In this week’s episode, Crys and JP talk about all things co-writing. They discuss the pros of co-writing, how to find a co-writer, contracts, how to split up work, how to split royalties, and more.
Question of the week: Do you have more questions about co-writing? Share your answer here!
Show Notes
Transcript
Crys: Hello friends. Welcome to the Write Away Podcast. It is January 20th, 2022 as we are recording our 79th episode of the podcast.
I’m Crys Cain, here with my cohost…
JP: JP Rindfleisch. I’m back!
Crys: AKA Gremlin Jesus.
JP: Okay. I do accept that.
Crys: For some reason I looked from my notes up to JP, and I think he’s had his hair down the entire time we were talking, but all of a sudden I was like, “your hair!” It was because you were playing with your hair. That’s why I noticed it.
JP: Yeah, it’s true.
This hair has become ridiculously long and I’m just like, why not? Just let it go.
Crys: Yeah. Ricardo Fayet, I think of Reedsy is, known as Spanish Jesus, and you can be Gremlin Jesus.
JP: I accept Gremlin Jesus very much.
So how are you?
Crys: I have done a lot more writing-focused work this week, which has been delightful. I am at a whole full three chapters of my serial. And one of the things I’m doing with this, because I want the chapters to be rather short, close to 600 words, is I had in my head what I thought the plot points were going to be for each chapter. They’ve been wildly inaccurate. And so as I have been writing, I’ve had to be gauging how long it’s been since I’ve had a cliffhanger, like minor cliffhangers, just enough to get you over into the next chapter.
And what I had written down as like, okay, this is my first little chapter, ended up being all three chapters, like the first three. Which actually is reassuring because the way that my brain was thinking of plot points, I was like, how am I going to find 30 plot points or 30 cliffhangers or whatever, 30 chapters for my first collection, and now I’m realizing that’s just not going to be a problem. I just have to be throwing in the choices more often.
JP: Nice. That’s pretty awesome. I definitely like that you realized that you could spread this out. You can have more space. I love serial fiction so much.
Crys: It’s not like he has another podcast about it or anything.
JP: No, not at all.
Fun side note to anyone listening, now on the Kindle app on Android, you can read Vella, which you couldn’t do before.
Crys: Oh yeah. Also, JP is a Goodreads author now. Now, I don’t know if you can follow Goodreads authors, I think you can, so you should probably find that out. Have you created an Amazon author page yet?
JP: No, maybe, I don’t know.
I’ll make one. Sure. I’ll put that on the list.
Crys: Excellent. When he does, we’ll link it below.
JP: Indeed.
Crys: Okay. So you are a Goodreads author. How’s the rest of week and whatever you else you said?
JP: Yeah. One, I wasn’t around last week because I was in California for the wonderful day job. Which was so nice cause it was very nice and warm there. It’s not very cold here, I think it’s going to be like negative something.
So I have two modes when I travel. One being I get no writing done because I am just a hundred percent drained, or I get a lot of writing done. I had the first one.
Crys: And it’s not like you weren’t stressing out about Omicron the whole time that you were traveling.
JP: 100% was. I definitely was as I was messaging you. But instead, I just tried to refocus that energy and I ended up just reading a lot. Which I mean, to me, reading is just as important.
It was good to be able to divert that energy and not feel bad about it because, whatever, if you can’t do something, might as well see what you can divert it to do something else. And I’ve gotten back on track and I’m hitting the goals this week. So, I’m happy about it. It is what it is.
And yeah, things are good.
Crys: This week, somebody asked me about co-writing and they’re like, if you have a podcast episode dedicated to it that you can point me at, please do. And I was like, you know what, I don’t think as much as we have talked about co-writing, I don’t think we’ve done an episode on co-writing. And then went and looked and sure enough, we have not.
So this is going to be our co-writing episode.
So we both have co-writers. You have two co-writers right now?
JP: Technically three-ish.
Crys: I feel like I’ve had more than five. Please give me a moment to count.
