About
I started publishing as retirement came into view with a suspicion that my somewhat unusual set of experiences might be worth writing down for somebody else.
My name is Steven Hilton. I write as Reno Smith, and I intend to go on doing that, but there is no longer much point being coy about who is behind it. When I started writing I was still working as a senior global executive, and putting my own name on the covers did not seem appropriate. I have since retired, and it no longer matters.
I have been married for forty years, and we raised two children. Of everything else on this page, that is the part that actually qualifies me to write most of these books.
I did not start anywhere near where I ended up. Opportunity was not something my early life handed over easily, but I was lucky and had great support. A fair amount of what I know about money, character and persistence I learned on the way from one to the other. That journey is really the reason for all of this. I came out the other side with a set of things I wish somebody had told me earlier, and no good excuse for keeping them to myself.
Not from one field, which I think is the useful part:
Any one of those on its own is a fairly ordinary life. Put together, they kept pointing at the same two things.
Character is built, not issued. It gets built early in small conversations that you do not recognize as important while they are happening. Which is why several of these books are aimed at a ten-year-old who has no idea they are being taught anything at all.
Most people learn about money too late, and expensively. Usually because nobody sat down and explained it (or you didn't listen) while there was still time for the lesson to be cheap. I learned some of it that way myself. It is a fixable problem, and fixing it is what half this catalog is for.
The work happens now on the Spanish coast. Playa is Spanish for beach, and we live beside one, which is where the name of the publishing house comes from.
That is not a note about lifestyle. Having lived and worked in a number of countries is a large part of where the perspective came from, and one of the books is a guide to this city in particular.
Steven Hilton
writing as Reno Smith · Valencia, Spain
They look like unrelated subjects. Money, courage, artificial intelligence, listening. They are all about the same person: the adult in the middle of a family, with children or grandchildren on one side, aging parents on the other, and a life of their own that does not pause while they help everyone else with theirs. Every title currently serves one of those two directions. The catalog holds together because of a person, not a subject.