If you’re creating a nonfiction book collaboratively, a good collaboration design will save you endless hours of work. An unwise collaboration design is not only wasteful, but will generate a poor result. Today, I look at the actual costs and benefits of good or poor collaboration design. What is collaboration design and why does it…
Most experienced businesspeople have a T-shaped knowledge and skill profile. Here’s how that looks: For a writer and editor like me, the deep part is knowledge of what works in business writing and business book publishing. The broad part includes the topics I’ve ghostwritten or edited books about, including AI, marketing, PR, social media, management,…
Writing books is hard. Collaborating without an effective plan can make it much harder. It’s okay to argue about ideas, structure, terminology, tone, case studies, or audience. Those arguments are productive. It’s not okay to argue about who’s editing which version when — that’s just a stupid waste of time. Even so, I see so…
Whether you’re writing in a corporate setting or as a freelancer, you’re likely to face this common issue: multiple “client” individuals that you must satisfy before the project is complete. How can a writer serve more than one master? In my experience, this is both extremely common and very tricky. In the business writer survey…
Google Docs is a pain for book collaboration. That was the general sentiment in a recent discussion I had with a bunch of writers, editors, and ghostwriters. If you’re going to use Google Docs, learn about access control. That’s the key to collaborating without driving each other bonkers. The challenge writers and editors face with…
I have a problem. I have too much talent. I’m good at math. I’m good at writing. I’m good at project management. I’m better at most of those things than the people I work with. (I’m not good at humility, as you may have noticed.) I took jobs that reinforced my arrogance. I had to…
The price of freelance work goes up as you involve more people from your company in their work. Call it the “collaboration tax.” The best analogy I can give is this: I once hired a carpenter to rebuild the porch on my house. I wanted to see if I could get a better price than…
We’ve optimized the heck out of cooking and shopping at my house. The key is a simple spreadsheet that my wife Kimberley built in Google Sheets — and it uses almost no math. We’ve improved it over more than a decade, and I can’t resist showing it off. Why this works for us This system…
Two or three researchers can do better than one. Here’s how to take advantage of that. For the purposes of this post, I’m talking about Web research that informs writing, whether that’s an article, a book, a white paper, or an internal document. Even if you’re doing actual primary research, such a survey or interviews,…