "author loot" (like bookmarks) to special web site promotions to conventions to book launch parties. Most of the time, the author foots the bill for this themselves, and it can be quite high, especially for those determined to "do everything possible to make the book a success." They'd usually be better off thinking for a few minutes about how much bang they're getting for their bucks, and then choosing only those promotional events/items that make for the largest explosions. Figuring out what's best to do is as important as actually doing it.

Promoting a book directly to readers is absolutely vital for the self-published, but it's more and more necessary even for those of us who are published by traditional publishers. In-house publicity departments are run ragged, and publishers expect their authors to step up and fill in the gap. The catch is that doing the wrong thing can blow you right out of the water…and it's not always obvious what "the wrong thing" is. Even experienced professional publicists mess up now and again.

Marketing a manuscript to editors means doing the research to find out if the book you have written fits their line. There is no point in sending a fluffy romantic comedy to a publisher that only does gritty action-adventure-thrillers, or a science fiction thriller to an academic press that only prints textbooks. Editor marketing also means not cornering the editor at her cousin's wedding, his sister's bat mitzvah, or their son's college graduation party and handing them a copy of the ms. along with a demand that they look at it. (I am not making these examples up, only changing names and relationships to protect the innocent.) This is not networking; it's obnoxious, highly unprofessional, and pretty much guaranteed not to work anyway.

Marketing a book to readers is a lot harder, because the market for fiction is so huge and diverse. Again, market research - but this time, look at what other writers are doing to promote their books, what other publishers are doing, and what's being done for completely different entertainment products. Talk to readers and bookstore clerks about what they like/don't like to see happen. Talk to your fellow pros and find out what they're doing and not doing, and what they think has worked and what hasn't. Then consider your own time, energy, and abilities, and do some brainstorming.

The most difficult part of marketing a book to readers is getting attention in more than your local community. An ad in the church bulletin usually isn't costly, but it also doesn't reach a lot of people. Bookmarks passed out to local bookstores may raise awareness in your city or town, but they don't do much for the rest of your state, let alone the rest of the country. The Internet and social media have made it possible to reach people all over the world, of course, but doing so effectively takes a lot of time. If you're self-e-publishing, you're pretty much committed to it, though.

Next: Quality Control

The Business of Writing: Operations

1. Operations - This includes primarily production, but also design, development, and fulfillment.

The business of writing starts with Operations, the first, largest, and most important of the line function areas. It includes all of the aspects of production/manufacturing, but also such necessary elements as purchasing, order fulfillment, research, development, design, and fulfillment.

For writers, production means actually writing the first draft and delivering it to an editor. This is the one area of the seven that changes least, no matter what stage of your career you're at. Whether you're new at this or a veteran of twenty years and thirty published novels, you still have to produce new work.

Production is often hard to get your arms around, because it doesn't have a lot of individual tasks that are clear and obvious and that build up to the end, like "buy envelopes," "address envelopes," "stuff envelopes," and "mail out query letters." "Write a page" and "write another page" don't provide quite the same sense of direction, especially when you aren't really sure how many pages there are going to be. Yet production is vital, because it's the thing on which everything else depends. If you don't produce a first draft, all the way through to the end, then Sales and Marketing has nothing to sell, Quality Control has nothing to edit, Finance has no income to track, and so on.

Since writing a novel takes a fairly long time for most of us, Production is where the majority of writers really need to spend the majority of their time. Breaking it up into one-half to two-hour chunks seems to work best for most of us, as the mental machinery tends to wear out after a few hours for a lot of us (yes, I know people who can sit down and write for 10-15 hours per day, but I'm not one of them, I don't know many of them, and unless you have already demonstrated your own ability to do this and have lots of 10-15 hour chunks of time available to do it in, you're probably better off not counting on being able to pull this off.)

An additional difficulty comes from the fact that, for writers, producing a manuscript is not something that can be done by the numbers. Every writer's process is a little different (or a lot different) from that of every other writer. Not only do we not do things the same way, we don't all do them in the same order. Parts of the process that one writer considers essential turn out to be things that another writer doesn't do at all. It can end up just being easier to ignore the whole question.