Yeah. More than five, like five or six. I don’t know. I might be forgetting something in there. Oh yeah, totally forgot that one. Seven ish. I don’t know. So we’ve done this a few times.
Why did you start co-writing first of all, JP?
JP: Yes. Okay. So for me, I started when I went to Authors on a Train in 2020, and I just happened to meet Abe, who J had set up as my partner for Authors on a Train, because Authors on a Train is centric around co-writing, or at least this one was. So we had to write a short story together and we were basically put into a situation where we both were like, we want to co-write and then J just conveniently found us. Somehow we became like best friends in five minutes and that turned into the whole gamut of co-writing together.
I can’t say that it was something that I had considered before then, but it’s something that I’m like, why didn’t I consider this? Because it’s amazing.
Crys: Yeah. I think part of the reason that you guys became friends, just as a comment to the aside, is because Abe has decided that he’s going to become everyone’s friend. Like he is an extrovert. And if you say yes, and then give him the chance to weasel into your life, you are then his best friend.
JP: That is very fair. Yeah.
Crys: Not saying that negatively. I know you’re listening.
JP: Yes, Abe, we love you.
Crys: We introverts need you.
I started co-writing simply because a friend said we should. She was like, oh, we should co-write. And she had co-written before. And it definitely knew that it helped things go fast. I had been her editor for a year or two at this point, so I knew her tone of voice. I was like, yeah, we can absolutely do that. And so we started co-writing. That’s the one that went pfffft a few months in, but we got a lot of books out in that time. I think we had 12 books in before it blew up.
She wanted to write a story that had three romance protagonists so a ménage story. So we brought in my current co-writer to write with us. That was the most miserable experience of any of our lives, probably. The original co-writer I’m sure had an absolutely miserable time. So we only got two books in that trilogy, and then it was like, okay, the three of us cannot write together any longer.
Then I had my main co-writer and we were just looking for something to give us mojo because her first co-writing experience had been that miserable one. So shocked that she considered co-writing anymore.
But I knew that writing with someone gave me mojo, gave me energy. We bounced a lot off of each other and so we started writing together. And then with other friends, it was often like, hey, like I really like your style and I would like to try writing something with you in this area that we both have interest in. And some of those worked out.
Everything else was positive. Some of them like were for a whole series, some of them were only for one book. And overall co-writing has been a major win for me. And like, even with the big, bad one.
JP: Right. Which, I mean, even then you like learned a lesson from that. So I think that all of it is growth.
Crys: Yeah. And like pros to co-writing in general. One, if you have a personality who is willing to let go full, intense ownership of the work and submit to that collaborative process where you create something that isn’t fully you, isn’t fully them, it can give you so much energy. You fill in your weaknesses. Like my main co-writer, she’s so good at emotion. I’m super good at action scenes. We fill in each other’s spots. And also if you have slightly different audiences, you don’t want completely disparate audiences because you’re probably not going to mesh them really well. So you have slightly different audiences, it really helps to expose both of you to parts of the reading community that have not yet encountered you.
JP: Definitely. That’s how I’ve taken some of the co-writing that I’ve been working on. As like one, like Jeff, I’m sure you’re listening, you crazy person.
That just happened on a lark because I had reached out to him for a serial fiction. And then he was like, oh, you want to do one together? And I was like, am I going to say no to the dialogue doctor? And the answer was, no, I’m not going to say no. So like to that piece, that’s partially a learning experience, but at the same time, our work is equal footing and we both have an equal say.
I think for me, like a big piece about co-writing is that the work is not yours and the work is not theirs. It’s both of yours. And so there’s no room for absolute nos. There’s always the ‘yes and’ theory. So you always approach things with a okay, but, you know, I may like this, but let’s add on to that.
And I think that’s really been the key for me, is not married to the work because the work isn’t yours.
Crys: So you’ve already said how you found your co-writer. Which is, one, Abe through Authors on a Train. Jeff, because you’re talking to them about the Serial Fiction Show. And then your other co-writer is another community connection.
JP: It’s J.
Crys: And so there we go. I was like, I don’t know how caged you were being about this. They’re all people that you met. Before you started writing together, had you met Jeff in person?
