The Publishing Performance Show

Jo Blackwell is a writer, podcaster, researcher, and personal brand builder whose work centers on helping women over 50 rethink aging. After raising four children, navigating perimenopause, and spending 14 years as a professional portrait and brand photographer, Jo founded the Midlife Movement in 2018 to share the latest science on aging — challenging the outdated cultural narratives that tell women their best years are behin...

Robert Moutal is the founder of Cover Design App, an AI-powered tool that helps independent publishers create professional, market-ready book covers using principles from semiotics, color theory, and design psychology. A publishing coach with a master's degree in semiotics and communication, Robert has personally published more than 60–70 books and built Cover Design App to solve the exact problems he saw holding self-publish...

Kevin Anderson is the CEO, founder, and editor-in-chief of Kevin Anderson & Associates, one of the publishing industry's most respected ghost writing and editorial firms. With a team of former Big Five acquisitions editors, publishing executives, literary agents, and bestselling authors, his company has helped bring more than 7,000 books to life — producing around 500 titles per year. Their clients range from celebrities ...

Michael Stewart is the Community Lead at Sudowrite, an AI creative writing partner designed primarily for fiction writers. His background is in journalism and nonfiction writing, but he discovered his struggle with fiction perfectionism early on—unable to finish first chapters because everything needed to be perfect from the start. Sudowrite helped him accelerate past the "shitty first draft" phase to get to the editing work ...

Madeline Shue is the Publishing Lead at ElevenLabs, an AI audio platform founded in 2022 and based in London with approximately 400 employees worldwide. ElevenLabs builds AI audio models including text-to-speech, speech-to-text, music, and sound effects, bringing these innovations to consumers, creators, and enterprises globally. Madeline works specifically on everything related to authors, publishers, and audiobooks, helping creat...

Walt Hampton is the Acquisitions Editor and Director of Marketing at Summit Press Publishing, where he reviews incoming manuscripts and helps authors do more than simply publish—he helps them get the book out into the world in a big way. Walt works with entrepreneurs and high-performing professionals to turn their books into keynotes, programs, coaching and consulting offers, and long-term marketing assets—because, as h...

Nicholas Keating-Casbarro is the author and creator of the Vitilarium Universe, a far-future sci-fi series following humanity after becoming multi-planetary. With seven books planned, Nicholas crafts character-focused stories exploring themes of power, corruption, government structure, and humanity's potential futures. A former medical professional turned author, Nicholas writes in an omniscient perspective similar to Frank Herbert...

Becca Puglisi is an international speaker and bestselling author who has sold over one million copies of her Thesaurus series, with The Emotion Thesaurus being her flagship book. Starting as critique partners on Critique Circle, Becca and co-author Angela Ackerman discovered they both struggled with showing character emotions—Becca's characters were always shrugging and shuffling their feet. This led them to create lists of e...

Michael Drew is the founder of PromoteABook.com (established 25 years ago) and BookRetreat.com, with a track record of helping 132 consecutive books hit major bestseller lists including The New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Success Magazine. Starting his career at age 18 as the #3 salesperson at Executive Excellence (a division of Covey Leadership Center), Michael impressed industry leaders and landed at Bard Pres...

Amy Suto is a seven-figure freelance writer, memoir ghostwriter, bestselling author, and founder of the top Substack newsletter Make Writing Your Job. Starting as a Hollywood TV writer working for minimum wage as an assistant, Amy discovered that freelancing could outpace traditional entertainment industry earnings. She's flown to countries like Austria to work with clients on their memoirs, ghostwritten for Olympians and NBA playe...

Dave King is a professional fiction editor with over 35 years of experience and co-author of the bestselling writing manual Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, which has sold over 200,000 copies and been adopted as a textbook worldwide. With translations into Italian, Taiwanese, Japanese, and Korean, the book maintains its position in Amazon's top 10 fiction writing manuals. Dave apprenticed under Renni Browne, a former editor for Wi...

Louise Harris is the founder and president of Last Research and Editing, a comprehensive editing service specializing in both fiction and nonfiction books. With a journalism degree from the University of Maryland, Louise discovered early in her career that she's better at editing others' work than writing her own—a realization that shaped her 20+ year editing career. Known for her old-school approach of printing manuscripts a...

Lucy McCarraher is the founder of Rethink Press (a hybrid publisher specializing in business books) and BookMagic AI (an AI-assisted writing platform). Over 12 years, she has mentored over 2,000 entrepreneurs and business leaders through the book-writing process, making her the UK's most experienced business book mentor. Lucy's background spans theatre publishing in Australia, creating "video books" with celebrities like Prue Leith...

Barbara Boyd is a certified book coach through Author Accelerator who has guided over 100 authors through the nonfiction writing process. With expertise in helping experts transform their knowledge into published books, Barbara specializes in the strategic foundation work that makes writing easier—from defining target audiences to creating actionable outlines. Her approach centers on the "Venn diagram of book concepts," ensur...

Evan Gow is the founder and indie developer of StoryOrigin, an all-in-one platform designed to help authors manage their book marketing infrastructure. After writing short stories in high school and working in tech and entrepreneurship, Evan returned to his passion for writing while building tools for the author community. Frustrated by authors juggling eight different services and five spreadsheets just to manage their marketing, ...

Dale L. Roberts is an award-winning author and self-publishing educator with over a decade of experience in the indie publishing industry. He's the author of "Wide Publishing for Authors," a comprehensive guide that helps authors break free from Amazon-only publishing and expand their reach across multiple platforms. Dale is known for his conversational writing style and practical, actionable advice that comes from real-world exper...

Rodney Miles is the author of the Book Dude's Guide to Self-Publishing series and a self-publishing consultant who has worked on over 300 book projects. With a lifelong love of books that started with his mother reading at red lights, Rodney transitioned from business ownership to professional writing after the Florida real estate market collapsed. Starting at just a penny per word on platforms like Elance (now Upwork), he quickly ...

Alexa Nazzaro is the founder of Axel Author Group, a publishing services company with the memorable tagline "we won't let you publish crap." With a background in writing and business communications, Alexa transitioned into author services after helping a client with an ebook project. Her passion for the creative process led her to support authors across various genres, offering everything from editing and formatting to comprehensiv...

Matt Briel is the Vice President of Marketing and Sales at Lulu.com, a self-publishing platform that has been a leader in print-on-demand technology since 2002. Founded by tech entrepreneur Bob Young, Lulu specializes in direct sales solutions and offers unique publishing options that major distributors don't provide—most notably spiral bound (coil bound) books. With global print networks across the US, UK, France, Australia,...