Which is fine, as long as the production part actually happens, and doesn't just get thought about or talked to death or outlined without actual progress. Some people write mainly by instinct, and as long as they produce pages and get all the way to the end of their stories, they don't have to think particularly deeply about their particular production methods. Others of us (raises hand) are more analytical, and need to break things down into parts and then examine them in hopes of improving the process (or at least, of having some idea what to do when things break down entirely).

For those who self-publish, production also includes producing the actual books (whether that means printing and hand-binding them in the basement, hiring a vanity press or print-on-demand place to produce the copies, or putting together a cover picture and formatting the files for an e-book). And let's not forget inventory management, for those who opt for the traditional basement-full-of-books (whether self-published or purchased from publisher stock).

Operations also includes research and development, though R&D is sometimes broken out as an eighth important area. "Research" here means the stuff one has to do in order to make the story work; market research comes under "sales and marketing," which I'll talk about next post. Operations research includes finding out what kinds of clothes people wore in the 13th century, or doing the calculations to figure out how to make two orbiting spaceships collide, or looking up what species of spiders live in the South African jungle where your protagonist's plane is about to crash. Research is why writers who've been around for a while have huge libraries of nonfiction with titles like "Practical Blacksmithing," "Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army," "The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue," "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds," "Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany," and "Rats, Lice, and History," to pick a few random titles from my own shelves. (The book on logistics is a thin volume that provides, in the footnotes, the equations for how much various pack animals can carry in the way of supplies and therefore how many of them you need to support an army of various sizes, and how long the army can travel without needing to stop and resupply. "Rats, Lice, and History" contains my all-time favorite footnote: "If the reader does not know the meaning of this word, it is too bad." [The word in question is saphrophyte.])

Writers are all intellectual pack-rats, absorbing and squirreling away all sorts of interesting nuggets of information to use later. But stockpiling all the random items that come along is rarely enough to make a book work as well as it could. Even if one is inventing the entire background, history, and all of the ecology, there are going to be things that one is better off looking up than trying to make up, if only so that they'll hang together or be reasonably plausible.

"Development and design" covers any prewriting that happens between getting the idea and sitting down to write the first scene. For a lot of writers, developing ideas is a seamless part of the whole writing process. For others, brainstorming, fitting things together, and outlining in advance of actually sitting down to write are an absolute necessity. Again, this is a place where each writer has to look at his/her own process and honestly evaluate what is working and what isn't, and then go for what is working, even if it is annoying and not at all the way one would like to be working.

Purchasing and order fulfillment are relatively minor matters for writers. Once you have a computer and software, you don't really need another one for the next book; notebooks and pens aren't horribly expensive or difficult to come by, and there really isn't much else a writer needs to have to write. Similarly, sending a finished book off to the publisher is usually not an everyday occurrence, nor is it particularly complicated: you check whether the editor wants hard copy or electronic, then send whichever it is off.

Next up: Sales & Marketing.

The Business of Writing: Introduction

I have never met a would-be writer who has a business plan.

OK, I haven't met many professional writers who have a formal business plan, either. Nevertheless, every last professional writer I know, of whatever genre, pays a great deal of attention to the business of writing, one way or another. Unfortunately, for most writers, on-the-job training is all they ever get when it comes to the business end of things (quite a few don't even want that much, and reality tends to be a nasty shock for them, because if you are writing and selling your stories, or hope to do so, you're running a business whether you like it or not).

I'm lucky. I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs who talked business over dinner…and pretty much anywhere else they happened to be. I enjoy reading business books and magazines; I enjoy talking business (except when my Dad and my brother start going off into engineering specifications). I loved getting my M. B. A., and I really enjoyed being an accountant and financial analyst before I quit my day job twenty-five years ago to write full time. I just liked writing more…plus, I knew even then that as a full-time writer, I'd get plenty of chances to do business-type stuff, while as an accountant, I probably wouldn't get a lot of opportunities to write about dragons.

Back in business school, I learned the standard model for business organization, but I don't believe I've ever seen it applied to writing. So I've decided to do that now. There are seven basic areas, and I'm going to do one post per area after this overview, and maybe a summing-up afterward, so if this is something you're totally uninterested in, you can skip the next four weeks' worth of posts (though if you are hoping to get professionally published at all, let alone make a living at this, I'd really recommend at least skimming the posts and thinking about what-all I'm going to say).

