By: Samantha Borcy
Most business leaders who set out to write a book never finish one. Melanie Johnson and Jenn Foster built a company around the reason why. Elite Online Publishing treats a book as the starting point of a strategy rather than the finish line of a writing project, and that framing shapes everything the company does for the executives, physicians, attorneys, and founders who come to it.
Melanie is the founder and CEO of Elite Online Publishing, a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author, a former Miss Michigan and first runner-up to Miss America, and a TEDx speaker. Before moving into publishing, she launched and operated two independent television stations in Houston and Dallas, building a career in media, broadcasting, and brand development. Jenn is her co-founder, a Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and international bestselling author, a digital marketing strategist working at the intersection of publishing and artificial intelligence, and the founder of Biz Social Marketing Agency, which has worked with hundreds of businesses, from local startups to international corporations, on search visibility and online presence. Her grandfather founded Maverik Country Stores, and that early exposure to entrepreneurship and business systems runs through everything she builds.
Together, they are not people who stumbled into this space. They built a methodology from the ground up and refined it over a decade of launches. The book, they will both tell you directly, is not the point. The book is the beginning.
How a Marketing Conference in San Diego Started Elite Online Publishing
The company that became Elite Online Publishing started with a spark at a marketing conference in San Diego in 2015. Jenn had already spent years in web design and digital marketing, running her agency and helping businesses grow their online presence through SEO, branding, and automation. Along the way, she had written her own bestselling books and learned firsthand how powerful a book could be in establishing authority, attracting clients, and opening doors that credentials alone couldn’t open. Melanie brought her background in media, television, broadcasting, and brand building.
They ran their first book writing retreat that same year, and the response convinced them that what they had built could be taught rather than improvised. The insight that became the foundation of everything Elite Online Publishing does is deceptively simple. Bestselling books aren’t created by accident. There is a repeatable process behind what most authors view as an unpredictable outcome.
That realization became the company’s founding principle. Don’t just help someone publish a book. Build a strategy around it.
Publishing a Book and Launching a Book Are Two Different Things
Before a book ever launches at Elite Online Publishing, the team researches the market, analyzes categories and keywords, studies the book’s ideal reader, optimizes the Amazon listing, and builds a concentrated promotional campaign around the release date. The question of how the book will perform on launch day gets answered long before launch day arrives.
Most authors upload a manuscript and hope for the best. Melanie and Jenn are thinking about positioning from the moment a book project begins. Who is this book for? What problem does it solve? How should it be categorized? What keywords will readers use to find it? How do you mobilize the author’s existing network and introduce the book to entirely new audiences? Those questions don’t get asked the week the book comes out. They get asked at the beginning, because the answers shape everything that follows.
Publishing has changed, and so has the system. Amazon has changed. Search has changed. Social media has changed. Podcasting has exploded. Artificial intelligence is reshaping how people discover experts and information. Jenn’s expertise in digital marketing and AI integration has become increasingly central to how Elite Online Publishing thinks about discoverability, personal branding, search visibility, and what it means to build a platform in 2026. The philosophy has stayed consistent even as the tools have changed. The book is the credibility piece. The strategy surrounding the book is what creates the opportunity.
The Fear Every Business Leader Brings to the Table
Melanie and Jenn’s authors are not career writers. They are CEOs, physicians, attorneys, financial experts, coaches, entrepreneurs, consultants, and nonprofit leaders. They have decades of expertise in their heads and almost no time to get it onto a page. The most common thing either founder hears when a business leader first comes to Elite Online Publishing is some version of: I don’t have time to write a book. Right behind that is: I don’t know where to start.
The white-glove process the company runs is designed around one core principle. The author’s job is to bring what nobody else can provide: their expertise, their experiences, their stories, their ideas. Everything else- the strategy, the writing support, the editing, the design, the formatting, the publishing, the distribution, the launch campaign, and the ongoing marketing- is handled by the team working around them.
One of the most rewarding moments in their work is when someone who has been saying for ten years that they need to write this book finally holds the finished copy in their hands. Something changes. They stop seeing themselves only as a business owner or an expert. They see themselves as an author and an authority. And the people around them start seeing them differently too.
Why Ownership Changes Everything
Elite Online Publishing operates on a model that traditional publishing almost never offers. Authors retain one hundred percent of their publishing rights and royalties. The company is hired for its expertise, its team, its publishing infrastructure, and its strategy. It is not in the business of owning someone else’s intellectual property.
For entrepreneurs and business leaders, that distinction matters, because the value of a book rarely lives in the royalties. A book that introduces a consulting client, leads to a keynote speaking engagement, opens a corporate contract, or becomes the foundation for a course or coaching program keeps working long after the launch week ends. Owning that asset and everything it can become is the difference between a book that serves one purpose and a book that becomes a permanent business development platform.
What Bestseller Recognition Actually Does for a Business Leader
The most powerful result a book can produce for a business leader, Melanie and Jenn both argue, is not a royalty check or an Amazon ranking screenshot. It is what happens when the book changes the author’s position in the marketplace.
Before a book, someone may be one of hundreds of consultants, coaches, executives, or experts competing for the same attention. After a book, the introduction changes. She is the author. Those words shift the entire conversation. A prospective client can spend hours researching competitors. Or they can read the author’s book and spend those same hours learning how that person thinks, what they believe, what problems they take on, and how they approach the work. By the time that prospective client gets on a call, the qualifying questions are usually already answered. The conversation moves directly to working together.
That is the transformation Elite Online Publishing is in the business of creating. Not more authors. More recognized authorities. The book provides the platform. The strategy that Melanie and Jenn have spent a decade refining is what turns that platform into opportunities and influence that outlast any single transaction or campaign.
