For most of her career, Marisa Solis worked in the margins of other people’s books. On Tuesday, she steps out of them.
The Pasadena-raised editor, who according to her publisher has worked on more than 500 nonfiction books since 1999, has co-written her first — a guide for experts who want to publish. She wrote it with Elizabeth Dougherty, her partner in the editorial firm Book Structure Pros. The two will discuss and sign the book at Vroman’s Bookstore on Tuesday, July 14, at 7:00 p.m. Admission is free.
The book is “The Complete Expert-to-Author Guide: Plan, Write, and Publish Your Nonfiction Book,” published in June by The Collective Book Studio. It lays out a step-by-step roadmap for turning expertise into an advice-based book — and for publishing and marketing it — aimed, according to the publisher, at consultants, coaches, educators, healthcare providers and entrepreneurs.
Solis grew up in the city where she will present it. She attended Arthur Amos Noyes elementary school and, at John Muir High School, was editor-in-chief of both the newspaper and the literary magazine.
“I felt this was my calling in life, and I was going to be a writer,” Solis said of her early years, in an interview with Pasadena Weekly.
The book grew out of a workshop that never happened. Solis and Dougherty built a three-day writing intensive for experts in 2023; it fell through. “But I took that disappointment and anger and said, let’s write a book,” Solis told Pasadena Weekly.
Writing it changed how they read other people’s work, she said. “It made us better editors because we are now on the other side of the desk, so to speak, holding the pen in our hands,” Solis said.
Dougherty, who cofounded Book Structure Pros with Solis, has worked in publishing since 1988 and was an executive editor at Weldon Owen. She holds a master’s from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism and lives in Palo Alto.
At the event, the authors plan to read from the first part of the book and walk through steps that new authors most often skip, then open the floor for at least 20 minutes of questions, according to Pasadena Weekly. Kirkus Reviews called the guide “a smart and stylish guide to writing and publishing a nonfiction book.”
For readers weighing whether to attend, the draw is less the how-to than the homecoming: a hometown editor who spent decades making other people’s books better, back on her own side of the desk in the city where she learned to bind pages with cardboard and glue.
Vroman’s Bookstore is at 695 East Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena. Admission is free; for more information, call (626) 449-5320 or visit vromansbookstore.com.
Solis started with a book she bound herself in the second grade, a story about a blind horse. On Tuesday she comes back to Pasadena with one that carries a barcode.
