Planning Your Collaborative Novel: The Proven Process From Idea to Draft: The Author Life

By J. Thorn and Zach Bohannon

Don't waste your time—we've got it figured out for you.

 

Planning a novel isn't easy and planning a collaborative novel can be overwhelming.

 

Join bestselling authors, J. Thorn and Zach Bohannon, as they show you the proven process to take your idea to draft. Avoid the common pitfalls of collaboration and apply a system refined over dozens of their co-written novels published by Molten Universe Media.

 

From idea pitches to drafting responsibilities, they'll give you the tools you need to be successful.

 

Collaboration is the future of publishing, and that future is now!

• Language: English
• Publisher: J. Thorn
• Release date: Jun 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201049980

Book preview

Planning Your Collaborative Novel

The Proven Process From Idea to Draft

J. Thorn, Zach Bohannon

Thorn Publishing, LLC

Planning Your Collaborative Novel: The Proven Process From Idea to Draft

Copyright © 2022 by J. Thorn

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Edited by Eve Paludan

More info at theauthorlife.com

Contents

1. Introduction: Book Collaboration, from Creation to Ovation

2. Strength in Numbers

3. The Dating Game for Writers

4. The First Story Meeting

5. You Must Outline

6. Three Story Method and Our Outlining Process

7. Collaborative World-Building

8. What Now?

About the Authors

Introduction: Book Collaboration, from Creation to Ovation

Hey, Zach and J., aren’t you those guys who wrote a book on a train?

That’s the most common question that we get whenever we’re together and meet other writers. It seems that, although we’re known for many things, Authors on a Train always comes up first. The second? Our wardrobes consist mainly of cargo camo shorts. Yup, that’s a thing. The attendees of our first Summit turned our fashion statement into a good-natured running joke by also wearing camo to the writers’ conference we held in Chicago.

Our trend-setting fashion aside, Authors on a Train is only one of our many collaborative endeavors. We’ve hosted other popular writers’ retreats, such as Night of the Writing Dead, Rock Apocalypse, Sci-Fi Seattle, Witches of Salem, and Vampires of New Orleans. We founded and hosted the Sell More Books Show Summit (which became The Career Author Summit.) After co-hosting The Horror Writers Podcast and The Career Author Podcast, we now co-host the Writers, Ink podcast along with J.D. Barker.

Though we gained valuable experience while working together on several different projects, our most important work is crafting collaborative stories. More specifically, we’ve written and published science fiction, namely post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction.

Our first collaborative novel, Dawn, was published in May of 2017. The book became an Amazon bestseller, maintaining a sales rank in the top-1,000 titles in the entire Kindle store for more than a month. Beyond sales numbers, we were most proud of what the book had accomplished in the first three months on the market: In the first 100 days, Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited ebook subscribers read more than one million pages of Dawn. For us, this page reads statistic carried much more significance than units sold and royalties earned. That phenomenal page reads number meant that the collaborative publishing business model that we’d created was actually working.

How many books have you purchased with your Kindle or other e-reading device but never read? We have hundreds of books on our Kindles that have never been opened, and we know we’re not the only ones who hoard ebooks that never get read.

Therefore, as an Amazon Select author, the pages read and counted by the Amazon Kindle devices provided real, aggregate data. Amazon even created a bestseller category named Most Read, which, to our knowledge, is a list not offered by any other online book retailer. Amazon reports proved to us that our readers turned one million pages of Dawn in just over three months. This data immediately validated our book collaboration theories that we’d put into practice. We had never experienced this level of voracious readership for our sole-authored books, so we knew there had to be something to our collaboration concept. Something, indeed! We were killing it in our book’s niche market and we were on fire to repeat this plan for success!

By the end of 2018, we had published twelve collaborative novels–that’s four complete trilogies as well as two co-written novellas, and the anthologies we have contributed to and published