But anyways, we were all in the writing communities doing similar classes or similar groups together. For mine, it was, we were all in our little niche, except for two, we’re all in our niche. So all of the romance co-writers who are all in our little niche community group, we had a slack, and there was just a bunch of us there. And so other than the one friend who started it all, who I had met at a writer’s conference, all of the others were from my active writing community. I was actively publishing. We were all actively publishing and supporting each other’s work. And we all knew each other’s tones, styles, all that.
So that’s where most of my co-writers came from. One came from an in real life friend who had never published anything before but was a big D and D player. And the other is, again, from communities, from online communities, writers’ communities.
So, like number one, make writer friends, right?
JP: Yeah. How are you going to be at least somewhat certain that the person you’re going to work with has the same drive as you without knowing them? That’s why, like I know all these people from the writers’ community, I know their passions. I know what they want to do before I even agreed to write with them because I want to make sure that we are in the same boat.
Yeah. And I’m a big proponent of community.
Crys: Yeah, I can’t really imagine, I can imagine like one situation, but in general, having a writing partner, having a co-writer that I was not already friends with and had not already gauged whether I thought we would work well together given our goals and ways of handling things.
The only situation I can imagine where it would be different is maybe more of a mentor situation. But even that, I feel like being a coach rather than a co-writer is a far more common position.
JP: Yeah.
Crys: James Patterson would be more of the mentor or big name signing on co-writing. He doesn’t co-write super intensely like we’re talking about here.
JP: Yeah. And so that would be like one approach, is you reach out to someone who is at a level you want to be. And you have that offering of doing a writing project, but it is a mentoring project. Whereas like this one, it’s more of like equal ish playing fields or like the way that it’s brought about it’s more of a ‘let’s do this project together,’ but it’s less of a mentor. But yeah, there is the mentor level where you explicitly ask like, I want to be at your level.
Crys: Yeah. So I want to talk about the vision of responsibilities real quick, which we’re going to get into a bit more in our specifics. But in any co-writing relationship, you want the division of responsibilities to be equal.
So with the James Patterson example, like he provides his name and some guidance, but he doesn’t do the majority of the drafting because he’s providing his name, which is worth a lot. And then the less known writer, and not always necessarily the newer writer, does most of the draft work and the story work because the balance is that they do the work to take advantage of the name.
So I know that you’ve been smart and you have contracts with your co-writers.
Yeah,
JP: I have contracts with the co-writers of which I have had things published.
Crys: Yeah, I was like, so do you do the contracts before you start writing together or have you done it right before you started publishing?
Or somewhere in the middle?
JP: In an ideal world, I would say that it should come pretty early. But in the real world, the most important part to me is that it comes before publishing. So I currently have a contract that came out before publishing. With the other two, I currently don’t have a contract yet.
Crys: So with your contract, do you spell out the division of labor in your contract or just the financial kind of ramifications and ownership?
JP: In the contract we currently have because NRDS is out, so that would be the one with Jeff. In that one, when we had originally written it, it was to be just like equal labor because we were doing like AB writing. So it was just like we were called out as writer one, writer two, or publisher and drafter, something like that.
And then we basically, yeah, we say that the work is equal. Or like that we are the two halves of the same person kind of thing. And then we hash out that all of the royalties are 50 50.
Crys: For me, I literally have zero contracts, even though my co-writer and I have talked a lot about getting a contract done because her health is not good and like she could kick the bucket.
So we do not have a contract and that’s not smart, folks. We should definitely not do that and not do what I do. And it bit me in the butt real hard with that first co-writer because things ended badly. We ended up having to negotiate a contract after the fact about who got ownership of which works.
And thankfully we wanted separate works. We wanted ownership of separate works. There was very little that we had to negotiate over other than ego. And no money exchanged hands, we just agreed who would get what, and in what timeframe it would be handed off. So it is good to have an ending of relationship clause, just imagining the worst circumstances.
