When it comes to writing your first book, most aspiring authors know they need a lot of help. Even more experienced authors typically recognize the role of collaboration in taking a book from idea to market. In reality, no books are written by one person alone—everyone brings in some kind of publishing professional.
But how do you hold onto your voice and vision when working with a team?
In this article, you’ll learn the one secret to collaborative publishing that will keep your voice front and center. We’ll also provide some extra tips to help keep you focused along the way.
Define Your Goals
If you really want to stay true to your voice and vision, the first thing you need is a clear, defined goal. I don’t mean something as simple as, “publish this book” (because of course!). When you set your goals for your book, you need to think further out.
Ask yourself, “What do I want this book to do for me?”
When it comes to this kind of goal, everybody has a different answer. Maybe you want to be a best-seller. Maybe you want to make a lot of money from book sales. Maybe you want your book to land you new clients or consulting jobs.
Or, if you’re like most of our clients, maybe your primary concern is getting your story out—you want to help people overcome the challenges you’ve survived.
Your goal might even be to add “published author” to your social media profile!
All of these goals are different, and the point isn’t to choose one that’s better than the others. Instead, when we think about how to maintain our voice and vision throughout the publishing process, our goals become our guides. We can filter editorial advice, design proposals, marketing plans, and everything else through the filter of our goals.
So what does that look like in practice?
Well, for instance, if your goal is to make a lot of money from book sales—maybe you want to land on a bestseller list—you’re going to have to orient your voice and vision toward the market. After all, your goal is to sell copies. Since that’s a market-oriented goal, your book will need to be shaped in market-oriented ways.
On the other hand, if your goal is to get your story out—to help the people who need your story—you don’t need to worry about selling hundreds of thousands of copies. You just need to find the people you can help and make sure they know about your book. Instead of filtering your publishing advice through a market filter, as in the above example, you’ll filter your publishing advice through the filter of that particular reader, often a younger version of yourself or a family member.
Without a clear goal in mind, though, it’s very difficult to decide which advice to take and which to leave. Throughout this article, I’ll repeatedly refer back to your particular goals.
So before you read any further, write down your primary goal. Be honest with yourself about what you want and commit to reaching that goals.
There’s a reason I suggest you not only determine your goal, but actually write it down—too often, when we get in the thick of publishing, we lose sight of the reason we wanted the book in the first place. Our voice and vision seem so clear and well-defined, but as the months drag on, something that seemed so solid and concrete can really drift away from us.
“Regardless of your particular revisions, remember to hold your goal close.”
So grab a sticky note and your favorite pen, and write down your goal. Then, hang onto your hats—we’re about to move through the collaborative publishing process!
As you move through the process, there are three primary stages when your goals and vision will come into play: writing, revision, and design.
Voice and the Writing Process
The first and the simplest time when your voice and vision is going to be defined is during your writing process. Whether you’re writing with a book coach, an English teacher, a ghostwriter, or just Google, you’ll learn and grow throughout the process. So it’s important to hold onto your goals as you work toward publishing.
As you gather more advice and feedback, you’ll very likely start to feel a little shaky about your taste—you’ll start to question whether what you’ve got on the page is what you really want on the page.
This is where your goals come in—if you know what you want your book to do, you can make more educated decisions about which advice to take and which to ignore.
Let’s take, for example, advice about structure.
Imagine you set out to organize your book as a collage-style memoir—you’ve got your story, mixed with recipes, maybe some poetry, and even a picture or two to round things out. When you started the project, you were in love with this type of book, and you felt 100% certain that it was the right structure for the story you’re telling.
So what do you do if your book coach disagrees?
What if they tell you that market trends are going away from collage-style memoir? What if they advise you that the market is really looking more for memoir that reads like fiction?
The answer lies in your goals—and, luckily, you wrote those down when you first started reading this post, right? Right.
If the goal you wrote down was a sales-focused goal, then your book coach’s advice makes perfect sense. Assuming your coach is active in the book industry, it might make sense to listen. That coach is sharing from their experience that this type of book hasn’t been selling well and, presumably, they know what they’re talking about (otherwise, why did you hire them in the first place?). In this situation, it probably makes sense to take your coach’s advice.
If, on the other hand, your goal is to express yourself and explore your creative side, then your coach’s advice is way off base! You shouldn’t be adapting your book to the whims of the market, because the book isn’t about the market.
It’s about you!
As you’re writing your book, you’ll come across all kinds of advice. The only real way to know which to take and which to leave is to continually check in with your goal. A clearly defined goal is like a filter—once you have it in place, everything that doesn’t fit falls away, leaving only the helpful information.
Revision
When you turn over that manuscript to your agent or your editor, things can really start to get hairy.
If you’re publishing traditionally, you’ll meet many people who want to shape your manuscript. That will probably start with your agent, who will undoubtedly want to help you revise your manuscript to give it the best chance of scoring a book deal (remember: agents only get paid when you get paid, so they are invested in making the book as marketable as possible!).
Once you land that book contract, you’ll have even more hands on your manuscript. Your editor will want a say in your revisions because, like your agent, they need to deliver a marketable manuscript to keep their boss happy (or, with smaller presses, to keep the press in business!).
Unlike your personal goal which can vary wildly depending on who you are as an author, your editor has only one goal: to sell books.
When an editor agrees to take your book on, they’ve already had to sell it—they had to sell it to their marketing department. They had to sell it to their editorial board. They may have had to sell it to their supervisor, depending on where they are in their career.
