She's already all that
As seen in New York Daily News, Thursday, August 19, 2004

At just 25, author Crystal Lacey Winslow has written her own success story
BY REBECCA LOUIE

Author Crystal Lacey Winslow's career has turned a page. Almost 80,000 books' worth of them, to be exact. Though the odds are stacked against writers who self-publish their work, Winslow sold more than 70,000 copies of her self-financed first novel "Life, Love & Loneliness" and is now rolling out 10,000 copies of her tome "The Criss Cross."

At just 25, the Brooklyn-bred entrepreneur is on her way to becoming an Oprah-meets-Martha- Stewart mogul. She owns a bookstore, Melodrama Books & Things, in Far Rockaway, and is developing lines of children's clothing and body products. Winslow's company, Melodrama Publishing, is negotiating to release "Wifey," its first novel by a new author.

Intimidated? You should be. But Winslow's success hasn't come without a price.

"I have not had a social life in four years," admits Winslow, who now lives on Long Island. "I have not went out on one date. Not one. I haven't seen a movie at the movie theater. People have not seen me at a party. There is no potential boyfriend."

While working your way through your roaring 20s may seem more like a whimper when it comes to fun, Winslow insists that this is her only option. "I'm not at the place that I want to be yet," she says. "I don't want to get distracted. I'm too focused right now."

Making sacrifices has long been a part of Winslow's life. Raised in Brooklyn's Pink Houses projects, Winslow says she "never had a stable household." Her mother, family friends and grandmother all contributed to her upbringing, and for a while she nursed the idea of being a fashion designer because she loved watching her grandmother make the family's clothes. She eventually earned a degree in legal-assistant studies.

Against the odds

"Coming from a low-income neighborhood, living in poverty, and the people around me not really being professional people, I realized I wanted to be a lawyer as a great crowd pleaser," she says. "At that point, I said to myself, 'Let me do something that I love.'"

With a day job at a law firm, Winslow trolled the poetry slam circuit and eventually self-published a chapbook called "Melodrama." Infused with a feverish desire to write, she also churned out "Life, Love & Loneliness," about the drama of five black professionals, in three months. Winslow was determined to self-publish: "I didn't want someone to say my characters were too risqué. I didn't want rejection letters. If I failed, I failed. I could only blame me."

Scouring the Internet and the library, Winslow found a company that would print 10,000 of her books for roughly $17,000. To foot the bill, she took a second full-time job working nights with mentally challenged adults and averaged about three hours of sleep a day.

Winslow put herself on a strict budget - no designer shoes, fancy clothes or recreation. In two years, she raised the money she needed and got her books made. Additional research led her to a distributor, who placed the books in stores for a cut of the profits. She launched her own marketing effort, which included thousands of dollars' worth of posters, T-shirts, bookmarks and postcards. "Loneliness" sold out in two months.

"There is an authenticity to Crystal's voice and a compelling personal story that readers have come to know," says Patrik Henry Bass, books editor at Essence. "Life, Love & Loneliness" has landed on the magazine's best- seller list twice since April 2003. "This is how Terry McMillan emerged. Crystal has huge breakout potential."

Though Simon & Schuster offered Winslow a two-book deal, Winslow intends to continue with her self-publishing route for "The Criss Cross," an urban drama.

"I have worked too hard to get here," says Winslow, who rejected the deal but contributed a short story to a Simon & Schuster anthology, "Four Degrees of Heat." "I was literally driving asleep on highways when I worked two jobs. I could have killed myself to do my company. I wasn't doing it to get picked up by a major [publisher]. I did it to establish myself as a business woman and to establish myself in the literary world."