Whether you’ve read our books by Diana Audrey or Diana Davis & Audrey Glenn, our books are written by two people! These two people:
(Yes, that’s Philadelphia!)
Some coauthor teams write all their works collaboratively. Some alternate chapters, with one author steering the same POV character(s) through the whole book. In the 2000s, we wrote parallel novels like this, with Diana’s two characters and Audrey’s two characters interacting in several scenes, but each building their own romance story. When we had scenes where all of our characters were together, we’d often write them in Google Sheets—yep, spreadsheets, so we could keep the lines straight (and also make hilarious commentary in the other columns).
In both our historical series and our contemporary series, however, we take turns writing the books. This is why our historical novels are by Diana Davis and Audrey Glenn. However, we were concerned this might be hard to understand or too inconsistent, so for branding purposes, when we launched a new genre, we decided to use a single pen name on all of our books. Plus coming up with one pen name was hard enough! Thus Diana Audrey was born.
How the writing process typically works for us
We usually work on our novels at the same time. A Gentleman’s Daughter and A Lady to Lead were written at the same time—and after the first few chapters, we both got too busy to share our notes, so we wrote them independently. We then compared our books and worked to make sure that any inconsistencies were minimized. We were surprised by how consistent they already were though!
However, we are pretty much always texting. We lived 2000 miles apart when we wrote our historical series, so we had to communicate a lot about our books (but we were already texting about everything else already!). We would discuss the story and the characters constantly while drafting, turning to one another for help and suggestions as well as feedback.
After those first two books, we worked harder to share while we were drafting. We used Google Docs to keep one another up to date on the latest happenings in our fictional worlds. This was especially important as we wrote books that were particularly intertwined, like Liberty’s Charge and Integrity’s Choice.
After we’ve completed a draft and polished it up how we want, we are one another’s first beta readers, especially since our books almost always feature a character that the other one will write (or has written) as a viewpoint character.
After our books have gone through other beta readers and rewrites and edits, we are usually one another’s final readers to ensure consistency and characterization.
And that’s how we write our novels together!