We recently connected with Madam Crystal Butterfly and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Madam Crystal, thanks for joining us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

Learning my craft was not easy. Writing books is interesting because most of the book creation process is figuring out how to do it on your own. Sure, you can go to school for writing, but all school can do is give you an idea of how to get started. Everything else is you figuring things out on your own. I first attempted to write a book back at the begging of my college days. At that time, all my story ideas were absolute garbage, and I’m happy they were; otherwise, I would never have figured out how to write anything good. However, my biggest mistake that created a problem for me was putting book writing on hold for several years. By placing book writing on hold, I was freezing my ability to improve my ability to write a story. That is why when I returned to writing books, it took me longer to get good at it than it would have if I had kept working on it—stepping away also made marketing my stories more complicated. Because during that time, I was not trying to build an audience to market. Marketing is an author’s biggest obstacle. When I finally could market my books successfully, I was forced to see that even though marketing would still have been difficult, I would have established an audience to sell to sooner.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I first seriously entered the life of an author after getting my bachelor’s degree. A lot of uncertainty entered my life then, making getting the standard nine to five complicated. During that time, the only insurance I had to build myself up was my book writing, so I went back to working on my craft to improve my writing ability. When I got feedback that the story I wrote was good, I decided to self-publish my first story, Curse of the Frog Prince part 1. My storytelling improved to the point where I am releasing three new stories this year. They are Goblins Labyrinth, Realms the Hidden Fairy, and Wedded Bliss. I’ve been an author for many years now, so I will soon offer more services than my audience. Including writers’ workshops, special stories exclusive to my patron, and an online concert. The concert is my most ambitious project because I am hiring dancers and getting music composed for each of my stories. More information about the concert will be released on my social media later this year. I’m proud that I can provide my audience with fun stories and will soon have more exciting things to share.

Alright – so here’s a fun one. What do you think about NFTs?

I am not a fan of NFTs. From what I have seen, NFTs take advantage of people for profit. I may deal in books, but it would be easy for me to use that to create an NFT. I could make a lot of money from NFTs, but I won’t because I will never take advantage of my fans. They are the ones who took a chance on me and my stories. Taking advantage of people who trust me with NFTs is a line I will never cross.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Something I had to unlearn was lessoning to everyone’s opinion about marketing except for my own. Not immediately doing this hurt my early sales of Curse of the Frog Prince part 1. I was told to keep my book a secret and tell people nothing about it outside of its name. This advice hurt my sales, and some other advice almost got me into debt to vanity publishers. It took me a year after putting out my first book before my sales improved. It’s good to hear advice, but using your discernment about the advice you receive is better than considering your own ideas.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mcbutterfly777/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/madam-crystal-butterfly-81328a246/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/MadamCrystalBu2
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/