Quite a while back, our own K.S. Brooks wrote about collaborating with the Evil Mastermind, Stephen Hise, on a book. I found the process to be really interesting, especially since the whole idea of collaboration is so completely foreign to me. For good or ill, my own process is totally internal; the only thing I might ask for help on would be physical details of the action (how a gun fires blanks, how to sail a sailboat), but nothing about the plot or the characters. I can’t even conceive of working with another person on a book; I have no idea what that would even look like. So I got to thinking about a friend of mine, David Wood, who collaborates with several other co-authors and does very well with it. Wanting to delve deeper into this mysterious process, I asked David if he would be willing to share his secrets of collaboration with us, and he graciously agreed.
MJB: David, I was going to count all your books and figure out how many are yours alone and how many are co-authored, and by whom, but I got overwhelmed by the numbers. Can you give us a quick breakdown of that? How many co-authors do you have, and how many books have you published with them? How many are your own? Continue reading “Writing with Collaborators: Interview with Author David Wood”
In this age of cooperation among writers (much better than competition!), it seems like we see a lot more collaborative efforts. From multiple writers on a single book to multiple writers banding together to create boxed sets, more and more authors are finding supportive boosts from working together: the antithesis of the lonely writer squirreled away at a corner desk, writing in dim isolation. The only drawback (if that’s what you want to call it) is the added consideration of how rights are assigned and profits are distributed.
