Conspire Creative owner Sharon Woodhouse is a publishing consultant, book project manager, author coach, author, publisher, book business mediator, and multipreneur known for:

 

• Bringing excellence, creativity, integrity, and an attitude of service to the work she undertakes

• Professionalism and street smarts

• Passion and discernment

• Activation and results—getting things started and getting things done

• Aligning work with the big picture—organizational and personal commitments, visions, and values—while attending to details and incremental steps

• Practicing continuous improvement of skills, products, processes, and systems

• Intellectual acuity—ability to work with top performers and complex material

• Warm, generous listening and genuine, enthusiastic advocacy of good ideas, brave choices, and others’ abilities, dreams, and quirks

 

She has taken an entrepreneurial approach to just about everything since first becoming self-employed as a teenager over three decades ago. She has directly counseled and coached hundreds of authors, publishers, solo professionals, creative small business owners, and job-changers in various aspects of setting up shop, running a small book-related enterprise, publishing, and promotion, emphasizing options, customized approaches, strategic planning, inexpensive and creative marketing, win-win partnerships, and developing an entrepreneurial mindset.

 

In 1994, Woodhouse founded her first publishing company and created with a small staff the beloved Chicago brand of Lake Claremont Press. LCP published over 500,000 books of 80 different titles in its 25 years and won 30 small press awards. In 2011, she started Everything Goes Media, LLC, to encompass her growing range of book industry activities, including consulting, coaching, mediation, print brokering, private publishing, and project management.

 

Sharon’s businesses, and the authors and books she has published, have been featured in hundreds of local, national, and international media outlets, including A&E, the BBC, Business Week, the Chicago Tribune, CNN, Crain’s Chicago Business, FOX, the History Channel, NPR, the National Geographic Channel, the New York Times, the Travel Channel, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.

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Sharon received her coaching training from Coach Training Alliance, and is a certified professional coach and a member of the International Coach Federation. She has studied mediation and conflict resolution for 35 years, including with the Peace and Global Studies Department of Earlham College; through NGOs in Geneva, Rome, and Budapest; the ABA; and Mediate.com. She has a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Illinois-Chicago and a Graduate Certificate in Mediation and Negotiation from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She has an M.A. in Communication from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where her work focused on mediation, difficult conversations, and coaching presence.

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Woodhouse is a longtime advocate of entrepreneurship, vibrant urban neighborhoods, old movie palaces, public transportation, free speech, science, and civilized civic behavior. Her most cherished win was co-leading a community effort to save the historic Davis Theater in Chicago’s Lincoln Square neighborhood. 

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Follow her writing on holistic author businesses, entrepreneurship for authors, book publishing, and book marketing on Medium.com and Substack.