Meet Jessica Mathews

We were lucky to catch up with Jessica Mathews recently and have shared our conversation below.

Jessica, we’re so excited for our community to get to know you and learn from your journey and the wisdom you’ve acquired over time. Let’s kick things off with a discussion on self-confidence and self-esteem. How did you develop yours?

It took thirty years of living before I truly developed any sort of measurable confidence. From an early age, I was thrust into leadership training and positions. I was a Girl Scout (starting at Daisy level). I started volunteering at age thirteen. I was on the board (president, vice president, treasurer, etc.) of numerous school clubs and organizations. I participated in speech competitions from the regional to the national levels. I even starred in a school play. I took everything I learned about leadership from elementary to high school with me to college and continued to participate in different organizations and management positions. I even studied abroad for a semester. In all honesty, all of the confidence I had in myself during that time was faked. I never truly felt capable or confident in myself until I was around thirty years old. One day, I realized that I was tying other people’s opinions of me to my self-worth and that was dragging me down. Once I made an active decision to ignore what other people thought of me, I was able to use all of the training and experiences that shaped my life and turn fighting for others’ approval into advocating for myself and my needs. I stand taller with a brighter future because I finally realized that no amount of preparation helps if you let others dictate who you are.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I write fantasy books for children and adults. I also recently published a coffee table book with my photography, poetry, and short stories (for adults). I am working on more chapter books for children, have a young adult book in the early editing phases, and have a new poetry book scheduled to release later this year. I would also like to create a new coffee table book with my travel and nature photography to release early next year. One of the new things I am the most excited about is creating a board game for my Pirate Princess children’s book series. I have never done something like this before, so it feels like I am about to embark on a great adventure.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

The three skills I think you need to run your own business are customer service or people skills, time management, and leadership or public speaking skills. If you can’t speak to an audience, you will never be able to tell people about your product in order to sell it. Whether you are telling people about your new book release or a new product, if people don’t know your new thing exists, they will never buy into your brand. How can they if your book or product is never brought out into the light of day? I also think you need customer service skills, meaning, you should be able to handle any issues or complaints brought your way without getting defensive and flustered. This is your brand. If something is wrong, you need to know about the problem and be the one to fix the issue. If you have never worked with a customer or in a field where you handled complaints, you won’t be prepared to react calmly and rationally when complaints crop up, and, trust me, complaints always crop up, especially when you least expect them. The complaints don’t usually make much sense to you, but your customer service skills will help you get to the crux of the issue and figure out what the complaint is about. The last thing I think people need to run a business is time management. If you are always late or running behind, if you can’t meet deadlines or ship a product within the window you set, people will lose confidence in your ability to deliver a product. For authors specifically, if you owe edits to an editor by a specific date and don’t make that deadline, your book may not be published until the next publishing cycle, which could be a year later than planned. If you have readers expecting your next book by a specific date and you don’t deliver, this is a surefire way to lose your readership and not sell any books.

If you knew you only had a decade of life left, how would you spend that decade?

My last goal was to write and publish forty books before I turned forty years old. I accomplished that goal March 2025 on my fortieth birthday. My goals for the next decade of my life include writing and publishing more. I want to get into writing young adult and middle grade chapter books since I haven’t written anything like that before. I want to get the young adult book I have in edits actually published before my hair is completely gray. It’s much more complicated than it seems to be from a reader’s perspective, and is taking me longer than I thought to accomplish my goal. I would also like to travel more, gain more new life experiences, and find more interesting research topics to write about.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.jessicamathewsbooks.com
• Instagram: hey_steve_its_bucky
• Facebook: @jessicamathewsbooks