My Story
Growing up in the 1980s, I was the kid who always had her nose in a book. My mom made sure of that. She kept me stocked with books and hauled me to the library constantly, and somewhere in all that reading, I decided I wanted to write books of my own one day.
There was just one problem. No matter how many books I read, I almost never found a character who looked like me. I did not have the words for it back then, but I felt it. And it stayed with me for a very long time.
My path to publishing took the scenic route. I studied International Affairs at Florida State, taught English for a while in France, and then did something that tends to surprise people when they hear it. I became an intelligence analyst.
I spent years in that world, including with the CIA and a deployment to Germany supporting U.S. Africa Command, doing open-source analysis. My job, put simply, was to look at enormous amounts of public information and find the patterns and the gaps that everyone else had missed. Hold onto that part. It matters to this story more than you would think.
In 2013, that childhood dream finally caught up with me. I left my federal job, moved to Atlanta, and set out to build the publishing company I had been dreaming about since I was a kid, one that put Black children at the center of their own stories.
But I did not go about it like a hopeful first-time author. I went about it like an analyst. I studied the market the same way I used to study intelligence: who is the audience, what do they actually want, and where is the gap nobody is filling? The gap was enormous and obvious. There were nowhere near enough books featuring Black children, and there were plenty of parents searching for them.
To fund the business while I built it, I took a job with the state of Georgia as a cyber analyst. That is the one the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote about: the cyber analyst who discovered the joys of writing books for children. I wrote and published on nights and weekends, and by the fall of 2018, my books were earning more than my paycheck. So I did the math, handed in my notice, and became a full-time author and publisher. Best decision I have ever made.
I founded Goldest Karat Publishing to do one thing: put more books featuring Black children on the shelf. My bestseller, Big Hair, Don't Care, became one of the most reviewed Black children's books on Amazon. Naturally Me came from simply asking my own followers what their kids were getting teased about. Book after book, the same thing kept happening. Kids saw themselves, and parents finally exhaled.
As a Black female author building a Black-owned publishing company, I was told, more than once, that books like mine were not marketable. More than 750,000 copies later, I think we can put that one to rest.
Along the way, my work found its way into Forbes, CNN, Essence, Scholastic, Entrepreneur, Inc, and the Huffington Post, onto the sets of BET shows, and into a nationally televised Amazon commercial, and I won the 2019 Digital Book World Medal for Leadership in Diversity. Most independent authors never see a fraction of that kind of press, and I am proud of every bit of it. And all of it grew from one stubborn belief: that every child deserves to open a book and see themselves inside it.
Here is what building all of that taught me: the hardest part of publishing a great book was never the writing. It was everything that came after. The design, the production, the hundred small decisions, and getting it out into the world without getting taken advantage of along the way.
So I started helping other authors do what I had done. Through my company, my services, my programs, and my consulting, I have helped bring more than 300 books to life, for the coaches, experts, faith leaders, and authors who had something worth saying and wanted a team they could trust to help them say it well.
That is what Publish With Crystal is. It is everything I wish I had when I started, handed to the people coming up behind me. You bring the message. My team and I handle the rest. And you keep every bit of what you build.
