Back when I was a newspaper assigning editor — whether as a food editor, a business editor, or a national editor — part of my job was to figure out who should be assigned certain stories. Sure, part of that decision was luck of the draw — she’s busy and he’s not — but a big part was an assessment of who had what skills and how those skills matched up with the assignment. One person might be better at reporting, at ferreting out facts from recalcitrant story subjects. Another person might be better at writing, at the sheer art of storytelling. Yet another might be especially adept at simplifying a complex and boring subject. Another might be so fast as to automatically be the one you turn to on a tight deadline.
      Understand that, and you understand what book collaborating is all about.
      Fast-forward to the day you turn in your manuscript. It’s doubtful that your editor also designs your book, right? And surely it’s not marketed by the same person who designs it. So how about the many months before your manuscript is turned in? What happens to actually make it a finished manuscript?
      I do book collaborations, and so do others, and the same sort of limitations apply to all of us. I can edit a recipe very well, and I’m a pretty good tester, too, but don’t call on me to invent recipes. A big part of editing is to act as a reader’s advocate, and I think I’ve gotten pretty good over the years at recognizing things that will stop a reader but that sail right past an author. I’m too much of a rule-follower to let an imagination and a sense of adventure govern my cooking, but I spend lots of time with cooks who overflow with imagination and a sense of adventure. I learn from them — and I have a sense of when their imagination is just too much for the printed page.
      The world is filled with book collaborators, all of whom bring different strengths into play. The task, then, for an author, is the very difficult act of self-examination. Authors need to figure out whether the book they’re putting together has a requirement that could be filled only by another person.
      For many authors, a collaboration is what results. The landscape is littered with the wreckage of failed book collaborations, so it’s perfectly understandable if you’re wary. But you’ll serve yourself best if you learn something about the process. Then you can figure out why and when they work, why and when they don’t work, and whether you should become part of one.
      For the single most important rule, I turn to Andy Schloss, a fellow IACP member with whom I collaborated on six cookbooks. When I was the food editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, Andy was one of my regular freelance writers, and the very sound working relationship that we enjoyed led quite naturally to our book collaborations, starting with the book Fifty Ways to Cook Most Everything: 2500 Creative Solutions to the Daily Dilemma of What to Cook. But Andy was involved in another collaboration long before he and I ever met. He was the co-owner of a Philadelphia restaurant. Andy ran the kitchen, his partner ran the front of the house, and that was the secret of their success. To quote Andy: “Each of us did something that the other couldn’t do.”
      Quite right. The same principle held for our book collaborations. I couldn’t invent recipes, but he could invent them in his sleep. And I could critique them, take them apart, and put them together again to make them more user-friendly.
      Rick Rodgers, an IACP member who probably has more collaboration credits to his name than anyone else in the world, agrees that a clear division of labor is essential.
      “But it only works with two people who respect those different spaces,” Rodgers said recently. “I’ve learned that maybe I’m not right for every job that comes down the pike. Maybe it’s a good idea to say no to a project now and then. I find that chef collaborations are the most difficult in that chefs are used to having a battery of people around them, and when they snap their fingers, the sous-chef is there.”
      He also knows that the collaboration path is perilous no matter what precautions you take. “I think when you have two authors, two agents, and an editor or two, fireworks are on the horizon.”
      Rodgers was part of a panel on collaboration, held at last spring’s IACP conference in Phoenix. His comments at that presentation — and again in a later phone interview — made it pretty clear that his use of the marriage metaphor is something he has thought about a lot.
      “I almost recommend that before either of you says yes, it’s … like you should go away for the weekend together. Learn who gets up before the other one, who will put off mowing the lawn,” he said. “Get these personality traits out of the way.”
      It really is an apt metaphor. It reminded me of an especially troublesome recipe from Fifty Ways. Andy Schloss had developed a recipe he called “Irish Ice Cream” that was heavily spiked with Irish Whiskey. I tested it and came up with something closer to soup than ice cream. Delicious soup, to be sure, but still soup. Andy correctly deduced that the alcohol was preventing the mixture from freezing properly, so he asked me to retest it with less whiskey.
      I did.
      “Still soup,” I reported.
      “Cut the whiskey in half again,” he suggested.
      I did. This time it froze much better and was still delicious, though it still wasn’t quite the hard-as-a-brick ice cream you might find in the supermarket.
      “Okay,” Andy said, “change the title to ‘Soft Irish Ice Cream’ and leave it like it is.”
      “Ah, meet the recipe halfway?” I asked.
      “Kind of like a relationship,” he said.
      It was a great moment in a book collaboration, and it’s a great ice cream.