22 | The Writer • January 2020
The business side of collaboration
While coauthors may be friends or critique part-
ners first, it’s not enough to hash out plot points
and hope the business side works itself out. “At
the end of the day, it’s a creative collaboration,
but it’s also a business collaboration,” Megan
Lacera says.
Even if you’re writing with your spouse, she
recommends discussing possible scenarios like if
an agent only wants to represent one of you or
wants to use a different illustrator. Both were
deal-breakers for the Laceras, who eventually
signed with an agent interested in representing
their joint and individual projects. “It was impor-
tant to us that they got our whole thing,” Jorge
Lacera says.
Tara Luebbe, who coauthors picture books
including Ronan the Librarian with her sister,
Becky Cattie, says her family was concerned
about in-fighting between them, but so far that
hasn’t happened. “We haven’t had enough
money to worry about it,” Luebbe says. She and
Cattie share a literary agent who represents their
joint projects. “When we queried, we made it
clear that we would be one team and would not
be submitting separate projects,” Luebbe says.
“Our agent treats us like one client. Becky is
CC’ed [on emails].”
However, many coauthors who’ve published
their own books have separate agents. Shovan
and Faruqi’s respective agents signed an agree-
ment between themselves in addition to the con-
tract the two authors signed. “It was important to
set up the expectation early on that any commu-
nication was going to go four ways [between the
two authors and two agents],” Shovan says.
“Nobody would be left out of a thread.”
Faruqi points out that you’re not only working
with your editor, agent, and coauthor but also
your coauthor’s agent if it’s a different agent. “An
author and their agent hopefully have a really
great relationship, but you don’t know anything
about my agent,” she says. “You have to work with
that additional person, too.”
When Asselin coauthored middle grade novel
The Art of the Swap with Malone, they agreed that
“the most important thing for us is that we made
sure our friendship was the most important
piece,” according to Asselin. They didn’t want to
fight about the book and cause a rift in their
friendship, but “I think our friendship made the
collaboration even stronger,” Asselin says. “Neither of us
wanted to let the other down.”
Asselin and Malone wrote the first few chapters in
between other projects and managed to land a book con-
tract based on those first few chapters. “At that point, we
had to get serious,” Asselin says. “It took us about 10 months
at that point to get [our editor] something more complete.”
Asselin and Malone’s names appear in the book in alpha-
betical order by last name, which is fairly common in kidlit
collaborations. “I do know other people and, if one is a very
established author, that name might be listed first,” Malone
adds. For instance, many of bestselling author Jane Yolen’s
book collaborations list her name first, even though her last
name falls at the end of the alphabet.Planning
Collaborative books can take more planning than a solo
project to ensure that everyone gets on the same page. For
Best. Night. Ever., Malone and her coauthors discussed ideas
on a Google hangout. “You’d come to the table with what
character you’d like to write and what their conflict might
be,” she says. “There were some that were too similar, but
other people had three or four ideas, so we traded.” Then
they used lots of notecards to figure out how the characters’
stories would intersect.
Plotters (authors who like to plan out the story and work
from an outline) and pantsers (authors who write without
an outline “by the seat of their pants”) do sometimes collab-
orate. Shovan also considers herself a pantser, so she’d never
written from an outline. But Faruqi insisted on outlining the
plot before writing a draft. “I would be pushing Laura,”
Faruqi says. “‘No, we can’t just come up with things on the
fly.’ I think it would have been much more difficult.”
Rosenberg and Shang live near each other, so they
hashed out some ideas during walks. “I’m definitely a pant-
ser,” Rosenberg says. “I’ve actually tried to write a few things
with outlines, and they haven’t always worked out. If I know
where it goes, the actual writing itself isn’t quite as compel-
ling. When we were working together, we did not work with
an outline, but we had a vague idea of our destination.”Writing and revising
Many middle grade and YA fiction collaborations use chap-
ters told from different characters’ points of view as a way to
divide up the writing. That’s how Best. Night. Ever. was writ-
ten. “If any issues arose in terms of storyline or not agreeing,
there were enough of us and an odd number where we
could take it to committee and majority ruled,” Malone says.
“In general, we more or less deferred to ‘if it’s your character
and your chapter, your opinion counts more than mine. You
have more ownership over your character and her actions.’”