High-Functioning Collaboration in Creative Production

How technical process improvement can drive better creative outcomes

To my surprise, clicking “submit” on the final deliverables for the biggest single audiobook of my career wasn’t the cathartic release I expected it to be. Instead, I discovered I wasn’t holding my breath at all.

Despite being expansively complex, with a fully-developed fictional language, and with a runtime triple the length of an average audiobook, reaching the final milestone was just another Tuesday with this particular client.

With Masks of the Miscam, Book 2 of the Noss Saga by Joaquin Baldwin releasing in just a few days at time of writing, this feels like a good opportunity for a retrospective.

When I considered taking on this project, I felt more than a little bit of trepidation - a 6-book series, over a million words, nearly 100 hours of finished narration. It wasn’t the scope that scared me - it was the commitment to that big of a project with an author I’d never worked with before. Creative collaborations can be tenuous under the best of circumstances; it’s a delicate balance of give-and-take that can be challenging to balance in equilibrium for all parties. If the balance drifts too far in either direction, the project suffers and the relationship becomes strained and unproductive.

One of the key factors that won me over to taking on the project was that Joaquin is a veteran of Hollywood film production - not only a common background we shared, but it meant that he likely knew how to give good direction, and that he also understood how to weigh the ‘cost’ of any feedback he might give me.

Now, with two of the six books finished, and the creative relationship not only still healthy but working better than ever, I wanted to share some of the mechanisms we’ve discovered that have enabled progress thus far.

One of the early successes was implementing a rapid feedback loop.

Most audiobooks use a “release”-based feedback cycle, where all recording is completed before a client review occurs. For the Noss Saga, Joaquin would review chapters as soon as they were recorded and edited, which allowed me to incorporate this feedback almost immediately in following chapters.

This was massively beneficial in refining character voices, maintaining consistent narration tone, and most importantly, establishing key pronunciations of the many made-up words that occur frequently throughout the entire series.

The result: fewer pickups, and fewer rounds of review needed after principal recording was complete, resulting in a shorter overall production schedule.

Another benefit of this red-phone communication system is that it allowed the production to become a collaborative creative process. In several cases, I recorded a chapter and asked Joaquin for feedback on specific elements of the narration which I wanted to solidify before moving on. In a traditional asynchronous production as I described earlier, this would not be possible. Instead, I could be certain that as the audiobook progressed, I was remaining as true as possible to Joaquin’s vision for the production.

Going one step further, Joaquin let me in on a little secret towards the end of production on Book 2: there were several instances throughout where I had unwittingly made small changes to words or sentences as I narrated, perhaps as a turn of phrase that felt more natural to me or even a simple word substitution. In some cases, instead of calling these out for revision, he incorporated my changes into the manuscript.

Ultimately, these changes don’t alter the meaning of the text or phrasing, but it is an example of how collaborative the project became as a result of the trust that we built by having open lines of communication throughout the project. Which leads me to my second point…

Establishing expectations early built confidence and mutual trust.

As a result of the rapid feedback loop, several details came up relatively early in production that normally would not be addressed till near the end. I’ll be honest, my knee-jerk reaction was worry that Joaquin was going to get sidetracked on unnecessary details or on “wrong thing wrong time” - but in fact, the opposite was true.

By making these points foundational to the process rather than secondary considerations, I was able to better understand Joaquin’s attention for detail, the level of perfection he was expecting, and most importantly, that he understood the difference between details that were inconsequential, and details that would have burgeoning importance later.

As we reached satisfactory outcomes on these details, it helped both of us understand our process, understand how to communicate with each other, and also get a better picture of the outcome we were driving towards. Sure, the results of the audiobook itself might have been the same had these questions come up later in the project; but by addressing them sooner, better expectations were set for both of us.

Focus your energy on the creative adjustments that matter.

Here’s a great example: Joaquin gave me few to zero notes on the voices I used for side characters, even ones I took some fun creative liberties with (Jilpi, who appears in chapter 39 of book 1, is one of my favorite cases of a performative Choice that Joaquin simply rolled with).

It was certainly within Joaquin’s right as the author and director to ask me to change any or all voices if he wished. However, by giving me creative freedom to play within the bounds of the world he created, I understood that when he did give me a note about something, it was important.

Let’s be honest: every creative has had situations where a client sends back a note and we ask ourselves, “does this r e a l l y matter, though?” This is trust-building at its best - by allowing me freedom to play, Joaquin helped me understand the choices that mattered more to him. Again - good creative collaboration is a balance of give-and-take.

Don’t be afraid to suggest a better mousetrap.

Our feedback process started as a simple email from Joaquin with bullet-point notes.

I needed a more robust way to collect these notes, so I started copying them to a separate document for easy centralization. Eventually I shared this doc with Joaquin so he could write notes there directly.

Once I started recording pickups, I revised the doc to include checkboxes so I could track what had been completed. Joaquin then took this one step further and converted the whole doc into a spreadsheet…which I then modified to sync with my internal production-tracking spreadsheet.

By consciously iterating upon what started as a simple, uncomplicated email, we ended up with a robust, highly functional way to communicate. Maximum clarity, minimum effort.

Had I not said “hey, I’m collecting notes <here> if you want to write there directly,” we would have never discovered the process we have now, and we would have been wasting time and effort in an inefficient process.

What could have been a behemoth nightmare of a project became one of my favorite collaborations of my entire career.

Joaquin is, in my estimation, part of a select group of creative masterminds who are capable of simultaneously watching a very high-level overview, and a microscopic perspective of the smallest details. In the same breath, Joaquin can describe the story arc of all six volumes of the Noss Saga - over twice as long as Lord of the Rings - then as a footnote explain the vowel sound difference between “u” and “oo” in Miscamish, the ancient language of the land of Noss.

His capacity to direct at a very precise level while allowing creative freedom in broad strokes is an absolute boon to me as a narrator, and I can only presume that others have had similar experiences - the illustrators, editors, and creative partners that are crucial to the success of a project of this scale and complexity.

As of this writing, we’re two books down on a six-book series, with nearly 50% of the total audio complete. Production for Book 3 will start up in the autumn of this year.

I, for one, can hardly wait.