In five years of running whitefox, here are some of the key things we’ve concluded that seem to matter most to both publishers and freelancers.

Just as new indie authors benefit from the single-minded, entrepreneurial determination to make their books work no matter what obstacles they may encounter, they can also benefit from collaboration and compromise, based on the input from an experienced specialist publishing team around them.

We get pretty snippy about ghostwriters in publishing. They are thanked profusely in the front of celebrity memoirs, but there is still a cachet in those non-fiction chart-clogging autobiographies being actually written by the subject themselves. It is authentic. It is the real deal. When I am handing over my money and selecting my gift, those books somehow have a greater perceived value.