The first meeting of the DNF Bookclub is tonight and I’m excited about it. We’re discussing A Song of Wraiths and Ruin by Roseanne A. Brown and it’s being hosted in the Written in Melanin discord server. Everyone in The Series tier or higher has access, so now would be a good time to sign up if you were on the fence about it!

But what’s got me hype is how many people of our community actually read the book and the discussions that have been taking place leading up to this meeting. It’s always amazing to me how you get to tap into people’s honest thoughts and opinions when they know they’re in a safe space — where the baseline understanding is that we’re not giving a pass to any author just because they’re Black, because we’re all Black and creative.

We have expectations.

We get to talk about craft and execution in a way we never could in public spaces because (somehow) we exist in the part of the timeline where it’s uncool for Black people to criticize Black authors because “at least we have it, right?”

I share all this because this space has been game-changing for me. I struggled to find a community of chill, supportive, Black authors in the beginning of my writing career, so I fostered one. And now, we’re hosting a book club. It’s grown so much and I’m just. . . tickled pink 😂

The conversation is guaranteed to be fun, so if you’d like to join us, please do: https://shop.melaninlibrary.com/pages/member

Our meeting starts at 7p EST and the beauty of the DNF Bookclub is that you have to respect the book, not finish it 🤎

Alright, so a little insight (and testing the new platform) for the latest video that dropped today. If you haven't seen it, you can watch it here: https://youtu.be/cBw3s9fsjXo

But if you have seen it, I want to share some advice I never explicitly stated during the video: your book is not your brand.

I talked about things that need to be done in order to establish yourself as an author, but all of those things add up to the fact that YOU, the author, are your brand and not your books. And that's an easy mistake to make, especially with your first book. I know I made it lol. My first book, Keeping Promises with a romance novella and my whole aesthetic for a while was pink and purple — and if you know me, you know I can't stand pink 😂 but it was 2019 and I still had a lot to learn!

Which is why I'm sharing this with you guys now. There will always be another book, project, color scheme in the works. So, when you're making decisions on how to brand yourself for your website, your socials, your newsletter, center yourself and not your latest project — because your latest project will change! If you don't believe me, take a look at my books. They're all wildly different color schemes, and there's no way I could alter my brand every time I released a book. It would be CHAOS. 

That said, I wanted to take a minute and be clear about this. I wish someone had flat-out told me that when I first started out. That said, y'all are grown (or grown enough to be in this corner of the internet!) so take what I said with a grain of salt. And, if you have specific marketing questions, drop them in the comments! I'm here to support y'all in your author journeys 🥰

✌🏾Chelsea (C. M. Lockhart)