Idea collaboration for authors

As a ghostwriter and editor, I collaborate with authors all the time. Sometimes it’s stressful. But when it works, it’s glorious.

Authors have ideas. The best authors have great ideas. It is not my place to criticize those ideas, in fact, those ideas are often why I’ve decided to collaborate with those authors in the first place.

However, ideas don’t always fit neatly into prose. They may be unconvincing. There may be a lack of evidence for them. The evidence may be persuasive at showing that the idea is a bit off. The idea may be named awkwardly.

There’s also a hierarchy of ideas in every book. What is the main idea? Which are subsidiary ideas? How do they fit together? Are there too many ideas? If so, which ones should we put aside?

My collaboration with authors typically looks like this:

Author: This is my idea.

Me: That’s great, but it won’t fit neatly into a book format. Would you consider these modifications?

Author: No, that’s not quite right. But I see the problem you’re explaining. How about this?

Me: Okay, but then we could extend it this way . . . and name it this.

[Conversation continues, productively.]

Ideas under stress get better

Stressed people don’t always perform better. But stressing an idea usually makes it stronger, more robust, more memorable, and more interesting.

Collaborating to make that happen — within the constraints of a book — is my idea of a fantastically interesting way to spend my time.

The reader gets a more powerful and memorable set of ideas.

The author gets to make a great impression.

And I get paid — and know I’ve made a useful contribution.

This only seems to happen in the context of editing or ghostwriting. It’s hard to get people to pay for idea development.

But that’s often where the real value in a book idea comes from.