Publishing Strategy Intensive

From inspiration to publication.

One month.

One private six-hour intensive.

One clear publishing path.

I used to have a speech impediment. For awhile, my ls sounds like ys and my th sounded like f. People laughed at how I spoke, adult people too. As a fourth-grader, my report card reflected a strange little duality: I was enrolled in both gifted education and special ed.

I loved my speech classes. Our teacher, Mrs. Q had a treasure box of prizes, so many hard little erasers in neon, so many glow brite pencils. I actually tried to purposely flunk my exit exam to stay in Speech longer, but Mrs. Q peeped my game.

Maybe my relationship with words, duality, and communication was written in the stars. My Moon is in Gemini. My Chiron, the astrological placement associated with our wounds and the wisdom that can emerge from them, is in Gemini in my third house, the space associated with communication, language and learning. My mother is a Gemini. My maternal grandmother had two sets of twins.

I know what it’s like to feel deeply misunderstood. I know what it’s like to silence yourself. I know what it’s like to discover your power through words.

Gemini is the sign of duality, translation, curiosity, communication, and connection. This and that. Art and commerce. Intuition and information. Heart and strategy. Donald Trump and Lauryn Hill. Tupac and Marilyn Monroe.

Your book exists in multiple worlds.

It is art. And it is entering a marketplace. It is freely expressed and expertly crafted. These aren't enemies, but they do need a bridge. Publishing advice often starts with the marketplace: What's selling? What's your platform? Who's the audience? What's the hook? Can we position it?

All useful questions.

But I begin somewhere else.

Who are you?

What won't leave you alone? What are you obsessed with (like for real)? What do you keep returning to? What legacy do you want to leave behind on this earth? What do you actually have room for? What kind of creative life sustains you? What do you intuitively know about this book that everybody else's advice keeps trying to talk you out of?

And then:

Where and how does that person meet the literary marketplace of today and tomorrow?

Your “Write” Path Depends…

You could go: Traditional publishing. Independent publishing. Hybrid publishing. Small press. You could adapt your book. It could become a university zine. An award-winning graphic novel. Podcast. Novella. Substack series. Vertical series.

There is never one correct path. The right answer depends on the book, the season, the market, your resources, your desired readership, your appetite for entrepreneurship, your relationship with visibility, your financial goals, your patience, your need for creative control, your intuition, your ancestral inheritance.

The Publishing Strategy Intensive exists to find the bridge.

YOU + BOOK + MARKET + LIFE = YOUR ALIGNED PATH.

The most expensive mistake is always self-abandonment.

Ignoring your heart is pricey, and while doing so may translate into riches, it rarely translates into wealth.

You can get The Deal and hate the book. Build the “significant platform” and detest your fans. Spend $40,000 independently publishing something you weren't ready to publish anywhere. Spend three years querying a manuscript when you would have been happier building your own readership. Hire an editor when what you really needed was time. Hire a publicist when what you really needed was better distribution. Follow every piece of good publishing advice and somehow end up with a creative life that doesn't feel like yours.

Meet the constellation

Every book is a galactic system and a village.

It needs someone who can see the architecture when you're too close to it. Someone who can hear the sentence that's almost there. Someone who can help you stand behind your own words when it's time to read them aloud.

And sometimes, someone who understands that creative inhibition doesn't live only in the mind. The body comes to the desk, too.

Gemini Moon brings together a constellation of artists, editors, teachers, and practitioners I trust to help writers and their books shine.

Not every writer needs every person.

We figure out what your book needs—and, just as importantly, what you need to bring it into the world.

EDGAR GOMEZ

Developmental Editor + Manuscript Review

Edgar Gomez is the author of two award-winning books, High-Risk Homosexual and Alligator Tears and the possessor of one of my favorite combinations in a writer: smart, funny, and compassionate.

That's exactly the sensibility you want from someone looking at the bones of a book.

Edgar works at the level of the manuscript itself: structure, narrative movement, character, voice, pacing, emotional logic and the big question underneath all the little ones—

Is this book becoming what it wants to become?

