Authors

How real authors used their books to create leverage, clarity, and lasting impact

These are not influencer stories or overnight success narratives.
They’re professionals who used a serious book to do serious work.

How to Read These Stories

Every author comes to Manuscripts with different goals, fears, and constraints. This page is designed to help you find stories that feel familiar, not aspirational. Filter by what matters to you, and see how others navigated the process.

While the majority of authors we work with are publishing thought leadership nonfiction, we also support select memoir and fiction projects where editorial depth, originality, and long-term intent are central to the work.

Don Sandel

Founder of GoPositiv and a long-time talent development leader who spent decades inside organizations designing learning experiences that actually worked. A dynamic presenter with a sharp sense of humor, Don became deeply interested in how the brain learns and what enables people to bring their best selves to work.

Satish Shenoy

Senior global business executive and award-winning public speaker who has scaled partner ecosystems from seed-stage startups to Fortune 500 companies, generating over $200M in revenue. Parallel to his business career, Satish completed full marathons on all seven continents, including Antarctica.

Jennifer Davis

Senior marketing and strategy executive with decades of experience at companies like AWS, Intel, and Honeywell, known among peers as an “idea machine,” who had long been fascinated by how decisions actually get made, but had never consolidated that thinking into a single framework.

Christopher Veal

Former Marine Corps officer, executive coach, and leadership development professional with 25+ years of experience working inside organizations, helping leaders build trust, connection, and performance.

Tom Weirich

Senior renewable energy marketing leader with nearly two decades inside the clean energy transition, deeply embedded in the industry but seeking a more reflective, lasting contribution beyond day-to-day deal flow.

Dr. Laura Streyffeler

Clinical psychologist, trauma expert, educator, and speaker with decades of experience working across counseling, forensic psychology, and higher education, who had accumulated immense insight but lacked a structured way to transmit it at scale.

Kyle Garman

Technology executive, investor, and board member of the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship who felt a growing responsibility to prepare young people for the future of work. The book emerged at a personal inflection point, driven by fatherhood, loss, and a desire to leave something meaningful behind.

Haley Hoffman Smith

Early-stage entrepreneur and digital creator who used Her Big Idea to process failure, clarify her message, and articulate a mission centered on empowering women to pursue bold ideas. The book became the foundation for a speaking career, community, and long-term platform.

Roger Osorio

Reinvention expert, educator, and entrepreneur who had already lived multiple career transitions but needed a cohesive framework to connect his experiences into a teachable, repeatable model. The book became the backbone of his work at The School of Reinvention.

Derek Gaunt

Veteran hostage negotiator and leadership trainer with nearly three decades in law enforcement who needed a way to translate high-stakes field experience into a durable leadership philosophy. The book became the vehicle to capture lessons learned under real pressure and make them usable outside crisis situations.

Aparna Verma

Debut fantasy novelist with a Stanford English background who approached publishing as a full creative ecosystem. Rather than treating the book as a one-time release, Aparna positioned The Boy with Fire as the nucleus of her identity, content, and community.

Morgan Wider

Former retail executive and economist who transitioned into entrepreneurship, Morgan entered the process believing a book should package her existing presentations. Instead, she confronted a deeper question: was she willing to step beyond service delivery and articulate a defensible point of view about identity, worth, and executive presence?

Paula Doroff

Former Wall Street executive who rebuilt her life from childhood poverty in Brazil, climbed to senior leadership at top financial institutions, and ultimately faced a pivotal question: could her value exist beyond the career she spent decades building?

Traci Mitchell

Emmy Award–winning journalist and media professional who translated decades of interviewing leaders, politicians, and public figures into a conversational, action-oriented book focused on communication, courage, and showing up fully.

Mayumi “Umi” Grigsby

Attorney and long-time policy advocate who turned a personal experience with dismissive medical treatment into a broader examination of systemic failures in U.S. health care, particularly for Black women and other marginalized communities.

Ahmed Siddiqui

Senior fintech product leader and VP of Product at high-growth payments companies who had accumulated years of internal writing, diagrams, and explanations, but lacked a single, durable way to codify his thinking for investors, operators, and the broader fintech ecosystem.

Rachell Kitchen

Founder and CEO of Level Up For Life Coach, a professional coach working with women leaders to overcome self-doubt, who had long believed she was meant to write a book but lacked a clear path to turn that identity into a finished, usable asset.

Nicole Bianchi

The book became the centerpiece of Nicole’s leadership platform. Organizations began using it as the foundation for workshops, executive programs, and multi-touch engagements. Instead of one-off speaking, the book created demand for deeper, longer-term work, including bulk orders tied directly to leadership development initiatives.

Dean Rustin Moore

Dean of The Ohio State University College of Veterinary Medicine and nationally respected veterinary leader who had spent decades studying and living the human–animal bond, but had never formalized that work into a single, accessible body of thought.

Terry McDougall

Executive coach and former corporate marketing leader who wanted to turn years of experience helping high achievers into a clear, portable framework she could use across coaching, speaking, and media.

Dr. Jonathan Fisher

Cardiologist with 25 years in practice who experienced burnout before it even had a mainstream name, then rebuilt his work around a bigger mission: improving clinician wellbeing and helping healthcare systems function in a more human, sustainable way.

Valeria Aloe

Leadership consultant and advocate focused on closing the leadership and wealth gap for Latinas who wanted to turn a deeply researched point of view into a credible, visible body of work.

