We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Cassandra Snow. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Cassandra below.

Cassandra, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you tell us a story about a time you failed?

A couple of days before mandates about staying home to avoid spreading COVID-19 became the norm, word in disability community was still spreading fast. I worked a couple of days a week at a local Metaphysical store, reading tarot cards for customers and clients. As an immunocompromised person, the store owner and I decided together it was best if I didn’t come in to this public-facing work for a couple of days until everyone figured everything out.

Well, you all probably know what happened next. A couple of days turned into a mandatory two weeks. Which turned into months and months while we awaited vaccines. I am not one to sit around and wait though. My previous business model as a multipassionate, Renaissance soul was to make my money for bills at the store. Anything that came in from private clients, writing or theatre was for spending or saving. It was all working so well until this.

Luckily, because of my own health risks, I qualified for the special unemployment income programs pretty easily. Suddenly I had more money than usual coming in, not less. I was able to use those resources to plan a pivot to online and email reading tarot readings, as well as tarot and writing classes online. It went well!

It went so well that I started dreaming up new offerings as well as new book projects. One specific offering I got really excited about was essentially a tarot boot camp for people who wanted to become tarot experts fairly quickly. People would meet with me to design the scope of 4 personal tarot lessons with me + plenty of extras and supplemental materials to help their journey. All of this was to come within four weeks so there wasn’t lag time to lose what we worked on together. This offering came with a hefty price tag but I felt very confident in my ability to really get people on their feet with tarot cards during these back to back lessons.

I poured my heart and soul into this project. I spent weeks crafting trendy visuals, not to mention rich sample syllabi and reading lists. When I thought I was ready weeks later, I launched.

I still struggle to admit that this was the greatest bomb of any of my careers. To date, I have not sold a single one of these packages. I thought this launch would set me up beautifully once my UI ended, and instead I was faced with an empty checking account and a heavy heart for quite awhile.

I still don’t know quite what went wrong, but I think launching a heftily priced item when so many of my peers were also struggling with losing their unemployment was a huge mistake. This seems obvious in retrospect but I really thought at the time it would work out. I learned more about working with the volatile economy in the following weeks than I ever had.

Eventually, I’d licked my wounds enough and refocused my energy on simple 1:1 tarot readings and one off lessons or consultations. I took some time off from teaching altogether, and realized I was not listening to my own burnout signals for a long time. My tarot business was fine. I didn’t need to be running myself into the ground. Lesson learned.

The biggest lessons of this time is that when I refocused on writing instead of packages on my offtime, I managed to secure an agent for my next several book projects. This match up was what I actually needed to prevent burnout and feel good moving forward. The final lesson learned here, for me, was that I don’t have to do everything myself. I can look at the things I love most, and realize what I DO NOT love, and seek support instead of trying to solve different problems that didn’t exist. With this offering I was looking to expand my offerings, but what I learned was that it was my support network that deserved to grow.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Hello! I’m Cassandra Snow, a tarot card slinging writer & grown-up theatre kid. Since I was a geeky little theatre kid, I’ve loved all things wordsmith-y and have been fascinated by all things woo & weird. I majored in theatre in college, though because of a combination of disability and trauma it took me six years to get my Bachelor’s. Once I had it, I moved to Minneapolis, MN where I founded a theatre company, worked elsewhere in arts admin (including some of the bigger names in town) and started seeing tarot clients on the side.

To support my burgeoning tarot business, I began writing articles on reading tarot for LGBTQIA+ would-be tarot lovers like myself. Through this project, called “Queering the Tarot” I remembered how much I loved writing. I remembered that authorship was the first thing childhood me wanted to be and became determined to get back there. Luck was on my side, and after a couple years of articles I nabbed my first book deal – an updated and book version of the “Queering the Tarot” articles. Since then I’ve also written a book on queer witchcraft called “Queering Your Craft” and co-authored a book on creativity and the tarot called “Lessons From the Empress”. I’ve also written and edited a number of freelance gigs. Next year (2025) a book of essays on queer tarot topics that I edited releases!

My theatre life has changed dramatically in the course of all this. Theatre really doesn’t work well with my disabilities anymore, so I sit on boards and occasionally take project-based or seasonal theatrical work instead of staying in that grind steadily. I’m most excited to be on the Advisory Council for Flip the Script, a queer film festival based here in Minneapolis.

When I’m not writing or doing theatre-ish work, I take tarot clients a few days a week. I’m back to teaching tarot classes, and my Patreon supporting my tarot and writing work has grown steadily. Most recently, I’ve been most excited to connect with people for 1:1 tarot mentorship or learning – just not in the frenetic, hyperspeed way I’d once hoped to.

Whether writing, reading or teaching cards or helping make art happen, I love when I can make readers, audiences or clients feel affirmed and empowered. I love being able to center my own queerness and make space for others to find and use their own queer voice. I love being central to community, be that location or identity based, and learning the topics important to those communities. From there, I use my work and platforms to help make them make it happen. This can be done by penning book foreword or articles in support of others’ projects, empowering them through a tarot reading or creating art that inspires action.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

I love talking about social media in a nuanced way, especially for small business owners. In the beginning, I used a lot of hashtags and followed a lot of people in my field more generally. I made sure to contribute to conversation threads, as well as using my page for my thoughts and offerings. I try to be an early adopter of new featurs on social media. I also know when to cut my losses. Its easy to see if a new platform or feature isn’t gaining steam or helping visibility within a few weeks. In those cases, I just let them drop.

I will say, I have always used my social media as personal pages first. I’ve gotten more private about certain things as I’ve garnered a following, but my “brand” is truly built on shared humanity. I have never wanted to feel like I was hard pitching my childhood friends constantly, and I have never wanted to forgo those authentic connections, many of who became clients anyway. Furthermore, social media is a parasocial system. Building a following there takes more than good services and products. People really do want to see the person behind it all. No, you absolutely do not have to overshare! The internet doesn’t even know my girlfriend’s name! But thinking about what you want to share & what’s interesting to YOU right now has always been a better system than trying to guess what other people want.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

I definitely started both tarot reading and writing as part-time, “when I could” monetized hobbies. I’ve always believed firmly that writers should be paid, so I insisted on that for myself too. Once I got my first book deal and realized this is what I wanted to be doing with my life, I had to make space for it. I had to take more risks of rejection, which is admittedly the hardest part for me. I think the biggest milestones have been the first book deal, meeting my incredible agent to sign with her, and most recently, getting to curate and edit an essay anthology.

Tarot was a little bit different. I read for friends throughout college and when I first moved to the city. That network grew until it actually became kind of frustrating to answer all the calls and texts from people seeking readings with no money attached. I added a price tag just to scale back the number of people. The more I worked in arts admin though, the more I realized I’d rather be taking tarot clients. I started actively trying to build that business.

Eventually, on a lark I applied to resd cards at a store and got hired! I met a lot of people there that are still clients for me, and this was the biggest launchpad for me to be able to make steady money. I think the coolest thing has been hearing that clients found me through referall lists of other industry leaders that I respect so much! That always feels good, and always feels so “adult” and important.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://cassandra-snow.com
• Instagram: https://Mx.cassandra.snow
• Other: I’m also on Threads at mx.cassandra.snow

Image Credits

St. Laurent Lens