Mark Reiter

Mark Reiter is an American writer, collaborator, and literary agent who has worked on a long sequence of business and leadership books, several of which reached the New York Times bestseller list under other people's names.

He is best known in publishing for his collaborations with Marshall Goldsmith, including What Got You Here Won't Get You There, Mojo, Triggers, and The Earned Life. That partnership has run for close to two decades, which is unusual in collaborative work and suggests a working relationship that suits both parties.

He has also collaborated widely outside that partnership, on golf instruction, business, and general nonfiction, and his name appears on the covers instead of in the acknowledgements, which was less common when he began than it is now.

He runs a literary agency representing nonfiction authors, which gives him an unusual double position in the industry: he understands both what a book has to do commercially and what it takes to write one for somebody else.

The visible contribution in the books he works on is structural. An executive's account of their own methods tends toward the resume, listing achievements and describing systems, and the discipline that keeps a book moving instead of accumulating is the collaborator's. In Triggers in particular, the pacing and the decision to introduce the daily questions as a practice instead of a theory are the kind of choices that come from the writing side.

Collaborators of his standing are rarely written about, since the point of the work is that the reader does not notice it. The consistency of the books he has been involved with is the strongest available evidence of what he does.