Speakers at AuthorCamp 2009

Jan B. King
Ms. King is one of the founders of eWomenPublishingNetwork, an organization formed in 2004 to help women become successfully published authors. Prior to that she was President & CEO.of Merritt Publishing, a niche publisher in Santa Monica, CA, an employee-owned business and a recognized brand for financial information to professionals and consumers. In 1997, Merritt Publishing was named the 44th largest woman owned/run business in Los Angeles by the Los Angeles Business Journal. Ms. King’s first book, Business Plans to Game Plans, was well received by academics and business people alike and is in its 3rd edition (John Wiley & Sons, 2004). Her second book, Smart Women Publish was published in 2005. In 2002, she received the award for "Outstanding Performance as a Small Business Woman's Advocate" from the SBA/California Small Business Development Centers. Ms. King’s views on business and on publishing have been widely quoted in Investor’s Business Daily, Working Woman Magazine, the American Bar Association’s Bar Leader magazine, Small Business USA and Business Finance, and she has been interviewed on numerous nationally syndicated business radio programs.

Mark Levine
Mark Levine co-founded Click Industries in 2000 and developed the concepts for all of the company’s web sites. Mark is a 1989 graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he doubled majored in political science and journalism. He graduated from Georgetown University Law Center in 1992 and practiced corporate, entertainment, and intellectual property law for nine years. His recent book, The Fine Print of Self-Publishing has been lauded by many experts as the Consumer Reports of the self-publishing industry. This book has helped thousands of authors choose the right self-publishing company and avoid the ones with unfair contracts or low-quality services. The Fine Print of Self-Publishing analyzes and critiques the contracts and services of the top 48 self-publishing companies. Additionally, the book educates authors on how to decipher the legalese in self-publishing contracts. As a result, many authors have been able to intelligently negotiate their own book contracts without having to hire a lawyer. In addition to writing and creating the web sites that comprise Click Industries, Mark has also published scholarly works, a novel, and a non fiction book. His law review article, “Home Office Deductions: Deserving Taxpayers Finally Get a Break” was published in the ABA Tax Lawyer in 1991 and was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1992. His first novel, I Will Faithfully Execute was published in 2000, was awarded his publisher’s Book of The Year Award for 2000-2001, and was read by former President Bill Clinton. Mark’s second novel, Saturn Return, is a coming-of-age novel that examines who we are, where we're going and who we're meant to be with.

Dawn Goldberg
Words, in the form of mechanics and meaning, have always fascinated Dawn. She can still remember sitting in sixth grade English class and memorizing helping verbs. She became an English teacher because she wanted to help students communicate well and gain meaning and insight from the written word. While the experience of teaching public school wasn't what she’d hoped it to be, it was the foundation for all she would do in her life. She went on to start her own business as a virtual assistant. She helped her clients make their already-successful businesses into thriving ones. She managed their businesses, handling invoicing, travel arrangements, website design and maintenance, and all things words. She began to see, or maybe just to remember, that there was a real need for people to learn how to communicate with words so that what they wrote was what others understood. It's not a surprise, then, that Dawn completely shifted from one path to another; she was still a business owner, but this time she was creating a company around helping others become stronger writers. She took everything she had done, as a teacher, as a virtual assistant, and as a business owner, and applied it to her new venture. That new venture is Write Well University, a company birthed to support others in their quest to be writers, whether to improve writing skills or to bring writing into their lives as a priority.

Dawn Putney
Dawn Putney is a founding partner of Toolbox Creative — a creative agency that specializes in strategic marketing and thoughtful book design. Toolbox designs books and branding strategies that help their clients tell their unique stories with emotion, passion and craftsmanship. Dawn has been in the advertising/design industry in one way or another since she was seventeen. She started out typesetting ads for the hometown newspaper. She moved on to the big city of Minneapolis, where she worked with some of the top agencies there while attending classes at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and Augsburg College. She currently lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Stephanie Chandler
Stephanie Chandler spent her early years in the fast-paced Valley in a variety of roles including software sales, technical training and technical support. She fled corporate America in 2003 and opened a bookstore in Sacramento, CA, selling the store in 2007. In the process of starting the business, she discovered a new passion: helping aspiring entrepreneurs find the same freedom that she did. In response, she launched BusinessInfoGuide.com, a directory of resources for entrepreneurs. She is the author of several books, including From Entrepreneur to Infopreneur: Make Money with Books, eBooks and Information Products (John Wiley & Sons, 2006) and has a new book coming out this fall called, Leap! 101 Ways to Grow Your Business.