Upping my Collaboration Game

Ever since I began daily stories and the paid memberships, are the possibilities of different projects.

When publishing traditionally or through Amazon, there is a need to build the book and then go through a release. However, now I’m seeing the possibility of doing smaller projects with quicker releases, or more complex stories over time.

More interestingly, I can monetize them. Perhaps I write a longer form story, or a serialized piece, or even a novel. I can release on this site, and set it to paid members only for viewing.

Small-Scale leads to new forms of Collaboration

I also realized I could work with other creators that have monetized their work through a platform like Ghost, Substack, Memberful, or Patreon.

In the past, these collaborations usually fall on the shoulders of one person to edit the book and package it for release. These costs time and money.

But with monetized platforms, individual creators could work on projects together, but run them on their own separate channels.

This allows us to:

• work together on separate stories where one author leads and posts it to their channel.
• do separate stories linked by theme, world, idea, and cross-promoted.
• you could even create a shared world/universe where we work with multiple creators.

This could create what Packy McCormick calls Super Teams that allows to cover a larger surface area of content discovery. However it also requires that you do the work (no such thing as slacking on the group project here):

being part of a loose alliance doesn’t guarantee participation. Individuals constantly need to earn their place in new projects and transactions. Without contracts and employment, social norms dictate participation.

YouTube and Twitch Creators lead the way

Two perfect examples of this are YouTube creators and Twitch streamers. They’ll collaborate on videos together, recording separate videos for their channels, and then link and hype each other at the end. Streamers are even more interesting, where they'll play together on a game, sharing a collaboration space, but only worrying about monetizing their own content.

I don’t see why we as authors can’t take on similar collaborations, linking individual projects together around similar themes, or creating multiple part stories between each other, or even create a shared world in which we can play and explore with our individual styles.

This really is my bat signal

Maybe this is already happening, and I’m completely clueless. I’m hoping it is. Because I’d love to work with my friends in the #writingcommunity on a project like this.

Have you seen any unique types of collaboration like this? Let me know at hello@davidgane.com.