The seven basic areas that every business has to cover, one way or another, are:

1. Operations - This includes primarily production, but also design, development, and fulfillment. For writers, that's everything from having the idea to delivering the first draft: research, developing/prewriting, notes and outlining, and, of course, actually writing the book and shipping it off to the editor.

2. Sales and marketing - Sales is defined as "the act of selling a product in return for money or other compensation." For writers, sales can be split into direct (selling a book directly to the reader) and indirect (licensing production to a publisher, who produces and sells the book directly to readers). Marketing is the strategy that a business uses to get to the sales part.

3. Quality control - This is where products and processes are tested for defects. For writers, this obviously includes all of the editing and revision parts of the job, but it also includes less obvious things like motivation, confidence, and getting enough sleep.

4. Finance - All the monetary aspects of a business. For writers, this used to break down primarily into managing cash flow, recordkeeping, and tax preparation, but it's rapidly getting more complex as new options arise in the other areas, which need to be balanced and evaluated.

5. Administration - The overall organization of people and processes, including everything from office management to the human resources department. For writers, it covers the day-to-day tasks of making and tracking submissions, filing, etc., but also things like skills development.

6. Public Relations - This has to do with the relationship between a business and the public in general - both the business' current customers and all of the rest of the people who aren't customers now but who may or may not become so at some future point. Writers usually lump it in with sales and marketing, but it's much more general.

7. Executive - This has to do with strategic planning and with overseeing everything else; for writers, that means keeping an eye on all the other categories to make sure nothing is left out and everything stays in balance (which can be quite a trick for a one-person business). This is also where long-range forward planning goes, as well as a whole set of choices that get lumped under "managing your writing career."

Generally speaking, the first two areas (Operations and Sales & Marketing) are considered "line" functions, because they are the things that bring in the money. Everything else is a "staff" function, that is, tasks that support the money-making side of the business, but that don't directly generate income. Staff functions are necessary (just try running a business without paying taxes!), but the fundamental difference between jobs that directly generate income and jobs that don't remains.

Juggling all this stuff is especially complicated for writers, because we're trying to do most/all of it ourselves. Yes, the editor, agent, accountant/tax-preparer, publicist, and housecleaner all count as help, but it is very rare for a writer to be able to hand the whole of any of these seven job areas off to any of these support people - and it's rarer still for a writer to be able to afford even one full-time employee. Also, even when one is just getting started it is common for more than one of these areas to be active at the same time. Once one is fully launched into a writing career, they're pretty much all going on constantly, and not in any particularly logical order, either.

The kinds of things writers need to do in each area, and the degree of importance of each, varies somewhat depending on what stage the writer's career is at, too. Unpublished and just-published writers will have to put more of their Administration time into setting up tracking systems for the long haul, for instance, whereas a midlist writer might be spending that time networking and practicing writing skills and a bestselling author might be keeping an eye on foreign editions and making travel arrangements for publicity gigs. It's all still Administration, though.

I could probably natter on about each of these areas for pages and pages at a time, but for now I'm keeping this to one post per topic. That means I'll talk mainly about the general kinds of things involved in each area, rather than a specific set of how-to recommendations, but one has to start somewhere.

Next post, the first line function: Operations.

Collaborating, Part 2

One of the great things about collaborating is that if you pick the right collaborator (and the right method), you can write until you get to a sticky spot, then hand it off to your collaborator and let them deal with it. In most cases, what is sticky for you will not be sticky for your collaborator (and vice versa), which minimizes "stuck time."

Another big advantage is that whatever you've just written has an immediate audience - your collaborator - who is just as excited about the material as you are. There is nothing quite so motivating as wanting to show off for someone you know is going to giggle and squeak and gasp in all the right places.

If you're considering collaborating with someone, there are a number of things to remember:

1) If both of you don't feel as if you're doing 80% of the work, something's probably off. If you're the sort of person who's going to track time, effort, and word count in some misguided attempt to make sure each of you contributes the same amount to the project, you are probably not well-suited to collaborating, and if feeling as if you're doing 80% of the work is going to make you grumpy, you probably shouldn't try it, either. Collaborations are not usually twice as much work as a solo novel, but they do involved more total work than a single-author book. This means that if you divide the total work of a collaboration in half, each author will be doing less work than if they wrote a solo book, but not 50% less. If you're not prepared to feel as if you're doing more than your share (and unwilling to recognize that your collaborator also feels this way, and that both of you are, in fact, doing more than you expected), you may wreck the project, and possibly the friendship.

