PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Reea Rod­ney is not con­tent with rest­ing on her suc­cess.

She over­came be­ing di­ag­nosed with fi­bromyal­gia– a con­di­tion that caus­es pain all over the body to es­tab­lish her­self as on Ama­zon.com’s best-list in 2021 for her chil­dren’s book se­ries Ju­niper and Rose.

A year on, the 42-year-old Trinida­di­an au­thor, pub­lish­er, and mo­ti­va­tion­al speak­er in the Unit­ed States has found suc­cess through her pub­lished work once again as her an­thol­o­gy The Se­cret Prayer of a Right­eous Black Woman: The Pow­er of a Moth­er’s Prayer once again made Ama­zon’s best-sell­er list.

The book fea­tured tes­ti­monies from Rod­ney, along with 11 oth­er Black moms, geared to­wards teach­ing women how to iden­ti­fy and elim­i­nate fear through faith.

The book made it to #1 on Ama­zon’s best-sell­er list in nine cat­e­gories in­clud­ing Women’s Per­son­al Spir­i­tu­al Growth, Mo­ti­va­tion­al Growth and Spir­i­tu­al­i­ty, In­spi­ra­tional Per­son­al Tes­ti­monies, So­cial Is­sues and Chris­tian­i­ty and Prayer.

How­ev­er, Rod­ney’s per­son­al suc­cess was bol­stered by the fact that she al­lowed oth­er up-and-com­ing writ­ers to be­come suc­cess­ful un­der her Dara Pub­lish­ing im­print, not just in the Unit­ed States but in Eu­ro­pean Mar­kets and even in In­dia.

“That par­tic­u­lar an­thol­o­gy, that was dear to my heart, be­cause my first time do­ing this an­thol­o­gy pro­gramme, I mean, it is a busi­ness so I make mon­ey by do­ing it but what hap­pened in this pro­gramme is that every­body who em­bark on this jour­ney, they all be­come au­thors, they all have the op­por­tu­ni­ty to sell the book on their plat­form to re­tain 100 per cent of their earn­ings. And I cre­at­ed a pro­gramme in a way to es­tab­lish en­tre­pre­neurs. So it’s not just they write a book,” she told Guardian Me­dia.

She added: “So they all went on with the abil­i­ty to launch four dif­fer­ent busi­ness­es off of that book, first the book sales, just sell­ing the book as an au­thor. And al­so they learn how to mon­e­tize and lever­age the book as a speak­er. They al­so learn how to mon­e­tize and lever­age the book by cre­at­ing a pro­gramme or a dig­i­tal prod­uct.”

The book’s suc­cess in those for­eign mar­kets was al­so based on Rod­ney’s savvy in terms of net­work­ing. In a bid to man­age costs at her pub­lish­ing com­pa­ny, she looked out­side of the Unit­ed States.

“Once I de­cid­ed that I want­ed to open up my com­pa­ny to work with peo­ple I knew that I want­ed to have af­ford­able prices as it re­lates to the il­lus­tra­tions and the for­mat­ting of my book and I want­ed to build a re­la­tion­ship with some­one so that I can have them as my go-to. So you know, in do­ing this, this job this field is good to out­source. If I were to hire some­one in the US, it will be very ex­pen­sive. But when you hire some­one in­ter­na­tion­al­ly, US mon­ey holds a lot of weight,” she said.

“I just met the peo­ple and I hap­pen to met this won­der­ful hus­band and wife, the wife Il­lus­tra­tor has been type­set­ting so we’ve been work­ing to­geth­er as a team, every clan I get a chil­dren book goes to them. Every client I get who has to for­mat the book goes to them, and in re­turn, you know if by chance they would have a client that came di­rect­ly to them and that per­son is hav­ing an is­sue with mak­ing the book he will re­fer them to me. So it’s just a mat­ter of me, let­ting them know, Hey, I’m go­ing to be do­ing the best sell­ing cam­paign on this day,” she said.

Rod­ney’s ap­proach to new clients is al­so in­ter­na­tion­al, as her col­leagues al­so re­fer po­ten­tial au­thors to her. Through the use on mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy, she is able to con­nect and ad­vise these au­thors on their work all the way through pub­li­ca­tion to pro­mo­tion.

“I will ini­ti­ate and we start an­oth­er dis­cov­ery ses­sion. That is usu­al­ly done through Zoom. So it al­lows me to ser­vice peo­ple any­where in the world once they can af­ford it. And we set up that that first con­sul­ta­tive free then I’ll hear about the book, and then I’ll talk to them. I’ll give them in­sight. I’m very pas­sion­ate about what I do in this space. And I’m not just some­one who’s gonna take any­body book that they say that they wrote and pub­lish it,’ she said, ex­plain­ing that tips and sug­ges­tions to re­work books are of­ten shared be­tween her and her clients be­fore the de­ci­sion to pub­lish is made, said Rod­ney.

As of Jan­u­ary, she had suc­cess­ful­ly pub­lished 30 clients, of which, Rod­ney said, 24 be­came list­ed on the top 100 on Ama­zon.