About
Founded in 2019 by Jordan Okafor after eight years acquiring trade fiction at Penguin and Hachette. Built deliberately as the opposite of the offshore-templated agencies that crowd this category.
Eight years acquiring trade fiction inside Penguin and Hachette is enough to learn what good editorial work looks like. It is also enough to learn how many promising first-time authors never get a yes. The studio exists because the second number is bigger than the first by a factor of about a thousand to one.
We sign 41 projects a year. We turn down roughly 180. The math means we can be selective. Selective is the only way the editorial bar stays where it needs to be. A book studio that says yes to every brief is not a studio; it is a content mill.
A founder-led editorial studio based in San Francisco. Seven full-time employees, twelve contract writers and editors on retainer, fourteen illustrators on roster. Every name is published on the team page. Every project gets a senior lead by name on day one.
We sign 41 projects a year and ship somewhere between 35 and 40 of them inside the agreed timeline. The other four or five usually slip because of author-side delays we did not flag early enough. We are working on that.
We are not a content mill. We do not white-label work to offshore writers and pass it off as American. We do not let AI write your manuscript. We do not promise bestseller status. We do not buy reviews. We do not run "guaranteed" anything.
Every one of those sentences exists because a competitor in this category does the opposite. The five-competitor audit we ran before founding the studio (still public, still in our repo) flagged each of those failure modes by name. We built around them.
Generative AI is the most useful tool in publishing since the spell-checker. It is not the writer. It cannot do voice. It cannot do structure beyond a high-school five-paragraph essay. It cannot interview your grandmother about the night your father left and turn the transcript into a chapter that makes you cry on a plane. We have tried.
So the rule is clean: AI does not write your manuscript. It transcribes interviews. It aggregates research. It runs a grammar pass at the end of copy editing. It does not draft prose. Your manuscript is written by a named human writer on our payroll, and that name is on the project from the day the contract is signed.
If we ever change that rule, you will see it on this page first, with a date, before the change applies to any project. So far the rule has not moved since founding. We do not expect it to.
Project fees, paid in three or four installments by the author. We do not take royalties. We do not own any of your IP. We do not have a publishing imprint that competes with you for shelf space. The transaction is clean: you pay us a fee, we hand over a manuscript, you keep everything that follows.
Some authors find this hard to believe on the first call because the rest of the category is full of hybrid-publisher arrangements where the publisher takes 40% of royalties forever. We are not that. The contract is two pages. Read it before you sign.
Since 2019
Founder
Jordan ran fiction lists at Penguin and Hachette US between 2015 and 2022 before founding the studio. Acquired and edited 41 trade titles, including three New York Times bestsellers in memoir and one Edgar Award shortlist in mystery. Now reviews every project brief that comes through the door and hand-picks the writer–editor pair for it. Lives in San Francisco. Reads at a serif window.
The team
Founder & Editorial Director, 14 yrs
Spent eight years inside Penguin Random House and Hachette before getting tired of telling first-time authors no. Built inkandchapter.com to do the opposite — say yes to the right authors, then ship work an acquiring editor would have signed.
Senior Memoir Editor, 11 yrs
Memoirist's editor. Worked on the development of seven memoirs that hit the NYT or Wall Street Journal lists between 2018 and 2025. Specialty is interviewing reluctant authors out of the third chapter and into the seventeenth.
Lead Ghostwriter, Business & Founder Books, 9 yrs
Ghostwrote three books that founders later used to raise Series B or C rounds. Will not start a project without a real positioning session, because the wrong frame burns six months of writing.
Art Director, Cover & Interior Design, 13 yrs
Trained as a fine-art printmaker, then spent ten years inside HarperCollins designing covers. Believes a cover is a sales argument compressed into 1600 by 2560 pixels. Will not start a cover until he has read the first chapter.
Head of Book Marketing, 10 yrs
Ran author marketing at BookBaby for four years before joining the studio. Sold more than two million dollars in Amazon ad spend across three hundred indie authors. Refuses to take a marketing client without a finished, edited, cover-designed book.
Ready when you are
A 30-minute discovery call with a senior editor — no sales script, no pressure. We'll tell you whether we're the right fit for your project, what it would cost, and how long it would take.