And this, folks, is why Inkshares is great. Thank you @Jeremy Thomas!

Everyone, please please continue to chime in, your ongoing feedback will help the Inkshares team know what features are important to the community, so please keep the posts coming! 

Jamison, thanks for bringing this up! While at this time my sole focus is on my own individual contribution to my book (#amwriting), having the ability to co-author something on inkshares and have it mesh with the interface in the way you describe seems like a no-brainer. It should be built in - because why not?!

Brian raises a good point though - I believe the inkshares folks are always busy tweaking the site’s normal functions. BUT that’s no reason to discount the value of your proposal. I hope they’re hitting the whiteboard as we speak to hash out some kind of plan on the site’s backend to get the co-author functionality up and running. There are probably a million considerations I’m not aware of, royalties/payments being one of them, as Richard says.

@Richard Saunders You bring up some great points.

The royalty split, in my mind, seems like a 2.0 version addition. At first, I assume that a "primary" author could get paid via their connected bank account and distribute funds as agreed upon per contracts. I currently have to manage this for all other collaborative projects, and didn’t even think of Inkshares helping--however, it would CERTAINLY make my live easier, which is always nice! 

For me, though, the primary concern is viability and cross-talk through the Inkshares platform, and I assume, in the the first round of additions, there could be a way "link" multiple authors under a single project and have this co-authorship be holistically felt through the Inkshares system (search, project page, profile, etc.) That’s just my thinking, however. 

Once you start going through the potential ramifications, it could get messy. So I’m wondering exactly how it would work. 

Is this something we would have to request for each instance? Or would there be an automated facility where we could click "link accounts" and if the other account accepted the request, it would go through. Of course this should only happen at the project level for each specific project.

Then there’s the issue of royalty splits.  For my Journey project, I take the majority of the profits and my collaborator gets 10%.

In the anthology project Mykl Walsh and I are taking 10% each with the remaining 80% to be split equally between all of the winning entrants whose writing is included. 

As it is now, my single account receives all of the royalties and I distribute the royalties I owe to others in Quarterly installments. This works because of the openness of Inkshares. Anyone can see how many books are being sold and I will give copies of the Inkshares Royalties statements to my collaborators.

If anyone wants to question (audit) those statements, I imagine that Inkshares would cooperate in verifying the information I provided.

So each joint project might need specific royalty split requirements.

Also under the current situation, we can mention on the project page who our collaborators are and each collaborator can help pitch the project to their base of supporters and explain the join venture.

With potentially 15 accounts participating the anthology, that also could get messy.

Bottom line is I am open to the idea, but am also OK with the current situation.

Due to the issues I mention above, (and others I may not have thought of), it seems that it might mean a lot of extra work for Inkshares to implement. But if they are receptive to building in the capability, I’m enthusiastically on board.

If Inkshares is willing to handle all of the royalty splits and paying each collaborator separately, that’s the biggest benefit for me as it relieves me of that responsibility, tracking, 1099ing etc.

Hello Inkshares Authors and Readers! 

I have a question for Inkshares and the Inkshares community about co-authorship and how it’s represented/integrated into the Inkshares site. 

First off I have been really loving the updates to the Inkshares online platform, including these forums! Thanks so much @Thad @Jeremy Thomas Inkshares is looking/feeling really great and the new additions have deeply enhanced the online experience! In that vein of improvement, I offer the following observation and question:

So far, (and please correct me if I am wrong) I seems that only one Inkshares account can be the "author" of a book project, but as we know many books have two or more authors. While RUNE OF THE APPRENTICE only has one author (me!) I have co-written another book which am very excited to begin funding on Inkshares in the next month or so. (I will spare you the details because promoting that book is not the purpose of this post.)

I’m really glad you brought this up, @Jamison Stone !