2) Collaborations are a meshing of two different processes, as well as two different writing styles. A number of the folks I know who have done successful collaborations do not work the same way on their collaborations as they do on their solo stuff. Sometimes, both writers end up with a sort of half-and-half compromise style of working that they can both live with; sometimes they do it one person's way rather than the other's; and sometimes, the collaboration gets done in a way that neither person uses when writing on their own. Be prepared to be flexible.

When you're collaborating, you have to be willing to adapt to your collaborator (and vice versa) in terms of working methods, as well as stuff like plot and characters. If one writer normally works in huge bursts of activity with long fallow gaps between, and the other is a three-pages-a-day plodder, they may want to think twice about a collaboration method that means they have to switch off every time a scene, chapter, or POV character changes. If one writer is a "can't talk about it in advance" sort and the other isn't, you'll have to experiment to figure out whether the one who usually can talk isn't allowed to do it at all (which can kill the project if they're a must-talk sort of writer), or whether the two of you can talk to each other but not to anyone else, or whether the must-talk writer can talk to anyone but their collaborator.

3) The whole point of a collaboration is that it's something both of you are doing. I've known several promising collaborations that collapsed because one of the writers got so invested in his/her characters or plot twists that they absolutely refused to let the other writer change or invent anything. In a collaboration, no matter how much you love a character, plot twist, idea, style, chapter, prologue, background detail, etc., you are not the one in charge. You can argue, beg, plead, whine, and blackmail to get your collaborator to agree to take the story where you want it to go, but in the end, you both have to agree. There's no point in winning the argument if it results in your collaborator being totally blocked because they just don't think it would happen that way. If you can't agree, you may need to take your lovely shiny plot/character/idea/whatever and turn it into your own solo book.

4) Collaborations are jointly owned. This means that unless you have a written agreement that spells out contingencies, each of you owns half the project, and neither of you can legally do anything with it (or with the characters, setting, elements of background, etc.) without the other's permission. Much of the time, this is not important…but when it does become important, it is absolutely vital. And if you can't manage to work out a basic agreement that says either of you can/can't write about the world/characters without the other's permission, and that if one of you dies, the other one gets full ownership/gets to make artistic and business decisions/can't touch it again, then you probably aren't going to manage a successful collaboration.

This is not about not trusting your collaborator. It's about protecting both of you. People die; they get Alzheimer's; they lose interest; they go haring off after possibly-brilliant but incompatible alternatives ("Why don't we change everything to stream-of-consciousness and make this into a pastiche of Ulysses?"). I've known several authors who've had to abandon months or even years of work because they didn't bother making a written agreement, and others who've avoided serious potential problems because they had it all spelled out in advance.

Most of the failed collaborations I've observed or been involved in have failed for artistic, rather than monetary, reasons. One writer lost interest, or discovered that they couldn't slow down/speed up to the other writer's working speed, or got so fascinated by a character or plot twist that they wanted to make it the center of the story (and in at least one case, they went off and did so, with the erstwhile collaborator's blessing). Or one writer discovered that he/she was so invested in her/his vision of the story or characters or background that he/she couldn't let the collaborator contribute or make changes.

5) Not all collaborations go to completion. Based on my experience, most of them don't. It's OK to start one that's supposed to be strictly for fun (that's how Kate and Cecy got going, after all. We didn't know it was a book until after we finished; we thought we were just having a whale of a good time.)

Which brings me to the last point: if you are not having big fun, collaborating may not be worth the aggravation. And it will be aggravating at times - when your partner is late with their next draft, when she doesn't have time to meet and work out that little plot-problem you need to settle, when he wants you to meet at an inconvenient time, when they are excited and you're feeling worn down (or vice versa). It can be fun anyway. If it isn't, it's OK to talk it over with your partner and agree to stop.