But what my current co-writer and I have talked about because our series has made us quite a bit of money, if she were to pass away, I would probably take literary management over her works so that her family could still continue to benefit from them. I would probably hire other authors to finish her works. And so we’ve discussed like very clear specifics. Currently any books that we actively wrote together, it’s 50/50. Any books that one of us wrote in the world but the other didn’t, it’s 75/25 because they still get their IP right from helping create the world. And then if one of us died, like we’ve talked about, the other getting like a 10% management fee or something like that.
And so that’s the plan, but it’s not in contract. And every time, just talking about this is like, dude, you got to get that in contract. It’s so much pressure.
JP: So of course, one, not legal advice, two whatever. But the contract I used, I asked around, what are other authors using for contracts? I got that and then I had a couple of people look at it, did a couple addendums to it just to make it more sound, I guess. Just because I like having more eyes on it, more or less.
And I really like it. Now, the part that needs to be hashed out that I really liked that you pointed out was the 75/25 for like sole works that are in the world because I wanted that as well.
Crys: You’ve got to discuss whether you’re allowed to write solo works and then what the exchange is there.
JP: We use like Concord, I think, which is a super easy free site you can use.
And you can always make addendums too. So like we have to make an addendum because JT Blakely was the name written in the contract and we we killed it. That name is gone now. So we are putting in an addendum in the contract to say oh, that’s okay. And then we will sign off on it.
Crys: Yeah. One of the things that I would have found difficult in creating a contract from the get-go is like what the division of labor actually would look like.
Now, my co-writer and I are in a very happy routine of like I handle a lot of the edits these days. So when we send it off to an editor, I just process it, hit her up with anything that is big that I need her input on. Unless we’re using one specific editor that I can’t stand her style, and then I just let her handle it because we have a particular disagreement on commas and clauses. And it’s fine as long as they don’t see the manuscript with those in it, like it can be in the book. Like I don’t have that much ownership of the text.
So if my co-writer edits, I’m fine. Like her changes can stay in there. If I edit it, I will delete every single one and it’ll take me hours to go through. So most of the time these days, I handle the editing. I often handle most of our audio negotiations and set up. She sometimes handle some of that, just depending on where we are.
She handles a lot of the marketing stuff because her fan base is larger. That’s a strength of hers. That was the industry she was in before writing. And I handle the financial side of it. I split out our payments. I receive the payments. We’ll talk more about that in a bit. And we wouldn’t really have known most of that until a year, maybe not a year in, six months in. But like you said, that’s stuff that can be added on in addendums if it’s something that needs to be in the contract.
JP: Yeah.
Crys: So you said that with Jeff and you, like you each wrote chapters, traded back and forth. But I know with Abe, you have a completely different system. So do you mind describing the systems you use?
JP: So we originally, with the NRDS, did AB writing. And I think I have two episodes that I wrote in Vella first, I first drafted. But that process doesn’t work for the fast pace of Vella. So then we gave up on it and we’ve reverted back to the process that Abe and I do, where Jeff first drafts and then I come in and I basically doing the second drafting and I’m cleaning it up.
Now this is Vella, so it’s really easy to just clean it up and then say, it’s good to go. So there’s not a lot of passes after that. But that method has worked out way faster because it allows Jeff to know what comes next because he wrote that draft and I’m doing minimal changes, punching up some of the lines. But we’ve already agreed on where the story’s going because I need that structure.
So we as a collaboration work together to make the outline that I know where he’s going with drafting, I come in with second drafting, and then we’re good and happy. And that’s the same process that I’m doing with Abe. And that process works really well with me as like I’m coming in and I’m just combing through, sprucing it up, and sometimes even adding some B plot in there.
Crys: Yeah. All of mine have been AB writing. With first co-writer, she was adamant that she could not write to an outline. That was the only time that I have written without an outline with a co-writer. I find outlines to be necessary when co-writing, it gets in front of a lot of miscommunication and drama.
So I definitely do outlines for sure. And normally it’s we switch chapters, often switch POV. I think all of my romance have been at least dual protagonists, if not triple protagonists. And so each person often takes a voice and like owns that voice for the book.
