The Power of the Page: Bestselling Author Scarlett St. Clair Turns Reading Into Community Building
PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRIS ANDREWS
Lines out the door, a global premiere, attendees in costume as their favorite characters. Are we talking about Comic-Con? A blockbuster superhero movie?
No, this is another successful book tour for Oklahoma City-based romance and fantasy author Scarlett St. Clair.
St. Clair’s latest book, A Touch of Chaos, is the final installment in her romantasy series reimagining the story of Hades and Persephone, and broke through just about every bestseller’s list when it debuted — New York Times, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, The Globe — plus it’s topping physical and digital lists for retailers like Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Apple Books and Kindle.
But St. Clair doesn’t measure success based on bestseller charts. She said what truly matters to her is that, for many of her fans, her books got them back into reading.
St. Clair (the author’s nom de plume) said her first foray into self-publishing under her given name in 2014 wasn’t all she had hoped. After introspection on her first publication effort and becoming a librarian at Pioneer Library in Oklahoma City, she changed her approach to publishing her work. Her time at the library taught her how readers approach a written work and how they search for information.
“I knew friends only read what their friends were reading. And I think in my head I was like, ‘How do you cultivate that? How do you ensure people are recommending your books to their friends?’” says St. Clair.
“Part of that to me is feeling like I know that author or feeling like I understand those characters. So, I did whatever I could do to illustrate, ‘We have this connection. We’re not alone.’”
The Power of Myth
So after deciding to change her approach and selecting Scarlett as her pen name — one of the names her mother had picked out for her as an infant — she began working on her first book as Scarlett in 2018. This time her aim was to build connections with her readers, and build a community after it was published. After she found more success with her first book under her new name, her next effort was a modernization and retelling of the Greek myth of Hades and Persephone.
As a former English Writing major at the University of Oklahoma, St. Clair had read many Greek epics and found them fascinating. One reason for the interest was the fact that, despite these myths being written thousands of years ago, humanity largely doesn’t change — making retellings all the more important and poignant. And with her Hades x Persephone series, St. Clair joins a wave of reimaginings and retellings that have captured the cultural consciousness in the past decade across mediums such as books, musicals, comics and video games.
When asked why she selected the myth of Hades and Persephone, she muses, “I always wanted [the myth] to be a love story — knowing it wasn’t, but I wanted it to be for the women involved. And I think that’s why it’s so nice to retell it, because that’s a point of power for the women who were silenced consistently in the original.”
Celebrating female agency and sex positivity is a cornerstone of St. Clair’s work — and as an author creating romance novels for adults, she is no stranger to writing steamy scenes and depicting sex in her work. But in her books, St. Clair always centers on the woman’s experience when writing these moments, as an intentional act of sex positivity. St. Clair pointed to how literature can help educate women in sexually repressed cultures about unhealthy and healthy sexual dynamics.
“There’s just so many negative repercussions for not openly talking about sex. It just cultivates this fear around sex that’s more detrimental to women, in particular, than anyone else,” she says. “There’s power in women embracing sex, and I think that’s scary for society.”
By choosing to retell ancient stories that weren’t kind to women in a genre that many literary institutions have historically interpreted as lesser, St. Clair hopes to explore society’s relationship to sex, love and power, which is why she writes the way she does.
PHOTOGRAPH BY LEXI CAMPBELL
Indie and Traditional Publishing
For her second attempt at being a professional author, St. Clair decided to set better goals for herself.
“The problem with the goals I set when I was that young is that they were too big. I think I placed the wrong value on things, like for example, The New York Times list,” she says. “What you don’t realize when you’re that young is that you feel like you need to be authenticated; you need the approval of an agent or a publisher and The New York Times.Yeah, well, none of those things are true.”
And it turns out St. Clair was right: She didn’t need a publisher or New York Times approval to have the success she wanted. With smaller goals under her belt (her first 50 reviews on Amazon, her first fan art, 100 Kindle highlights), she self-published her first book in the Hades x Persephone saga, A Touch of Darkness, in May of 2019 while still working full-time at the library, and it had a great reception with her growing reader base.
After working on additional books and publishing A Touch of Ruin in 2020, she realized she could “take a chance” on herself and be a self-published author full-time with what she was making. She quit her job at the library, even though publishing community members told her that it was impossible to earn a substantial income from what she was doing.
Those naysayers were also proven wrong, after she published A Touch of Malice in 2021. This was the turning point for St. Clair who, though she didn’t know it, was blowing up on TikTok when users started recommending her books as part of the BookTok community.
“I started to notice right about when Malice was coming out that my physical book sales exceeded my ebook sales, which is unheard of in the indie space, as you’re usually heavily ebook. Then my book started getting into Barnes & Noble stores,” says St. Clair.
After visiting various Barnes & Noble locations in Oklahoma and across the country to sign their book stock (which all sold out fairly quickly), she visited the B&N location at The Grove in Los Angeles. This fateful visit led to a meeting with leadership at a Sourcebooks imprint named Bloom Books — the publisher behind Fifty Shades of Grey. St. Clair recalled the meeting with the leadership at Bloom fondly.
“The first thing I told them when we got on the phone was I wanted to take over the world, and they didn’t laugh at me,” St. Clair says. “They said they wanted it too, and said, ‘Here’s all your opportunity.’”
St. Clair with an impressive gathering of her loyal readership
PHOTOGRAPH BY LEXI CAMPBELL
Taking Over the World
It turns out the idea of “taking over the world” for St. Clair wasn’t all that farfetched. A whirlwind few years later, her books are published in 18 languages, she has international book signing events and her creations have conquered almost every bestselling chart.
But even as her success has become apparent, St. Clair still emphasized how much the power of connection means to her. Her book signing events often take hours due to making a personal moment with every one of her hundreds of readers in line.
In these lines, she hears personal stories about how her books have changed her readers’ lives. St. Clair hears their stories and shares her own stories of triumphs, traumas and tears.
PHOTOGRAPH BY LEXI CAMPBELL
And as much as her readers give their support for her books, St. Clair makes a point of giving back, too — generously backing the Pioneer Library System’s high school completion program and other reading programs, spontaneously fulfilling GoFundMe campaigns and maintaining her donor advised fund at the Oklahoma City Community Foundation.
“My dad said, ‘You have to help people.’ But my dad would help people with nothing,” St. Clair recalls. “And now that I have something, if I don’t help people with it, what’s the point?”
St. Clair had set herself a goal of being a famous author when she read Lord of the Rings for the first time at 13. Now that she’s achieved that dream it’s her community that sustains and empowers her to keep sharing her art. •
Scarlett St. Clair’s next book, Apples Dipped In Gold, will be released in ebook on July 16 and trade paperback on Oct. 29. To learn more about Scarlett St. Clair or where to buy her books, visit her website at scarlettstclair.com or follow her on Instagram at @authorscarlettstclair.