We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Clarence & Yalonda Lewis. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Clarence & Yalonda below.

Clarence & Yalonda, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear the story of how you went from this being just an idea to making it into something real.

During the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020, one of the things we started doing together was live-streaming on Sunday nights on Twitch (twitch.tv/djcsharp). Our stream is called HeartBEATS in The Basement and Clarence plays slow jams while Yalonda chats with him and the virtual guests about music, relationships, or other fun topics.

For our 25th wedding anniversary, we streamed a celebratory HeartBEATS episode titled, “25 Things We’ve Learned in 25 Years.” We thought it would be a fun way to reminisce about our quarter-century together while sharing our milestone day with family and friends in a safe, responsible way considering the pandemic. We told stories and lessons learned, joked, laughed, disagreed, and had a great time.

Clarence’s dad usually calls after each stream to give us his feedback. But suddenly we had a dozen people call or text us to tell us how much they enjoyed the show. They enjoyed it not solely for its entertainment value, but more importantly, they appreciated our representation of black love. They loved our candidness about some of what it takes to achieve marital longevity. Almost everyone suggested that we should write a book. Our first thoughts were, “Yeah right, what do we know about writing a book? What do we look like advising people on marriage? We’re not counselors. We are just two people who got married out of college and have been trying to figure it out through trial and error for the past 25 years.”

The next day, much to our surprise, the phone calls and texts encouraging us to do more kept coming. So we began to reconsider. “Should we write a book? Is this something we could pull off? Could we write a book?” We started doing a little research and reached out to friends who are published authors to discuss the kind of commitment such an undertaking requires. They were all quite encouraging and provided us with tons of helpful information about self-publishing. After serious thought and getting over our initial trepidation, we decided to put pen to paper to try.

We modeled this book after the stream, using the “25 Things We’ve Learned in 25 Years” as the baseline for our chapters. When composing the original list for the stream, we each separately drafted a list of 15 lessons from our time as a married couple. Afterward, we sat together and compared lists. We were pleased by how much they did not overlap. We attributed the lack of overlap to our distinct perceptions of our shared experiences and how we had individually applied those experiences to the marriage. Reviewing our items together was a walk down memory lane as we discussed the events and stories that resulted in each lesson. Some lessons were obvious to both of us, and some required explanation, but it wasn’t difficult to get on the same page about each of the items. In the end, we were able to create our consolidated list and that gave us the outline for who would write which section.

We started writing in September. It was a tough process, but we dedicated 4 hours a week to nothing but writing. One of our friends helped us stay on track with a week check-in. We completed our writing in March. We then hired an editor. We had 3 iterations of revisions and submitted our book to Amazon for publishing. It was completed and released in July.

Clarence & Yalonda, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

One of the cornerstones of our marriage has always been their love of music. First, that love led Clarence to start DJ’ing part-time under the moniker DJ C Sharp. In 2020, our love of music led them to start a weekly livestream broadcast centered on R&B music and conversations about life and relationships called HeartBEATS on Twitch (twitch.tv/djcsharp). Based on our stories and on-stream chemistry, our family and online community encouraged us to write about our marital adventures and insights. The product of that encouragement is aptly titled, The Rhythm of Love: 25 Things that 25 Years of Marriage Taught us.

We have expanded beyond the book to marriage seminars and in-person book clubs to promote the book and engage other couples.

We are most proud of the newly created segment of our show called “Renting” The Basement. (The Basement is what we call our studio.) Every chapter of our book is titled after a song to represent the theme of the chapter. We invite couples on to do the same. Tell us all your love story through songs. We play the songs and they talk about why those songs have meaning to them and their relationships. We feel it’s been very successful. Our guests and audience have enjoyed learning all the positive examples of black love that are out there.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

The book world is all about awareness and buzz. You have to find ways to create buzz about your product and generate awareness of you and your product. We had a marketing strategy, but it was woefully insufficient. One specific lesson we learned was the difference between completing the project and publishing the project. There are multiple reviewer and editorial sites where you can submit your projects for review and to raise awareness of your project. If you can connect to the right sites, they will actively help you promote your book. We published our book through Amazon as soon as we finished it. This was a mistake. Had we had a more comprehensive machine and better resources behind us, we might have known this and thus created more awareness of our project.

If we could redo it, we would have attempted to work with a larger publishing house. Even if it costs more. They understand the workings of the publishing machine.

How’d you meet your business partner?

We met during our colligate years. We took a class together ironically called “Marriage and the Family” We studied together a couple of times and eventually, started dating in the Spring of 1993. We married in 1996.

Contact Info:

• Website: cylentertainment.com
• Instagram: cylentertainment
• Facebook: cylentertainment
• Twitter: cylentertainme2
• Other: Twitch.tv/djcsharp