However, with my main co-writer and I, we have started just throwing ourselves headlong in the manuscript, wherever it is, and trying to leave the other one kind of halfway through a scene so they’re not starting from a blank page.
Even though we’ve got the outline, sometimes it’s really hard to start a scene. And then the other one will throw themselves in and go as far as they can and then try and leave middle outline. Because with health and energy issues that we’ve had over the past year, some days are really good days and some days are really bad days. And so that doesn’t keep us from stopping when we’re having a good day, but it also doesn’t force us to overextend ourselves when we’re having a bad day. So that’s been really useful as well.
We write exclusively in Google Docs. It is the easiest way to share documents right now. I know that there are other tools that are trying to do the same or trying to make it easier to share, but currently nothing beats Google Docs.
It did start out like we had a Word file that we would like email back and forth. And so it would change the V name at the end, like names of the files just got gigantically long. And we realized that was just too unwieldy and moved to Google Docs.
JP: Yeah. For Jeff and I, because like we’re talking Vella episodes, so anywhere from 1500 to 2,500 words, those are all their own separate Google Docs. And then I can hop in, do my edits and then they’re there. For Abe’s, when I come in, the first draft has been done. So then I can take the Google Docs, I don’t know if he’s writing in Google, if you are cool. And then I actually, I’ll move it and put it somewhere else. So like this one, whatever one I’m working on right now, I’m trialing out Scrivener, just because I want to love Scrivener.
Crys: I also want to love Scrivener and I do not. I use it sometimes though.
Side note, what is really helpful for me is when I’m in revisioning or when I need to see things like my outline laid out in the cards, and like often when I feel like something’s missing, but I don’t know what it is, I’ll throw it in Scribner and play around with the cards and say, okay, what is actually missing? That’s when it’s super helpful for me.
JP: Yeah. That’s what I’m doing now. Because it has all those chapters broken out into pieces. And now that I’ve become very entrenched in serialized fiction, like I need to see things in shorter chunks because if they’re too long, I get overwhelmed.
So that’s been really helpful as like our visioning process. Cause I’m like, oh, I’m at the end, but I’m not really. And so yeah, that’s why I’m testing it out there. But everything always ends up back in Google Docs because at the moment that’s really the best thing for collaboration that I know of.
Crys: How do you go about outlining?
JP: So we outlined for the Vella stuff. First I outlined like the 10 episodes and then we move forward from there. But then we started to hit a stop gap and I needed to outline the rest of it. A reason why I didn’t want to outline the whole thing first was because I just wanted to make sure that this was going to work as a process before I wanted to actually hash out the whole thing.
Then I came up with about like 64ish episodes and Jeff and I worked through them and we put them in Notion. And Notion has been amazing because like I had mentioned before, you can open up each of these separate ones and see it as its own little card. So it’s like a cue card, so you know what you need to write. But then we can have like release dates attached to it, statuses that he can go in and change and I can come in and change, so I know which ones are scheduled, which ones have been edited. And also because we’re going to be publishing it as a novella, which episodes are going to be put in which novella so that I can have a plan. So yes, I love Notion. It’s fantastic. I’m looking at it right now.
Crys: And just to clarify, only the outline and all this metadata is in Notion. They’re still writing over in Google Docs.
JP: Yeah. Like you could drop in a file there. But no.
Crys: Yes, there’s no real good way to export things. My co-writer and I, and actually this is how it’s worked for just about every co-writer, is we’ll sit down and we’ll hammer out a plot. And working in the niche romance, there’s some like generic world-building that you just have to pick which puzzle pieces of the world building you are going to use, the rules of the world. And so once we set up the basic rules of the world and how we want to roll with that, then we start saying, okay what’s the series theme going to be?
We generally write six books. For the ones who I only wrote one book with, it was a different story. And then for each book we would sit down and be like, all right, so this is the story. And so we need to pair them with someone who’s not the same as them and is a compliment. So we figured out who the two main characters were, say, okay, I think that this is going to be a pick a trope kind of story.