All of that selling means they know what works and what doesn’t, at least from a market perspective.
Of course, they wouldn’t have issued you a contract if they didn’t believe your book could sell. But that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. Most presses are going to want to make a little tweak here or there (or a big tweak here and there!) to make sure that your book is going to fit the market the best way they can.
That means revisions.
You might get anything from, “I need you to add another chapter because there’s a piece that seems to be missing,” to, “maybe we should cut this chapter entirely.” Your editor might ask you to rethink some of the imagery or the symbolism that you’re using.
Whatever the revision notes are, you’re going to have to take them seriously. At this point, it’s time to revisit your goals… but things have gotten much more complicated.
If you set a goal for sales, you’re in great shape! You and your editor are aligned, so you can happily (or grumpily) head to your laptop to make their suggested revisions. Since your editor is firmly in the center of the book industry, I promise they have a better sense than you do of what the market is looking for.
But what if your goal was to make sure that your story reaches the people that you want to help? How do you think about it then?
I suggest thinking through three consecutive questions:
1. Consider what you know about your audience.
If you know your audience really, really well—and if you think the suggested revisions will make your book less attractive to them—then you should say so!
But, on the other hand, is it possible that your editor actually knows better than you what that audience is looking for? Because if your goal is to make sure you reach that audience, you need to make sure that the advice you’re getting is for that audience and not a general readership.
Once you’ve determined whether the revision makes sense for your audience, use that information for question #2.
2. Consider how important a book contract is to reaching your goals.
Most book contracts are going to have a clause at some point that essentially just says, “This contract is contingent on the author executing the manuscript at a professional level.”
“Professional level” means revisions.
If you decide not to complete the revisions your editor requested, they are well within their rights to cancel the contract—after all, you did not execute the manuscript at a professional level.
If you decide you don’t need a contract, and it’s clear to you that the revisions aren’t in line with your audience and, therefore, your goals, then it’s possible that it’s time to look into parting ways. This isn’t unheard of (although it’s not super common either!)—you’ll just need to let your editor know that you don’t want to make the revisions, and see what they want to do.
If, on the other hand, you decide you want to move forward, your goals will play a super important part in #3.
3. Consider how you can address the revisions in a way that matches your goals.
If you get feedback from your editor that you disagree with, you should make the most cogent, thorough, thoughtful, perhaps researched argument for why that revision is not right for your book.
Then, you should suggest an alternative edit.
Often when something flags an editor’s attention, what has happened is that something caught their eye and pulled them out of the text. You don’t want that for your editor, and you don’t want that for your readers either. So, if something is tripping up the reader, you need to make an adjustment.
“If you really want to stay true to your voice and vision, the first thing you need is a clear, defined goal.”
But there are probably lots of ways to make that adjustment.
If that’s the case, the best approach is to speak with your editor (and agent) directly. Let them know that you understand why the section needs work, and that you want to fix it. Then share the plan you have to address the issue.
In almost every case, they’ll be willing to let you try the revision your way. And by offering that solution, you avoid coming across as difficult or unwilling to listen.
Regardless of your particular revisions, remember to hold your goal close. If the revisions will help you reach your goal, then you should do them. If they will take your further from your goal, you should not.
But what do you do when you’ve completed the revisions and your book moves into production?
Production
Production is the sticking point for so many authors for two main reasons: the title and the cover.
I have worked with authors who ended up turning down a book deal over these two things. And I get it. The title and the cover of your first book is so, so important. It’s so meaningful, and it’s so special.
But if you’re working with a press, you may have to compromise on your title and cover design.
Trust me that I know this really well. My first book The Struggle Over Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter did not originally have that title. We presented our previous title, and the press did not like it—and for good reason. They knew that we needed to have that phrase Black Lives Matter, the phrase that people would be searching if they wanted to read our book, in the primary title (the first part of the title as opposed to the part that comes after the colon).
This was not really a conversation. Essentially, the press told us that the title must have “Black Lives Matter” in the primary location. From there, we could play around with different variations of the title, but keeping that phrase in the main title was non-negotiable. If we wanted to publish with that press, we had to change our title.
When we got that news, I was really disappointed.
But I remembered our goal. Our goal with that book was to amplify the voices of people who had so generously shared with us for that book. We wanted to get those voices out to the people that we knew they could inspire. We wanted to get the story and the ideas in that book out to activists and social movement leaders.
We really believed in that book. We didn’t have a sales or revenue goal (that’s never my goal for my personal books). Instead, we wanted to think about how to get the book into people’s hands. That meant I wanted that book in libraries.
I am a firm believer that libraries are the gateway into new ideas for so many people. So when our press told us librarians would be searching for “Black Lives Matter”—and that, by putting that phrase in our primary title, they would be more likely to find it and purchase it—I was sold.
It was much, much more important to me that libraries acquired our book than it was that I had control over the title.
The same considerations are true for your cover and other design elements of your book. If you hold your goals close, you can make educated decisions about what to accept, what to (try to) negotiate, and what to adamantly reject.
This is what I mean when I say that your goals are your filter.
Your Voice, Your Vision, Your Goals
As you move through the writing and publishing process, a lot of things can come and go. Just like with everything in your life, things change. Your perspective might shift. And even your voice and vision might adapt.
But as long as you have that goal in place—as long as you hold it close to your heart—you are going to have all of the guidance that you need for making sure your collaboration comes out true to your voice and vision.
The video format of this post can be found here.
