You’re only as good as your collaborators

I heard a string quartet play the other night. The four young musicians in it met at Yale and now live and work in New York City. On the evening I heard them, they were joined by a harpist and a flutist who played a few pieces as a duo and then joined the quartet for a few others.

The individual musicians brought out the best in each other, making the whole of the performance greater than the sum of its parts.

It got me thinking about collaboration, and the effect it can have on freelancers’ work and careers.

It’s easy to mistake freelancing as a singular undertaking. But that’s not true. Writers work with editors, copyeditors, proofreaders, graphic designers, photographers and others. Write for enough publications, you could be dealing with several of each of those at the same time.

Who you collaborate with has an enormous bearing on the quality of your work. Team up with editors or publishers who’ve spent time at top-tier magazines, newspapers or websites and it can’t help but strengthen your work. Team up with inexperienced editors, and even though it might be easier, it could hurt you in the long run by not pushing you to up your game.

This is why I’ve frequently used this blog to warn writers not to work for content farms like Demand Media and Associated Content. Sure it’s easy money and it saves you from having to pitch. But who are you collaborating with? What kind of background and experience do they have? Will they help you become a better writer? Do they care about getting things right, or just good enough to be published?

If you think of the work you do as a series of collaborations, then you’re only as good as the people you collaborate with.

Besides pushing you to do your best work, there are other reasons to team up with the best collaborators you can find:

• There’s something to the old adage about two heads being better than one: working with someone else can help you see possibilities you might not have discovered on your own.
• You can get more done faster.
• Your work network expands to include not just the person or people you’re collaborating with, but their networks too (call it the LinkedIn effect).
• By pooling your talents, you make yourself more attractive to potential clients looking for an all-in-one solution, i.e., hiring a single team that can write and produce whitepapers, brochures or website content.
• Teaming up with someone younger, older, from a different culture or part of the country or world can help bring a new perspective to your writing.
• As we move to a more project-based economy, successfully teaming up with other people on an ongoing basis shows you’re adaptable and work well with others, which makes you a good catch.

What experiences with collaboration have you had?