And then we would just basically sit down and in a Google Doc, 1, 2, 3, like one to 16 or 20, however many chapters we had, we would just then tell each other the story and like, oh, what about it, what about it, oh, back up in there. If we think of like funny little lines that we want to have in the story, like we’ll throw them in the document so we don’t forget them. Sometimes it’s literally just like mad monkey sex here. And that’s all that chapter gets, which is really annoying.
But we’ve gotten our planning a book process down to between an hour and two hours, so that we can just get started on the book and get rolling.
JP: Yeah, I think that’s one key bit I want other people who are on the fence about collaborating to know, is that the brainstorming process when working with another person is like fricking amazing.
Like as long as you find the right collaborator, it’s always this intentional or kind way of one upping and like, what if we do this, well what if we add this to that? And it almost makes it so that the story is something that’s bigger than what you could have come up with. As long as you vibe with the other collaborator.
Crys: Yeah.
JP: Yeah. If you don’t or if you work with someone that has a very clear direction, like I had mentioned, if you don’t do yes ands and you say no, you kill the conversation. If you always add to it, whatever you had in your mind and you have to do the brainwork to think, okay, they said what if we go this direction, but I really want to get to this point C, what if you yes and that? What if you say that’s a great idea, but we add in this little thing. Now you’ve made something that’s bigger than yourself and you’ve added to the story in a different way. And that’s been like the most fun part of collaborating because it’s always made like a richer story, in my opinion.
Crys: A different phrasing that I use for this for similar effect is, if my coworker and I have different ideas of what should happen in a chapter, I will say, I love that idea (regardless of how I feel about it). I love that idea. I had another idea that doesn’t quite match with that. So I want to tell it to you and then you tell me which one you think makes the strongest story given the full arc that we’re going for. And then I’ll share my part. I’m generally disconnected from like an attachment to either idea.
With my main co-writer and I, the reason this is so successful is we yield to the strongest feeling party. And that requires a lot of communication. But particularly because we write a lot of like subtle gender discussion stuff in popcorn romance, it’s lovely, it’s what keeps me going, sometimes one of us will have a really strong feeling about a particular kind of representation that we want in the book or a particular character and how they would do things.
And we’d never say no directly, but we will use other phrases like I really feel like this and explain why and like have actual discussion. I don’t aggressively say no to a co-writer that I have a good relationship with. As the relationship was going south with other co-writer, I don’t even think I said no then, but we had some really intense discussions. And there’s a reason it didn’t go lovely and well.
Also those were not written with an outline. Outlines help you get these things out before anyone’s invested in a particular outcome that they haven’t communicated. We’re all about communicating what’s our outcome. Like where are we taking this? Have outlines when you’re co-writing. If there’s one piece I can say, like one piece of advice I can give like super intensely with co-writing, it is having outlines.
JP: I really liked that piece about there are some things that we’re passionate about. And when Abe and I started, I feel like I have been like exponentially growing and figuring out like what it is that I have the strong inkling to write about, and it’s been the queer characters. But when we first started, it wasn’t necessarily that. And that’s when we came up with our list of characters. Since then, as he’s heard me talk on these podcasts and like he knows that’s something I’m passionate about, we’ve been able to re-introduce some characters with queer aspects to them. And that has been a fun conversation to have.
He will approach me and be like, I know you’re passionate about this, like where can we add this? And that’s been like a really nice way of him actively listening and being like, I know you’re passionate about this, let’s add it in. And while our main characters may not necessarily be like the queer characters I would love to write about, this story is the story that I want to tell and I love the direction that we’ve taken it. And so I think that you have your passions and you have the things that you can be willing to collaborate with, and I think having that person that you know what their passions are as well and figuring out how to fit that in the story, that’s been very beneficial for both of us.
Crys: I want to just touch on one last kind of piece of information that we get a lot of questions on and that’s like, how have you set up the actual paying of royalties? And how are you handling that? Because with a KDP account, you can only have one payee, and most retailers you can only have one payee. So how are you handling this?
