Lean Publishing Tip of the Day: Working On A Book With Co-Authors
But writing a book with co-authors also brings many advantages, including a built-in wider network or word-of-mouth audience, more perspective, and more voices to help with marketing the book once it's published.
Writing a book with a co-author or co-authors comes with some particular challenges.
But writing a book with co-authors also brings many advantages, including a built-in wider network or word-of-mouth audience, more perspective, and more voices to help with marketing the book once it's published.
Planning Your Book's Structure
Obviously all plans are subject to change, but committing to a path forward and living within the constraints of that plan part of all successful teamwork.
With that in mind, planning your book's structure in advance is a really important part of working with other authors on the same book.
You want everyone who's writing a part of the book to know where it fits with all the other parts of the book, even if they haven't been written yet.
Taking the time to produce a shared book structure document before you start writing is a great first step to writing a book with multiple co-authors.
Planning Your Book's Writing Process
How you actually write your book with your co-authors will develop organically over time, and it's important to periodically review what's working and what's not.
Given today's tools, it's possible to actually write a book with people from around the world, even people whom you've never met!
A great example is the book Stratospheric: From Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS.
You can read about how they did it in this blog post:
Self-Publishing a Book With (Almost) Complete Strangers
Planning Your Book Marketing
Book marketing starts from the moment you agree to write it.
Tell your friends and family and post about it on your favorite social media channels from the start.
With multiple authors, you've essentially got multiple marketing channels built in to your book marketing efforts.
And when your book is published, you can appear on multiple podcasts, plan multiple book launches, and do things like have a release party.
You can also share the burden of book marketing costs, something that might be prohibitive to do as an individual.
Arranging Rights & Royalty Splits
We don't give specific legal advice, but we do recommend that you look into the legal side of things if you're going to co-author a book.
Have a look around the self-publishing blogosphere and you'll probably find good examples of how things like this are arranged pretty quickly.
Leanpub makes it particularly easy to arrange having the royalty payments themselves split up by the book's Primary Author.
Clips From The Livestream
