writermag.com • The Writer | 23For Can I Touch Your Hair?, Waters and Latham also used
dual perspectives, but sometimes they’d help each other when
one got stuck. “If something’s not working, I’ll say ‘Irene, take
a crack at my poem,” Waters says. “By doing that, she unlocks
something. Then I’ll rewrite her rewrite.”
Waters and Latham also had periodic conference calls
with their editor as the manuscript progressed. “We go
through word by word, line by line,” Waters says. “If some-
thing doesn’t seem right or if for some reason we omitted a
word that wasn’t on the page, [our editor] would stop us.”
Rosenberg and Shang tried writing with alternating per-
spectives but found it hard to stick to their own chapters.
They wound up using a single perspective and took turns
writing. “Somebody would start the writing and then hand
it off when they reached a stopping place,” Rosenberg says.
“Wendy started with it, and she’d pass it to me. I would edit
and insert and put some of my own spin and then move the
story forward. We wrote with a lot of overlaps.”
Luebbe says her and Cattie’s books have benefited from
both of them participating in critique groups. “We each
have critique groups in different places, so it’s interesting to
get different groups’ feedback,” she says.
Rebecca J. Gomez writes picture books on her own and
with Corey Rosen Schwartz. Their latest collaboration is Tw o
Tough Trucks. “When we begin a project, we use Google
Drive,” Gomez says. “It’s funny because usually we justOnce a collaborative book is
published, having multiple
authors to champion the
book is a big plus.
brainstorm until we like an idea. We’ll jump into a
document and say, ‘How should this story start?’
It’s back and forth. It’s hard to explain how it really
works. It’s like we’re just trying to share a brain.”
For their nonfiction book, Heavenrich and
Mihaly wrote the section on bugs together, since
they’d both been working on that topic. Then one
wrote the sections on animals and the other wrote
about plants. “I would write a chapter and send it
to Chris,” Heavenrich. “She would do some edits.
We really worked trying to make it sound like the
same person wrote it throughout. We found a
together voice.” They both live in rural areas
without fast internet connections, so they relied
on email attachments sent back and forth rather
than Google documents.Promoting
Once a collaborative book is published, having
multiple authors to champion the book is a big
plus. “Sometimes I have a hard time promoting
myself, but I believe in everything that Wendy
does,” admits Rosenberg. “One of the really nice
things of working together is I can say I’m pro-
moting her.”
Asselin and Malone have done Girl Scout
events jointly and created a teacher’s resource
guide together. They also shared the cost of book-
marks. “More often than not, school visits are
separate because we can’t be in the same place at
the same time,” Asselin says. The two both live in
Massachusetts, but about 45 minutes apart, and
they can’t always sync up their schedules.
Luebbe and Cattie take a similar divide-and-
conquer approach. “We’re in two different cities,
so that’s very helpful,” Luebbe says. “She’s got her
own set of bookstores and her SCBWI [Society of
Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators] chapter.
Having two different spheres of people is helpful.”
Gomez says she and Schwartz do online pro-
motions and giveaways jointly. While Schwartz
tends to get more school visits, Gomez promotes
their books through local independent bookstores
and social media. “When you reach your end
goal,” she says, “you have two people promoting it
and trying to make sure that it’s a success.”Susan Johnston Taylor is the author of Ride Across Time, a
fourth-grade leveled reader in graphic novel format. She’s
also written for Boys’ Life, Dramatics Magazine, and other
Viri publications for kids and adults.
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