Nate Androsky

Founder and CEO of a behavioral science and product design firm who wanted a clearer way to communicate how his team thinks and works to higher-stakes, enterprise buyers.

Linda Morris

Linda Morris is a lifelong storyteller—novelist, screenwriter, and editorial consultant—who spent decades helping others shape stories before fully claiming her own as an author.

Ian Lemke

Ian Lemke is a real estate investor and entrepreneur who built his business by prioritizing trust, transparency, and long-term relationships over transactional wins. His book, People Over Property, documents not just how he invests, but why—positioning ethical decision-making and partnership as competitive advantages in real estate.

Alexandra Shapiro

Former federal prosecutor and one of the leading appellate lawyers in the United States, who has argued before the Supreme Court, clerked for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and won numerous appeals resulting in exonerations of wrongfully convicted defendants.

Alisa Parenti

Award-winning broadcast journalist, Bloomberg host and reporter, and adjunct professor of journalism at Georgetown University, with a master’s degree from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. Deeply experienced in reporting, storytelling, and teaching others how to write clearly under pressure.

Andrea Goulet

Andrea Goulet is a founder and UX leader who understands how trust and positioning are built.

She entered the Manuscripts process not to “become an author someday,” but to turn her expertise into a clear public framework, one that could create authority, demand, and opportunity in real time.

Ashlee Berghoff

Ashlee Berghoff is the founder of Smooth Operator, America’s go-to process and systems specialists for event-based businesses. She helps entrepreneurs replace 7-figure chaos with 7-figure profits by building operational engines that scale without burnout.

Danny Lehr

Danny Lehr is a sought-after speaker, entrepreneur, and former competitive athlete obsessed with helping people accomplish their biggest goals—one hour at a time.

Edwige Robinson

Edwige Robinson is a global technology executive leading digital transformation across Fortune 500 organizations. Recognized as the #3 leader in Telco & Innovation by Mobile Magazine, she is a Forbes Technology Council member, Crain’s Chicago Notable Woman in STEM, 30 Black Stars Pinnacle Award recipient, and finalist for the 2026 Women in Tech Global Awards.

Ty Pinkins

Ty Pinkins is a 21-year U.S. Army veteran, former White House staffer, Georgetown Law graduate, TEDx speaker, and U.S. Senate nominee from Mississippi. His book 23 Miles in Running chronicles his journey from chopping cotton in the Mississippi Delta to serving in the White House.

Jane Finette

Author, Unlocked: How Empowered Women Empower Women
Founder, The Coaching Fellowship
Former Senior Leader at Mozilla, eBay & Sotheby’s

Peter Parnegg

Peter Parnegg is a sales strategist, instructor, and the author of Why Bother Asking?: Unexpected Keys to the Kingdom of Connection, a book that turned conventional sales wisdom on its head and redefined what leadership and connection look like in today’s world.

Cheri Mason

Cheri Mason is the former Chairman of the Board of Veterans’ Appeals at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, where she led one of the largest federal adjudicatory bodies in the country.

Amy Dong

Amy Dong is a coach, facilitator, and author of Twenty-One Years Young, praised by The New York Times as “honest, refreshing and, at times, gut-wrenching.

Neil Chilson

Lawyer. Computer scientist. Policy architect.

Neil has advised the Federal Trade Commission, guided national debates on digital regulation, and now leads AI policy strategy at the Abundance Institute.

Corrie Napier

Corrie Napier is a conflict resolution consultant, mediator, and speaker who helps leaders turn destructive conflict into constructive conversations using her B.U.I.L.D. framework.

Catherine Connelly

Catherine Connelly is a veteran tech entrepreneur who spent two decades building and scaling companies in the online dating and social discovery space. In 2020, she sold her company, The Meet Group, in a $500M acquisition.

Yen Verhoef, PhD

Yen Verhoef is an educator and thought leader building a new model for how schools evolve inside outdated systems. Through Rebel Teaching, she challenges the inherited machinery of American education and offers a practical framework for repurposing it from within.

Jason Levin

Speaker, trainer, and coach with a decade-long idea around relationships and connection who had built a solid practice but hadn’t yet turned his core philosophy into a defining, market-anchoring asset.

Alyce Dailey

Alyce Dailey is an entrepreneur, leadership coach, and mother of four who spent nearly two decades building a successful referral-based real estate business while mentoring women in leadership and personal growth.

Navid Nazemian

Senior global HR executive preparing for a major career transition who had deep experience and research but lacked a structured way to turn it into a defining body of work.

Dr. Christina Cipriano

Yale Child Study Center professor and psychologist who wanted to take rigorous learning and development science out of academic journals and turn it into a practical, widely accessible book that helps families and educators challenge broken systems and create better outcomes for kids.

Jen Marr

Crisis response leader, trainer, and former corporate executive who wanted to turn years of frontline experience and care-based work into a credible, teachable framework she could scale through training, speaking, and programs.

Scott White

CEO and Chairman of a public real estate company who had spent decades building businesses, teams, and results, but wanted a meaningful way to share his philosophy on happiness, purpose, and living fully beyond quarterly outcomes.

Dr. Naeema Olatunji

Physician and nonprofit leader carrying a deeply personal story that required care, structure, and emotional safety to translate into a finished memoir rather than remaining an unwritten burden.

Hilary DeCesare

Founder, entrepreneur, and advisor with deep Silicon Valley experience who had built and exited multiple businesses but hadn’t yet formalized her core philosophy into a single, shareable point of view.