Ann Gosch got her assignment: ghostwrite, for a chemical engineer, an article to run in Fenestration: The Magazine for People Who Create and Fill Openings.

The technical aspects of extruded vinyl for manufacturing windows baffled Gosch (rhymes with “gosh!”).

“I didn’t even know enough about the subject to know what questions to ask to learn about it,” she said.

At that moment, Ann Gosch the freelance writer thought maybe she should become Ann Gosch the freelance editor.

“I figured, I know grammar; I can edit,” the University Place businesswoman recalled this week. “It’s much easier to start with words on a page and move them around than stare at a blank computer screen.”

Besides, everyone who puts words on paper can use an editr, right?

It took a few years after that 1993 plot twist for Gosch to jettison writing altogether. But byGosch Editorial Services has become the go-to resource for MultiCare Health Foundation’s Office of Philanthropy, Thomson Learning’s Crisp Series workplace training manuals, the exclusive Woodmark Hotel on Lake Washington and books from Palmer/Pletsch Publishing in Portland, among dozens of others.

Gosch’s largest – and favorite – editing project hit the market a few months ago. “Six-Figure Incomes: Profit from America’s Best Communicators,” a book by Peter Stankovich, ranked this week among the top 10 percent of books sold on Amazon.com.

Stankovich, a Seattle financial planner and former pharmaceutical salesman, ain’t no writer. Yet he spent 10 years consolidating in his journal the lessons he’d learned – about how to connect with people in the business world – from his interviews with experts and more than 7,000 sales calls.

“I never intended to publish it,” Stankovich said, “but it kept getting bigger and bigger. It was so overwhelming, I didn’t know what to do with it. But I started realizing, if this information was so good for me, maybe it would be good for other people.”

He interviewed several editors he found through the Northwest Independent Editors Guild.

“I wanted to meet Ann before I gave her my baby,” he said. “I sat down and looked her in the eye and had a normal cup of coffee with her. What I liked about Ann … is she’s a certified Toastmaster, she specialized in books on communication and she’s other-focused instead of self-focused.”

Gosch recalled a daunting yet stimulating task.

“He handed me a 130,000-word manuscript. … He had a wordy style. I cut 15,000 words.”

After Stankovich received back his edited, 345-page manuscript, he says, he “stayed up until 4 o’clock in the morning reading my book. I couldn’t put it down. It was just what I wrote. But better.”

“For an editor,” Gosch said, “it doesn’t get any better than that.”

Well, maybe it does.

Brian Tracy, a well-known international motivational business speaker and author, called the Stankovich-Gosch collaboration a “helpful, practical book (that) shows you how to be more influential, persuasive, and effective in every business or personal relationship.”

And after seven Amazon.com reviews, the book has a five-star rating. And it’s launched Stankovich into a new career as a speaker and consultant.

“I was a nobody before I met Ann,” Stankovich said.

Gosch earned this ink for submitting the most-polished entry in my plea for readers to send me their elevator speeches – those short, pithy introductions we make about ourselves when, during a networking encounter, someone asks, “So, what do you do?”

Gosch replied, “I help people communicate more clearly in print. Whether you’re writing a book or brochure, manual or report, I can help you say what you want to say in a way that matches your professional image.”

By their nature, good elevator speeches should make you want to find out more. The more I found out about Gosch, over a normal cup of coffee, the more I liked.

She grew up with three brothers on a dairy farm near Hillsboro, Ore. Her mother, Margaret Hesse, taught her to sew, which led to a degree in clothing and textile merchandising at Oregon State University and an early career traveling the country and training store owners in the operation of Swiss-made Bernina sewing machines.

Gosch has written more than 350 sewing-related articles for Consumers Digest, Crafts Plus and McCall’s Patterns, among other publications, and a regular column in Sew News magazine.

And if you see her around town climbing out of her sporty 1994 red Subaru SVX – license plate BYGOSCH – ask her about her next editing project. She calls it “the cookbook from hell” because of the heavy editing and shaping of more than 100 recipes for family, sit-down dinners.

At least it has nothing to do with fenestration.

Dan Voelpel: 253-597-8785

dan.voelpel@thenewstribune.com