For writers who aren't ready for a full developmental edit, manuscript review offers another possibility: an expert read of the work as a whole, identifying what's alive, what's unclear, what's missing and where the manuscript may want to go next.

TANYA SHIRAZI-GALVEZ

Line Editor

Once the architecture works, we get close. Sentence-level close.

Tanya Shirazi-Galvez is a writer of poetic prose, an editor whose literary experience includes the award-winning journal Aster(ix), an essay published on Roxane Gay’s Audacity newsletter, and a doctoral candidate at UNLV.

She works where rhythm, precision, image, syntax, and voice meet.

A great line edit asks:

How can this sentence become more completely itself?

Tanya listens for the music already inside your prose: the cadence that's yours, the image that deserves another second, the paragraph that's nearly singing—and helps you bring it forward.

You made the voice. Tanya helps it ring.

CHARLENE MODESTE

Performance + Author Presence

Writing the words is one thing.

Standing in front of a room and claiming them is another.

Charlene Modeste is the creator of She's About to Pop, a one-hour play documenting her journey through fibroids, cannabis, healing, and her own creative awakening.

She understands that reading your work aloud isn't about putting on your Official Author Voice.

It's about becoming more fully you in front of other people.

Charlene works with writers on presence, voice, embodiment and the strange vulnerable art of standing behind what you've made.

How do you breathe? Where do you rush? Where do you disappear?

Where are you performing instead of communicating?

And what changes when you stop trying to sound like a writer and let the room actually meet you?

MINA AIDOO

Trauma Resolution + Somatic Pleasure + Creative Process

Sometimes the manuscript isn't the only thing that's stuck.

You sit down to write and suddenly need a snack.

You revise the same three pages for six months.

You know exactly what the chapter needs and somehow cannot make yourself touch it.

You become extraordinarily productive at everything except the thing you say matters most.

Creative inhibition has a bodily dimension.

Mina Aidoo is a trauma-resolution practitioner and somatic pleasure healer whose work invites writers to become curious about what happens in the body around visibility, vulnerability, pleasure, inhibition and creative risk.

Rather than treating creative freeze as evidence that you're lazy, undisciplined or insufficiently committed, Mina helps you notice the patterns your nervous system brings to the creative process—and explore ways of working with your body's information rather than waging war against it.

Every book—and author—needs the right people at the right time.

One manuscript may need developmental intervention before anybody touches a sentence.

Another may already have its bones and need an extraordinary line editor.

Another writer may have a finished book but freeze every time she's asked to read from it.

Another may discover that the biggest obstacle between herself and the manuscript isn't craft at all.

Gemini Moon isn't interested in surrounding your book with an enormous team because an enormous team looks impressive.

We build the constellation around the work.

The right person.

At the right stage.

For the right reason.

So the finished book doesn't merely look professional.

It shines like itself.

I want your book journey to be healthy, wealthy, and wise.

Healthy = your creative life feels like an extension of self-compassion.

Wealthy = you’re experiencing true abundance: time, profits, community, ownership, creative relationships, intellectual property, readership, pleasure, cultural influence, and possibility.

Wise = you understand the choices you're making and why you're making them and how to adjust as you and the world change.

I start with a fifteen minute call.

You tell me only what you’re comfortable with sharing. Tell me what you're thinking about. Tell me where you're stuck. Tell me the strange book idea you can't stop thinking about. I will point you toward the most useful next step in fifteen minutes. Maybe we'll discover that you're ready for something deeper. Either way, we'll talk.

Click here for the fifteen-minute conversation→

Then, if it’s a clear match, we move onto the The Publishing Strategy Intensive.

Over one month, we'll examine the nexus between who you are, what you're creating, how you work, your strengths and vulnerabilities, who the book is for, and how it wants to flow through the world.

You’ll leave knowing that you are truly writing the book you were destined to write.

Click here to sign up for your initial Publishing Strategy Call→