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No anonymous roster

Every name. Every face. Every LinkedIn.

Seven full-time, twelve on retainer, fourteen illustrators on roster. The senior leads are below. Every project gets one as the named owner — not a sales rep, not an account manager, but the person actually doing or supervising the work.

Founder

The studio runs on Jordan's editorial bar.

Leads the whole studio

Jordan Okafor

Founder & Editorial Director, 14 yrs

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.

  • Acquired The Quiet Hours (Penguin, 2019) — NYT bestseller, memoir
  • Edited On the Last Train (Hachette, 2021) — Edgar Award shortlist, mystery
  • Twelve years on the board of the Bay Area Independent Booksellers Co-op
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Senior leads

Six leads. One per discipline.

The lead on your project is named on the proposal. They join the discovery call. They sign off every deliverable. No anonymous handoffs.

Leads Memoir & business-book editing

Maya Rosenberg

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.

  • Developmental edit on Letters We Never Sent (Scribner, 2023) — WSJ bestseller
  • Ghost-edit on three executive memoirs whose authors she still cannot name
  • Guest lecturer, NYU Center for Publishing, memoir track
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Leads Business book ghostwriting

Ravi Balakrishnan

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.

  • Ghostwrote the founder book for a Series B SaaS CEO; book cited in the Series C deck
  • Two NYT bestselling business books under an NDA
  • Contributor, HBR.org, on writing for founders
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Leads Children's books & illustration

Elena Mireles

Children's Books Lead, 12 yrs

Twenty-six published picture books on her shelf, two of them as author. Reads every children's manuscript out loud to her seven-year-old before approving the read-aloud rhythm.

  • Author of The Light Behind the Door (Chronicle, 2020) and Field Notes from the Yard (2022)
  • Picture-book editor on the 2024 SCBWI Crystal Kite finalist The Soft Hour
  • Member, Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI)
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Leads Book cover & illustration

Marcus Thorne

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.

  • Cover design, The Hollow Hill (HarperCollins, 2020) — AIGA 50 Books / 50 Covers, 2020
  • Cover & interior, Letters We Never Sent (Scribner, 2023)
  • Adjunct faculty, California College of the Arts (CCA), Book Design
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Leads Amazon ads, PR, and launches

Clara Iverson

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.

  • Built and ran the Amazon-ads program at BookBaby, 2019–2023
  • Launched seven Amazon #1 Bestsellers in Memoir and Business in 2024–2025
  • Contributor, Self-Publishing Advice Conference (SPA), 2024 and 2025
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Leads Fantasy, mystery & thriller, sci-fi

Sam Okonkwo

Senior Fiction Ghostwriter, 8 yrs

Published novelist in his own right (under the pen name Samuel Okon) before going full-time on ghostwriting. Writes the kind of mid-list commercial fiction Amazon readers actually finish.

  • Author of The North Quarter Lights (2019) and two sequels, under pen name Samuel Okon
  • Ghostwrote a fantasy trilogy that is, between the three books, now at 380,000 copies sold
  • Workshop leader, Stanford Continuing Studies, Plot Architecture
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Beyond the named leads

Twelve writers and fourteen illustrators on retainer.

Behind the named leads sits a roster of twelve contract writers and fourteen illustrators we have worked with for an average of four years. They are matched to your project by category, voice, and capacity. You will meet your specific writer or illustrator on the kickoff call, by name, with their portfolio in hand. No mystery roster, no random assignment.

We do not publish the contract roster on this page because we have asked them not to take cold inbound. If you want to know which writer or illustrator is on your project before signing, ask on the discovery call. We will tell you.

Ready when you are

Want to meet your specific writer or editor before you sign?

Discovery call is 30 minutes. You'll get a named match within 48 hours. If the fit isn't right, we re-match at no charge.

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