‘I'm aware I sound nuts': How tarot helped Stacy Gregg land her biggest book deal yet

The Spinoff

21 hours ago

When author Stacy Gregg turned to tarot cards to decide the fate of her new book the result was a six-figure deal with Simon & Schuster. But if the cards have delivered for your once, can they be relied upon again?
When I tell you that my latest book deal was predicated entirely on a tarot card reading, I'm aware I sound nuts. And yeah, fully cognisant that it's not exactly best practice to rely on mysticism for your most important financial and career decisions. I get it because I too am a sceptic about all things spiritual. Apart from once putting Jedi on my census forms I have never been interested in belonging to a religion or believing in a god – and I roll my eyes if anyone so much as tries to pick up the paper and read me my star sign.
And yet, for me there has always been something deeply compelling about tarot.
When I was a kid, fortune tellers were always on TV shows, as ubiquitous as quicksand and sasquatch. There they were clattering their bangles and gazing into crystal balls on every show from The Love Boat to Hogan's Heroes (J'adore Lebeau in a gypsy turban!). Then out would come the tarot deck and they'd turn the cards and gasp in mock shock before solemnly interpreting their confounding symbolism to the dupe opposite them.
Tarot held a nostalgic, kitsch fascination for me – but until last year I had never really had the urge to have my cards read.
And then my house flooded. Not just a little bit, not a leak in the carport. I mean proper natural disaster. And so, after loading all my worldly possessions into eight jumbo skips I found myself shacked up in some rented dumpster fire of a house, endlessly filling out insurance paperwork and meanwhile the TV series I was meant to be writing hadn't yet been green-lit so I had no paid employment to speak of. Plus, after nearly two decades of being bound to a big UK publishing house I now found myself cut loose with no contract and no agent since Nancy, my rock since forever, had just announced her retirement. It is at times like this that a girl thinks to herself 'I might get my tarot cards done.'
Luckily I knew a tarot reader who was in the same state of flux that I was. Sarah Nathan and I are old friends and when she told me she was giving up her lucrative day job to do tarot reading … OK, I might have made that 'huh' sound that Jesse Mulligan makes when he's interviewing someone on RNZ. But I knew Sarah. She was neither a flake nor a slouch – she was taking her career move to tarot seriously. She already had a website – 'AbundanceLoveJoy.com' – and she delivered her readings via zoom or as a pre-record and then uploaded them to a unique YouTube channel just for you so that you could watch your cards unfold in privacy at your leisure.
Also, yeah, yeah, obviously I'm fully aware of the ways that mystics, like tarot readers, can use techniques to trick their marks into thinking they have powers – things like 'cold reading' in which the tarot card reader pumps you for information you aren't even aware you're giving them to create the illusion of psychic ability. Absolutely Sarah had the advantage of knowing loads about me – it would be easy to extrapolate and make stuff up. But she was legit in her beliefs. And I wasn't asking if there was a tall, dark and handsome stranger in my future.
I only had one question for Sarah and her cards: What the hell should I do about my manuscript?
Despite my newfound, full-time, unwanted job handling insurance claims for my flooded house, I had somehow managed to write a book that year. It was a cat dystopia. When people asked me to explain the plot I would say: 'It's like a cross between Watership Down and Logan's Run – but with cats.'
Since I had no agent and no publisher, the only person who had seen it to date was my friend, author Nicky Pellegrino. Knowing the pickle I was in, Nicky had valiantly offered to read The Last Journey. So I gave her the 60,000 word text and braced myself.
'I think it's special,' she told me as we walked our dogs on Kakamatua beach. 'I think you should take it wide.'
In publishing parlance, taking a book wide means sending it out universally to find the highest bidder. It's a ballsy move – even when you do have an agent. I didn't have one so I would be effectively agenting myself.
'I just can't,' I said. 'Publishing in the UK is so agent-dependent. Plus I'm too defeated by life right now.'
She protested but I gave her a hard no on the matter. I mean why rely on the voice of a number one best-selling international author like Nicky? But a tarot reading? Now you're talking sense!
