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

The 3 classes of collaborative and “helpful” reviewers and how to deal with them

The 3 classes of collaborative and “helpful” reviewers and how to deal with them

Reviewers are a pain in the butt. I’m not talking about people who write reviews of your book on Amazon or Goodreads. I’m talking about people who offer their opinions as part of your book creation process. Unless you know who they are and manage them proactively, they will create angst and chaos. To avoid…

The cost of poor collaboration design for authors

The cost of poor collaboration design for authors

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…

How a T-shaped writer/editor collaborates with a T-shaped author

How a T-shaped writer/editor collaborates with a T-shaped author

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,…

Version control for authors and ghostwriters (or, how not to drive yourself and your collaborators nuts)

Version control for authors and ghostwriters (or, how not to drive yourself and your collaborators nuts)

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…

How writers can efficiently serve two masters (or more)
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How writers can efficiently serve two masters (or more)

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…

Using Google Docs to collaborate on a book? Learn to use access control.
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Using Google Docs to collaborate on a book? Learn to use access control.

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…