ABOUT
The path here included a writers’ room, several million words, and one very expensive year.
SEAN PLATT · FOUNDER
In 2008 I wrote posts on my very first site, Writer Dad. A year later I started Ghostwriter Dad, because I’m wired for franchise thinking.
A woman who had been reading both blogs hired me. She knew her field cold, but whenever she tried to explain what she did, the ideas came out heavy enough to alienate her potential clients. She was making people carry the piano before they got to hear the song.
So we started pulling them apart. She would give me a concept that took her twenty minutes to explain, and I would keep working on it until somebody outside her field could understand it in two. That was the first time I understood how much money can be hiding inside an idea that people simply can’t understand fast enough.
I spent years ghostwriting email by the acre. Some of those sequences had open and retention rates in the ninetieth percentiles, which gave me an absurd amount of evidence about where attention holds and where it leaks.
At one point I had two campaigns for the same offer going to the same list. One explained the benefits clearly and did almost nothing. The other unfolded as a story, with each email stopping a little before the reader wanted it to. That one sold like the story might stop if they didn’t.
Years later I opened a client’s expert manuscript and recognized the first campaign, three hundred pages long.
In 2012, I founded Sterling & Stone, spending a decade making fiction at volume. We broke stories before we wrote them. Beats went on a board, weak joints got found while they still cost an afternoon, and nobody got sentimental about a chapter that didn’t exist yet. The Book Business Blueprint was born from that habit. It’s a beat sheet in a business suit.
My story studio also taught me that a manuscript needs a chain of custody. Story people worked the architecture. Writers built the pages. Editors came through looking for weak spots. Our “showrunners” kept track of the book everybody thought they were making while the rest of us disappeared into our piece of it.
Then 2023 arrived with the writers’ strike. We lost all our Hollywood projects a few weeks before a publishing company we ghostwrote for defaulted on hundreds of thousands of dollars in invoices. We were down almost a million dollars in a very short window.
I had spent years helping other people turn what they knew into assets while treating my own work like something that would somehow take care of itself.
So I went back to ghostwriting, building bestsellers for authors and business owners again, close enough to the work that I could see where a book started earning its keep and where an expensive one wandered off course. The pages were downstream from the decisions that made the book valuable.
That became Book Your Business.
SUE WEEMS · HEAD WRITER
Sue Weems came to Sterling & Stone as a fiction writer, which is a résumé line this house hires for. We landed a ghostwriting project with her name all over it: a framework built over decades, a client who could own a room, a book that needed the polish without sanding off the person. Sue raised her hand. She turned in the draft ahead of schedule. I read through her draft in awe, and could see the future of Book Your Business before I was done.
Sue has an MA in English from UC Irvine, a teaching post at the University of South Carolina, and a decade of ghostwriting nonfiction, much of it sold to Big 5 imprints, for bestselling authors, Fortune 500 VPs, doctors, and founders who’d never written anything longer than an email.
You can ramble at Sue for an hour, contradict yourself twice, lose your own thread, and she’ll hand you back the three stories and two principles your book was trying to be the whole time.
SENIOR WRITERS · EDITORS · PRODUCERS
Our senior writers have written and ghostwritten books published by major houses. Every editor on the team came out of traditional publishing, where they learned what happens to a manuscript between “promising” and “ready to print,” and how much harder every fix gets once eighty thousand words are depending on it. The producer’s desk keeps one eye on the manuscript and the other on the business it has to serve, so the book everybody is making stays the same book all the way through. Their names may stay off the cover. Their fingerprints do not.
There’s a fair chance you’ve read one of our books. Better than fair if you fly much.
Your book deserves more than a writer. Book Your Business gives you a team that knows how to find the book, build the book, and keep it useful to the business paying for it. If that sounds like the team you want around your most powerful asset, start with the application.
Still deciding what the book even is? The six-minute quiz is here.