Editorial trust; Barbie books; artificial analysts: Newsletter 21 January 2026

Newsletter 132. Trust comes from a shared worldview. Plus, will AI replace analysts, the start of the Barbieverse, plus three people to follow, three books to read, and one wizard with all the answers for authors.

How editorial professionals and clients learn to trust

When the relationship between a freelance editor or ghostwriter and their author client breaks down, the reason is typically a failure of trust. That’s the easy explanation. Clients say, “I hired her but it turned out I couldn’t trust her.” Or editorial professionals says “He retained me, but then behaved in a way that showed I couldn’t trust him.”

Reading that, you’d assume that when things fail, it is because someone is acting like a scoundrel. But that is almost never the case.

Trust is rarely based on faith (faith, remember, is a belief without evidence). Instead, when you look more closely, trust comes from a shared worldview. When the editor or ghostwriter have a common goal and perspective with their author client, things are more likely to go well. When that goal is not shared, they are quite likely to go poorly.

That means in any editorial relationship, you need to agree on a lot of things.

• What is the goal of the book? What does the author want to accomplish? That might be maximizing sales, generating controversy, helping people, or developing a speaking career. An editor or ghostwriter can help the book to accomplish any of those goals, but only if they know up front what those goals are.
• Who is the real audience? You cannot edit or ghostwrite a book without a clear understanding of the audience. Until and unless the author can articulate who their audience is, no editorial expert can succeed. Discuss it, then write it down. Be as specific as possible (for example, “Digital marketing professionals who want to leverage AI” or “Cancer survivors attempting to strengthen relationships with their significant others”). Editors and ghostwriters should write all editorial suggestions from the perspective of what’s best for the agreed audience.
• How will the work be divided up? “Edit my book” is not a good job description. Is this a fragmentary first draft, or a completed manuscript? Do you want a developmental edit, a line edit, or a copy edit? “Ghostwrite my book” is even more vague. Where is the source material coming from — the client or the writer? How will the research be conducted, and by whom? Who’s writing the first draft, the writer or the client?
• What’s the schedule? A project that has to be done in 8 weeks is very different from one that can be developed over a year and half. Either is possible, but the time to figure out if you’re on a rush schedule is not when half the time available has already elapsed.
• How available is the client? Editorial professionals need access to succeed. Are we going to have weekly meetings? Monthly? Will the client be responding to emails, and if so, how quickly? How much time must the ghostwriter allow for the client to respond to drafts, or for an editorial project, how quickly will the editor turn around drafts to be edited?
• What tools are we using? Microsoft Word? Google Docs? Voice dictation? And crucially, what sorts of AI tools are allowed or prohibited, and for what purposes? (This disclosure form can help.)
• What other reviewers will have a say? Adding additional reviewers (spouses, partners, trusted colleagues) tends to make projects more challenging. Part of trust includes knowing who these folks are and when they’ll be contributing.
• What’s in scope? Freelance writers and editors need to know what’s expected from them, and what’s within their rights to charge extra for. That includes extra rounds of review and (please don’t leave this to chance) who tracks the citations and footnotes.
• What is the author’s expectation of the freelancer’s expertise? Authors deserve to know who they’re hiring. Are you paying for an expert in memoirs or thought leadership books, and if so, how much experience do you expect them to have? How much do you expect them to already know about the topic of your book (e.g. medical knowledge, technology expertise, or executive leadership experience)? Will you pay them to learn more or do you expect to supply that yourself?
• How will writers or editors get paid? Freelancers need both milestones and hourly rates. All of that needs to be written in the contract. The contract should also say who can terminate the relationship in case of serious problems, and what the financial consequences of such a termination are.

The way to develop this shared understanding and trust is with a series of discovery calls, and often, a pilot project to surface deeper understanding of what will go on in the full book project.

If you agree on all this and document it in a contract, then trust will follow. In fact, the process of discovering your agreement is where trust comes from. And trust, more than any other quality, is what makes collaborative book projects succeed.

News for writers and others who think

Former Forrester analysts Peter Kim and Ron Shevlin are having an interesting debate on the question of whether AI can replace industry analysts. The depth of insight of an experienced analyst is pretty hard to duplicate — AI tools aren’t known for their insight. But the question that’s weighing on Forrester and Gartner’s stock price isn’t whether AI can replace analysts, but whether clients think it can — and clearly, many of them do.

The estimable Maggie Langrick, who’s already had careers as a successful actress and hybrid publisher, reflects on her midlife gap year. I don’t know what Maggie will do next, but I do know it’s going to be amazing.

In The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum asks if Donald Trump’s latest text message to the prime minister of Norway, which violates all the laws of grammar, geography, and common sense, is a sign that we’ve crossed into Looney Tunes territory. Unless you think American foreign policy should be based on personal slights about who gets the Nobel Peace Prize, the answer is yes.

A new organization, We Need Diverse Books, has been established to fight library book bans.

Move over Marvel. Barbie now has her own fictional universe, with books to come.

Three people to follow

Eric Hellweg , product director for Amazon One Medical, now with chatbots

Erik Lie , exposing cheats, liars, and corruption in plain sight

Mark Carney , prime minister of Canada: polite but not quiet

Three books to read

The Category Creation Formula: Discover, Design, and Win New Market Categories by Kevin Maney and Mike Damphousse (Harper Business, 2026). Invent a category and leave competitors in the dust.

Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid (Carina Press, 2024). Gay hockey players run hot and cold.

How to AI: Cut Through the Hype. Master the Basics. Transform Your Work. by Christopher Mims (Crown Currency, 2026). AI advice for normal human beings.

All the answers

Two bucks. Expert answers to all your authoring questions. Why haven’t you tried it yet?