How to Co-Author A Book

The idea of two people writing a book together has always fascinated me. How do they do it? Today, I have one team’s answer to that question. Sara Dailey and Staci Weber, authors of SINFUL, a November 2010 release, are here to talk about how they get it done. Welcome!

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First, we want to thank Melanie for having us here on her blog and allowing us to get the word out about our debut novel, SINFUL. Melanie has asked us to share a bit about our co-writing process. People are often surprised that we are co-authors and more often than not, the first question they is how do you write together? Writing is usually a solitary thing. You are supposed to write by yourself. Right?

It’s true; the majority of people who write, write alone, but we’ve been lucky enough to meet a few other writing teams out there, so we know we aren’t the only ones doing this. Just like solo writers, co-writers all seem to have their own little system that works for them. There’s certainly no right or wrong way to write as a team.

When we set out to write SINFUL, we had absolutely no idea what we were doing. Neither of us had ever written anything longer than a short story, but we decided to give it a shot. We met one night at our local Starbucks and began plotting out our story. We continued meeting weekend after weekend, and it all just kind of fell into place. Before we knew it, we were writing a novel … together. We would sit and drink coffee at Starbucks while passing the computer back and forth. One of us would write a bit while the other threw out ideas, and then we would switch.

While most of the writing was completed together, the majority of the revising and editing we did on our own time. One of us would revise first, and then the other. Chapters would go back and forth a few times until both of us were satisfied.

Amazingly enough, no blood was shed during the process. We really do work well together. We know each other’s strengths and weaknesses and aren’t afraid to say what we think. And it helps that we both genuinely enjoy writing together. It’s nice not to have to go it alone, and it forces you to be accountable. It’s too easy to say, “Oh, I’ll get to that chapter later.” When someone’s counting on you to show up, it’s a lot more difficult to bail. Writing is hard, but putting your work out there for others to read is even harder. It’s not easy to get a book published, and we’ve had to face a lot of rejection. I’m sure we will have to face bad reviews of SINFUL as well. Writing is subjective, so not everyone is going to love our work. Somehow, it makes it a bit easier to share the process with someone else, and neither of us could imagine doing this all alone.

We are going to keep at it. We are currently trying to find an agent for our new manuscript STATIC and are about to start writing an adult romance novella. After that, we will be on to writing book three with no plans of stopping there.

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This guest post was brought to you as part of a Travelling to Teens tour.  I hope you have enjoyed.  Check by later today for my review of SINFUL!