On the Zoom, Sarah smiled at me. She has the most uplifting smile, a halo of chic blonde hair, designer glasses, several decks of tarot lined up in front of her. 'I like to pull cards from different decks,' she explained. Some of the decks were classical, elegant with medieval style imagery, others were new-agey, while still others were homemade and used words and pictures normally associated with the building and construction industry like drills and chisels and diggers – all of which would be given a metaphorical twist in Sarah's interpretation.
Multiple decks and many many cards were drawn but according to Sarah they all said the same thing and it was basically the same thing Nicky had said, only this time I was listening. 'This book is a treasure,' Sarah insisted. 'The cards are telling you to break the wheel. You need to show it to multiple publishers.'
I finished our call elated. My book was a treasure!
And then a more sane thought: I was a mental. I couldn't just act out a batshit career move because the cards told me to do it.
'Nah,' I said to my boyfriend, 'I've decided to be normal. I'm just going to send it to one publisher, the old one I used to be with back in the day. Maybe they'll take it. I will cross my fingers and hope for the best.'
Except that night I lay in bed unable to sleep. Nicky thought the book was good. Sarah said that cards were telling me to go for it. Really, at the end of the day what was the very worst that could happen? I get rejected by multiple houses in a long, drawn-out fiasco? That sounded like a typical publishing scenario to me.
And so, the next day, with a cute covering letter, I sent the manuscript out. I didn't technically take it 'wide' – only to the four publishing houses in London that I had meaningful relationships with. Of the four, the one I was most excited about was Simon & Schuster. My old editor was now the head of the children's publishing division there, and her second-in-command and I had also enjoyed a long and happy working relationship when they had both been at HarperCollins. Since they'd been at Simon & Schuster the company had grown so exponentially they were looking for new offices. They were so hot right now. Having the book with them would be the dream scenario.
When I sent the emails off I truly had no expectation of a swift reply. Publishing is the slowest business in the world. It's typical for a house to take three months to get back to you, especially on an unsolicited manuscript. I settled in and prepared myself for a long, long wait.
Twelve hours later I had an email back from Rachel and Michelle at Simon & Schuster. 'Great pitch! Hold tight! We're reading…'
I had another email back two days later. They'd read it. They loved it. Could they make a pre-emptive offer to take it off the table before the other houses swooped? Well duh, yup you can.
And so, at two in the morning, on my phone in bed I negotiated a six-figure deal for The Last Journey. It was the biggest advance I had ever got for a book. I did it without an agent and in my jim-jams and whenever I pushed back and asked for more money I felt certain I was right. Because the tarot cards told me this book was a treasure.
Looking back now, without the cards to back me up, things could have gone so differently. It was Sarah's faith, her cards, that weirdly gave me confidence in my own abilities. I can't explain it. All I know is that it worked.
A few months later I consulted Sarah again. I had a question I just had to know the answer to. I was nominated for the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults for my novel Nine Girls. The thing was, I had been nominated for the same award eight times before and I had always lost. It is not much fun flying to Wellington eight times to sit in an auditorium and lose in front of everyone. This time, I had to know. What was my fate to be?
Sarah shuffled the deck and asked the cards. 'Will Stacy win the book awards?'
The card she drew from the deck depicted a grizzled old woman cowering in rags in the snow, being pelted by rotten fruit and shunned by the crowds. Pretty definitive. Sarah agreed. 'It's another no I'm afraid.' Good to know, I grieved and let it go and flew to Wellington anyway to tautoko the winners.
This story explains why, when they called my name that night to say that Nine Girls had won the Margaret Mahy Award for the Book of the Year I sat slack-jawed and did not get out of my seat for quite some time. Sarah says my own negative energy from all those years of losing influenced the deck on the reading that day. I agree. The cards are all about your energy. And so, last week I booked a reading and asked her about my new book. The one that will come after The Last Journey. Apparently it's a corker. Now I just need to write it.
The Last Journey