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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Steve Fredlund

Steve Fredlund spent more than two decades as an actuary, doing what he was “supposed” to do, building a stable career, and checking all the boxes of a successful life. Despite outward success, he felt constrained by people-pleasing, safety, and a quiet loss of agency.

Daniel Wakefield

Daniel Wakefield is the founder of Top Tier Headshots and a business strategist helping entrepreneurs and creatives grow through genuine connection, not empty algorithms or shallow tactics. With a background in photography, branding, and community building, Daniel turned early coaching conversations into a broader playbook for business growth.

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.

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.

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.

Jim Camp Jr.

Jim Camp Jr. is a retired U.S. Air Force Major General, leadership advisor, and co-owner of Camp Negotiation Systems. After years commanding under pressure and coaching executives on high-stakes negotiation, Jim recognized a deeper pattern: leaders weren’t struggling to negotiate deals, they were struggling to lead decisively.

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.

Jaime Jay

Jaime Jay is a systems-minded entrepreneur, former 82nd Airborne paratrooper, and the founder of Bottleneck Distant Assistants—a company that helps business owners reclaim 20–40 hours a week through smarter delegation.

Gregory Offner

Before the book, Gregory was doing strong work inside organizations.

After the book, decision-makers could:
• Understand his philosophy quickly
• Share his framework internally
• Justify bringing him in at scale

James Wang

James Wang is a General Partner at Creative Ventures, investing in healthcare, agriculture, and industrial technologies. He previously worked at Bridgewater Associates and Google X’s Makani project and is a co-founder of Lioness Health.

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.

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.

Stefaan van Hooydonk

Stefaan van Hooydonk is one of the world’s leading voices on workplace curiosity.

After three decades in global executive roles across Asia, Europe, and the U.S., he founded the Global Curiosity Institute to measure and operationalize curiosity as a performance advantage.

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.

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.

Joe Heitzeberg

Joe Heitzeberg is the co-founder of Crowd Cow, a direct-to-consumer marketplace connecting customers with independent farmers producing high-quality, ethically sourced beef.

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.

Randi Braun

Randi Braun is the Founder and CEO of Something Major, a coaching and training organization helping women leaders navigate power, performance, and progression at work.

Chris Mader

Chris Mader is an EOS Implementer and executive coach who has spent more than 30 years leading, coaching, and developing high-performing teams.

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.

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.

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.