Coauthors saluted; Wiley’s turnaround; fetishizing editing: Newsletter 18 June 2025

Newsletter 99: The incredible benefits of creating a book with a wicked smart thinking partner. Plus, AI learns from really old books, authors make TikToks of scrawling edits, three people to follow and three books to read.

What I learned from my intellectual soulmates

I’ve written nine books and am working on another. Only two were mine alone. The other eight were partnerships — books with coauthors, or books I ghostwrote in partnership with their authors. Those partnerships were the most rewarding intellectual collaborations of my life. These were my intellectual partners:

• Charlene Li (my coauthor on Groundswell)
• Ted Schadler (my coauthor on Empowered and The Mobile Mind Shift)
• Julie Ask (my coauthor on The Mobile Mind Shift)
• Nick Worth (client with whom I ghostwrote Marketing to the Entitled Consumer)
• Dave Frankland (client with whom I ghostwrote Marketing to the Entitled Consumer)
• PV Kannan (client with whom I ghostwrote The Age of Intent)
• Curt Schwab (client with whom I ghostwrote The Responsive Enterprise)
• Katie Markwell (client with whom I ghostwrote The Responsive Enterprise)
• A ghostwriting client with whom I wrote a book published this year, whose name I cannot disclose
• A ghostwriting client with whom I am currently writing a book, not yet announced.

My gratitude for these folks is boundless. Without them I could never have become an author, which is what I always wanted to be.

Whether you are coauthoring or ghostwriting, the collaboration to create a book is the most intimate possible form of intellectual creation. It merges the best qualities of two or more minds to create something richer than what any one could create alone. It’s challenging to create together and speak with one voice (ask Simon & Garfunkel or The Beatles).

Here’s what I’ve learned from these collaborations:

• Unbroken trust is fundamental. Without trust, it all falls apart. This is much harder than it sounds. In any collaboration of this kind, you will always have moments when you want to achieve your own goals and it would be easiest to outmaneuver your collaborator rather than compromise. And you will always have moments when you suspect your collaborator’s motives. Unless you prioritize the relationship over any individual decision, the whole venture falls apart.
• You need a shared vision. You must agree before starting work on the audience, the problem you’re solving for that audience, the way you’ll be solving that problem, and how your book is different from what came before. You’re setting off on a quest, and if you’re going to travel together, you must have the same destination in mind. Not only that, you must all be passionate about how desperately the audience — and the world — needs to hear about your idea. Continually revisiting and referring back to that vision is what keeps you going in an inescapably challenging process.
• You must spend a lot of time planning. You can’t work on a book together unless you all agree on what the book is. That means you must agree on the main idea, the type of content, the voice, the list of chapters, the approach to publishing, and the collaboration process ahead of time. Planning is essential for any book project, but with only one author, you can still succeed by just winging it and figuring it out as you go along. That doesn’t work with coauthors or ghostwriting collaborations. All that planning can seem tiresome, but unless you build that foundation solidly, the whole edifice will eventually collapse.
• Three is far harder than two. Of the eight books I’ve written with partners, three had a pair of collaborators in addition to myself. The Mobile Mind Shift had three coauthors. On Marketing to the Entitled Consumer and The Responsive Enterprise, I ghostwrote for pairs of clients. Getting three people aligned on everything from the idea to the approach to the voice is extremely challenging and generates a lot of communication overhead. In any three-person collaboration, there’s also the possibility of two-against-one politics. It’s certainly doable, it’s just much harder.
• Collaboration design is essential. People working together must design a process for conceiving, researching, drafting, and reviewing content. Everyone needs to know who’s contributing which pieces, and who is reviewing the pieces that others contribute. Writers must know what to expect from collaborators reviewing their work. The collaborators who are doing the reviewing must be diligent and meticulous in their reviews and creative in the solutions they offer to the problems they identify. A disciplined process generates progress. An undisciplined process generates waste and chaos.
• Diversity improves the results. Three of my ten collaborators were women. My coauthors and clients were Asian, Indian, Irish, and British. They were analysts, executives, and CEOs, working for research organizations, tech startups, and venture firms. Their perspectives had enough in common with mine that we could see eye-to-eye, but were diverse enough to surface ideas, strategies, case studies, and proof points that I’d never come up with on my own. Collaborating with people significantly different from yourself is more work, but it generates far more interesting results. You must learn to respect and embrace those differences, rather than resent them.
• Shared values keep the project going. Diversity of insights is great, but shared values are nonnegotiable. These are values I shared with every collaborator I’ve worked with: A dedication to finding the truth. Trust in the value of research. An admiration for directness in writing and speaking. An appreciation for wit. A commitment to giving appropriate credit to sources. An unwillingness to settle for second-rate content. Caring and humor towards each other. An appreciation for sarcasm. And perseverance in the face of difficulties. Without all of these, the project will fall before you reach the conclusion. Or worse yet, you’ll end up with a published book and contributors who hate each other.

Whew! That’s a lot to count on. But the payoff is huge. It’s not just the creation of a book that can change the world, which in itself would be worth it. It’s the glorious feeling of connecting with and building on the ideas of other really smart people.

This is why as an author you must choose your projects carefully. When they fails, the result is exquisitely and intellectually painful. They succeed only when your collaboration partners and you have aligned yourself for a common goal. But when collaboration on a book does work, it’s the most rewarding process you’ll ever experience, and the results are amazing.

News for writers and others who think

The publisher Wiley is remaking itself (Publisher’s Weekly, subscriber link). In its recent annual financials, after some divestitures its sales fell 10%, but revenue was up 3% — in part due to nearly doubling AI licensing revenue to $40 million. Operating income bounced up to $221 million. As publishers like Wiley increasingly move to generate revenue from AI licensing, check your publishing contracts. Don’t give up your licensing revenues for nothing.

Harvard and the Boston Public Library are digitizing books in the public domain and making them available for AI training. Now your LLM will finally be able to write like a nineteenth-century novelist or an American revolutionary pamphleteer.

In Wired, authors are posting TikToks of themselves scrawling notes on printouts of their works to prove they don’t use AI to write them. Harlan Ellison used to write on a typewriter in a bookstore window. Let’s not make a fetish of the writing process — the results are what matters. In 2025, any writer who doesn’t use AI to help with research, structure, ideation and finding problems in their work is just ignoring available tools that can help them.

Three people to follow

Mohamed El-Erian , thoughtful and independent analyst of current economics

Daliana Liu , making data science understandable and sexy

Joe Chernov , B2B marketing wizard

Three books to read

Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us by Jennifer Finney Boylan (Celadon, 2025). A trenchant analysis of gender from a transgender author.

How to Fall in Love with the Future: A Time Traveller’s Guide to Changing the World by Rob Hopkins (Chelsea Green UK, 2025). Imaginative musings on optimistic futurism.

Let’s Retire Retirement: How to Enjoy Life to the Fullest—Now and Later by Derek Coburn and Sara Stibitz (Page Two, 2025). Living and working beyond the myth of the rocking chair.