Collaborating, Part 1

People go into collaborations for different reasons…and each project, and each co-author, is a different situation. Sometimes, two or more writers collaborate because they came up with a brilliant idea in the bar at three in the morning…and next day, it still looks brilliant and fun. Sometimes, the collaboration springs out of something that began as a mutual writing exercise. Sometimes, two friends discover they're working on very similar projects and decide to share. Sometimes, one of the writers is trying to cheer up the other, or help them out of a hole. Sometimes, two writers find that they work much, much more effectively when they toss ideas back and forth between them and then dash to the computer to get something down than they do trying to crank stuff out on their own.

Similarly, there lots of different methods for collaborating. One that works well for a lot of people is "I write my characters; you write your characters," in which each writer comes up with some characters, they decide mutually on which ones will be the central viewpoints, and then they work out (in advance or as they go along) which scenes will be from which viewpoint. The writer who has that character writes the scene.

Another one is to have one viewpoint character, and switch writers at the end of every scene or chapter. I heard once that this is how Fred Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth worked, with one writer spending his chapter getting the hero into a terrible fix and leaving him on a cliffhanger, and the other writer then having to write him out of the mess. I don't know if that's true, but it would certainly explain the plot-pattern in some of their collaborations.

I've also known collaborations where one writer does one type of writing - all the dialog, say - and the other puts in all the action or the narrative. This works really really well when each writer is playing to a particularly strong point, but it requires a whole lot of trust in each other.

Yet another collaboration style is the one where one writer does the prep work and a detailed outline, the second writer comes up with a first draft, and the first writer does the rewrite and polish. This is especially common in the sort of commercial collaboration wherein a publisher matches up a new, up-and-coming writer with one who's more experienced and who has a large following, in hopes of boosting the newer writer's audience, but there are other collaborative partnerships that just naturally fall into this pattern.

And there's the one where both writers are in the same room, with one looking over the other's shoulder, switching places whenever the one at the computer gets stuck or the one watching can't stand it any more. It doesn't seem to be common (since it requires both writers to be in the same place), but I know at least one set of roommates who work this way, and I've seen several folks do this to produce short stories while at a convention.

There is no one right way to collaborate with someone; there is only what works for a given pair of collaborators. I've worked on several, and each of them was different. For the Kate and Cecy books, Caroline wrote Kate (and later Thomas), and I wrote Cecy (and later James); we didn't talk much about plot and the only editing of each other's writing we did was for typos and consistency. Because they were in letter format, we were essentially doing the "you write your characters, I'll write mine" method, plus the switch-writers/viewpoints-at-the-end-of-each-chapter method. The big advantage of working like this was that there was never any problem with the characters all sounding alike, or with one of us not really "getting" the other's characters well enough to write them from the inside.

For two other collaborations (each with a different author), we picked a viewpoint character, then one of us wrote until we got stuck (which was sometimes in mid-sentence); then we handed it off to the other person. The next writer would go over the previous writer's work, editing and making changes, then go on until they got stuck, whereupon they'd hand it back.  The editing-and-revision pass kept the viewpoint character's characterization and the overall style remarkably consistent, even though, as I said, sometimes we switched writers in mid-chapter, mid-scene, or mid-sentence.

Another collaboration I worked on involved you-write-your-characters-I'll-write-mine, but with lots and lots of joint plot-planninig and a lot more editing of each other's chapters than Caroline and I did.

In each case, I don't think the results would have been nearly as good if we hadn't worked the way we did. Trying to write Kate and Cecy with lots of plot-planning and each of us editing the other would have a) killed the books dead (Caroline is the sort of writer who cannot discuss her work in advance of writing it without killing it), and b) probably smoothed out the voice and style more than was appropriate for an epistolary novel. Trying to write a single-viewpoint collaboration without editing each other would likely have made it lumpy and inconsistent in style, voice, and quite possible stuff-that-happens (also, in both cases, there really wasn't anybody else either of us wanted to write. It was that character's story, and nobody else's).

All of the successful collaborations I'm familiar with have been ones in which both of the writers were having a tremendously good time. The Fun Quotient isn't a guarantee that the project will get finished, much less reach professional publication - I've had loads of fun working on each and every collaboration, but the three Kate and Cecy books. are the only ones that ended up published, and only one of the others made it to any sort of ending.

Since this post got awfully long, I'm splitting it into two parts. So more random thoughts about collaborating next time.