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 matter?

Here’s a definition, specifically for nonfiction book development:

Collaboration design is the documented process by which contributors collaborate to research, draft, review, and finalize book content.

In an effective collaboration design, contributors can work efficiently apart, and can efficiently combine their work into an effective whole.

In a poor collaboration design, everyone has their fingers on every piece all at once, there’s no fixed process for finalizing content, and there’s no one making sure it all fits together effectively.

Let’s look at costs. I previously estimated that one author working on a book efficiently would take 264 hours. Here’s how that breaks down

• 18 hours on preparation
• 72 hours of research
• 144 hours of writing and revision
• 30 hours on manuscript completion and book production

Obviously your mileage may vary, but that’s a reasonable test case to start with. That’s 4.4 hours per thousand words. If the author’s time is worth $75 per hour, that work costs $20,000. For a 60,000-word book, that’s 33 cents per word.

Now let’s consider two people collaborating efficiently on the book, whether that’s coauthors or an author and a ghostwriter. Does it actually save time and money? A well-designed, super-efficient work breakdown might look like this:

• 36 person-hours on preparation (18 hours each for two people planning together)
• 72 person-hours of research, conducted separately
• 48 person-hours of content planning (2 people times 24 hour-long meetings)
• 144 person-hours of writing and revision
• 36 person-hours of one contributor reviewing the other collaborator’s work
• 30 person-hours of manuscript completion and book production (assume one collaborator does all of this)

Total: 366 hours. Collaboration has added 102 person-hours, or 38%, to the total time spent. If the work is divided evenly, each contributor is spending 183 hours, which is 69% of what it would take to do the work alone. But if this is the same 60,000 word book, now it is taking about 6.1 person-hours per thousand words, not 4.4. And at $75 per hour, the cost is about $27,000, or 45 cents per word.

That’s still worth it because it saves time per person. And if you are an author using a ghostwriter and can put most of the work on your ghostwriter, it will save you a lot of time. (But be aware, a good and expert ghostwriter is going to cost a lot more than $27,000 per book.)

But let’s consider what happens if you have a poor collaboration design. There are a lot of ways this can go wrong, but let’s assume you unwisely cut back on your planning by half, both up-front preparation and content planning for each chapter. As a result, the research is inefficient with a lot of waste on things that don’t get used. And the writing is extremely inefficient, with too much time spent with each collaborator reviewing and batting back and forth the content in multiple drafts. This is likely to create a messy final draft that needs extra time in manuscript completion and book production. Now the time breakdown might look like this:

• 18 person-hours on preparation (9 hours each for two people planning together)
• 108 person-hours of inefficient research, conducted separately
• 24 person-hours of content planning (2 people times 12 hour-long meetings)
• 288 person-hours of writing and revision, twice as much as the efficient process
• 72 person-hours of one contributor reviewing the other collaborator’s work, again, double the efficient process
• 45 person-hours of manuscript completion and book production (assume one collaborator does all of this)

This inefficient process has generated 555 hours of work, more than double the one-author total, and 52% more than the efficient process. If the work is divided evenly, each contributor is spending 277 hours, even more than if they didn’t have a coauthor or ghostwriter and did it all themselves. That’s 9.3 person-hours per thousand words, and at $75 per hour, the cost is nearly $42,000, or 69 cents per word.

It can get far, far worse. If the book is longer, the cost is even greater. And if there are three or more contributors, or a meddlesome set of external reviewers, the project time and costs can get totally out of control.

What efficient collaboration design looks like

Unless you like waste, the message here is: plan your collaboration ahead of time. Use expert and experienced writers. And try to keep the collaboration overhead to a minimum.

Here are some principles that will help you do that.

• Expect to spend significant time up-front on the book theme and content. The output is a book treatment (a one-to-two page summary) and a table of contents that all contributors agree on. It’s worth it to meet in person, sometimes for multiple days, to do this properly. Document everything you come up with.
• Design a process with a primary writer and researcher for each chapter. (In a ghostwriting process, the ghostwriter is the primary writer and researcher for all the chapters.) Meet before each chapter to define the content. Then the primary writer/researcher drafts a fat outline for review and after that’s approved, writes a draft. The other collaborator reviews the writer’s work. Then you get together and review the feedback and what’s needed next.
• Don’t constantly revise one chapter — move on to the next. You’ll learn from the reviews of early chapters. Put that learning to work in creating later chapters. Later, come back and revise the whole book from start to finish based on what you learned in the early drafts. This is more efficient than polishing a single chapter over and over.
• Manage external reviewers. There are always external reviewers — editors, bosses, even spouses. Don’t let them parachute in at random times. Give them significant chunks of the book at a point when you’re happy with those chunks, and give them a strict deadline to get you feedback. And put all the external reviewers on the same schedule. This way you can batch all their feedback and respond to it, rather than getting successively shoved in other random directions.
• Designate one collaborator to finish the manuscript. At some point, you’ll be focused on completing the book based on drafts that everyone has agreed are in good shape. One person should do the finishing work, including reviews of copy edits and page proofs. Having multiple contributors working on this process creates inefficiency without increasing quality.

I go over these recommendations in more detail here, with specific recommendations for ghostwriting processes here.

Of course, you don’t have to design your collaboration ahead of time. You could just wing it. But as I’ve demonstrated, that’s likely to cost you dozens of person-hours, tens of thousands of dollars, and endless anguish. And when things go wrong — and they always do — it gets even worse.

Plan now. It’s worth it.