Collaborate to Create

Why co-authoring nonfiction is a pro strategy worth considering.

- BY MATTY DALRYMPLE AND MICHAEL LA RONN

Several years ago, we were in New York, teaching at the Writer's Digest Annual Conference.

One evening over dinner, our conversation turned to how we had landed speaking gigs, the tactics we had used to negotiate our agreements, and the best—and the worst—practices we had seen when it came to engaging audiences. By the time dessert arrived, we realized we had more than just a shared set of stories. We had the foundation for a book.

That effort produced From Page to Platform: How to Succeed as an Author Speaker, our first coauthored nonfiction book. We realized we had stumbled upon a professional strategy worth sharing with other authors: coauthoring nonfiction as a business choice that can elevate your author career. The result of that realization was another joint project: Collaborate to Create: A Guide to Coauthoring Nonfiction.

In this article, we'll walk you through why coauthoring nonfiction deserves a place in your professional toolkit, what it requires of you and your collaborator, and the first steps to take if you want to explore collaboration.

The Professional Benefits of Coauthoring

Deepening and Expanding Knowledge

Writing about a subject with a partner forces you to articulate what you know, absorb what they know, and combine those insights into something neither of you could have produced alone. When Matty coauthored The Podcast Guest Playbook: Turning Conversations Into Connections and Community with her other coauthoring partner, Mark Leslie Lefebvre, she had plenty of experience with podcasts as both a host and guest, but Mark was able to bring a perspective on how podcast guest best practices could be applied to radio and television interviews.

Expanding Audience Reach and Income