Print-on-demand (POD) publishers such as Lulu.com make it very easy for clubs and friends to put together and publish books created by multiple contributors.

Large family groups might focus on genealogy, church groups often print cookbooks, neighborhood groups may collaborate on hobbies and crafts, and friends often try out anthologies of poems and stories. Perhaps the resulting book is a keepsake or gift. In most cases, other than books created for organizational fund raising objectives, nobody expects these books to make money.

But what if they do?

How are you going to divide it up? Did you talk about this in advance or did you laugh it off because the idea of there being profits seemed absurd?

Let's suppose you have created a book of craft projects based on the homeschooling creativity of a your group of friends. Quite likely, each contributor e-mails his or her written-up project, along with drawings and photographs,  to the person who's been railroaded into pulling the material together and uploading the file to Lulu.

Before this file is uploaded, the ad hoc editor will have to open a Lulu account and make decisions about pricing, formatting, and the cover design. Whether you buy copies of the resulting book at a cost and sell them at a marked-up retail price or allow the public to buy copies directly from Lulu, there will be income to divide amongst the members of the group.

Now, when the book idea came up, profits may not have been discussed. None were expected. If they were discussed, maybe each person thought you had a consensus about where those profits would go. Perhaps a lot of assumptions were made, but never put into writing because--after all--why would friends need to do that?

Whether you have a lawyer draw up a formal contract or you simply print out a letter of intent for everyone to sign, skipping this step may not only lead to discord, it can ruin friendships and take all the fun out of the project.

If you sell individual copies, who keeps the money made from each sale: the person who physically spent time selling the book or the whole group? If friends and others buy the book from Lulu, royalties will go to the person who created the Lulu account. Does s/he get to keep that some or all of that money because s/he spent numerous hours editing and formatting the uploaded file? Or, does s/he distribute the money to the contributing members of the group? What are the potential income tax and sales tax liabilities going to be? Who holds the copyright?

Decide all of this in advance and write it down one way or another. The last thing you need to do is assume that because you are colleagues, friends or family this is a luxury you don't need.

Don't let money ruin everything.