JP: Vella, it’s one person gets paid. So I just totally was like, yeah, Jeff, if you want to do that, because he had done it before. So that’s why I was like, I’m fine with that. That doesn’t bother me. And then it’s 50/50, so he’ll send me the amount I am due. And then also, like I have merch that I’ve made for the series and I just know whenever I get income for that it’s 50/50, and then I’ll send it back to him.
So that’s how that’s set up. And then with Abe and I, I will be the one that will be doing the pass through for 50 50, cause we’re also going into Amazon, which there’s no splits there. And then I think with J, we’re probably going to go the Draft2Digital route, so that will be auto split. But really I’m using my LLC, which I made as like the pass through to do the payments splitting. And the reason I made the LLC was partly because of that, and partly because of the things that we want to do with Write Away, which kind of need that separation of the singular person just for protective reasons.
Crys: Yeah. I have so far managed all of the financial ends for any of my co-writers. I have mad Excel skills, so I created an insane spreadsheet that takes into account all the retailers, because now I’m moving some of my books wide, and it was like an hour or two hour updating process for me. And so I delegated that to my assistant, one of the most important thing she does for me. And so she goes to all of the retailers, she downloads the sales reports, she plugs them in. And then it does all the calculations for me, tells me what I owe everybody.
I have a separate spreadsheet that logs all of the expenses that my co-writer and I have that I then split in half and take her half out. Or if I owe, whoever owes, I take that from their monthly payment. And I did not have a business bank account when I started doing this. When we started doing it all went into my personal bank account. And then I moved to a business bank account, business bank account makes it much easier just because it’s separate from your personal finances.
And so I have the spreadsheet and then I send all my payments through PayPal. And they have a function called mass pay, at least call it used to be called mass pay, I think it’s called payouts now. Anyways, you can request access to that and then just upload a CSV which you create in Excel of how much I owe everybody, and then PayPal just sends all the payments out at once. I really like this because it doesn’t charge as much. It charges me the fee, but no more than $1 per person. Whereas when you send payments through PayPal and you’re sending it as a fee for goods and services, it takes 3% plus 30 cents or something. It might be like 2.29%.
But when you’re talking thousands of dollars for a successful book, you might be talking about losing hundreds of dollars in PayPal fees. So that’s not fun. So I use the payouts. And that’s the financial setup. I do not issue the thing you’re supposed to, that you issued to vendors and people if you pay them more than $600 in a year. Because I, again, not tax advice, but I utilize a current loophole that is used for when you pay people via credit card or through PayPal, where you are not technically liable to send them whatever that form is. I can’t remember the number. Anyways, this is a United State’s IRS form and we’re supposed to send it to any of the people we pay more than $600 to, regardless of whether they’re domestic or international.
And there is a current loophole at the time of this reporting, again, not financial advice, but it just is one less thing for me to do to utilize that loophole and pay people through PayPal versus like direct deposit. If I did direct deposit, I’d have to do that. So a lot of people who do pay through PayPal still issue those.
So that’s the almost exhaustive rundown of how co-writing has worked for us. I did have one final thing here about when things go bad, but I think we covered that as we talked about earlier points, so I’m not going to elaborate on that further.
If you have questions, you can definitely throw them on the comment section below the show notes.
My question this week for folks is simply, do they have more questions about co-writing that we did not manage to cover? This is something that I think we both intend to continue to do. I’m rolling back on it a little bit, or I say that, I’m focusing on finishing up the romance before I engage in any more fiction co-writing projects. Just because I just need to get that done and need to have the focus there. But I do look forward after I wrap all those up, then starting to co-write in fantasy and science fiction again.
JP: Yeah, definitely. I plan on continuing all my collaboration as long as they want me. Yes, I plan on continuing all of them. Yeah. Ask us away, ask us all the question. We’ll find an answer.
Crys: Thank you so much for listening to us. If this information has been useful to you, we’d love if you consider supporting our Patreon, the link will be in the show notes. We love making this. It’s really just an excuse to geek out about writing. But we do have costs in producing this podcast and anything that you would be willing to contribute would be helpful.
Thank you so much and we will see you next week.
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