Latest news with #ThePerfectDivorce
Entrepreneur
3 days ago
- Business
- Entrepreneur
Jeneva Rose on Writing No.1 Bestseller 'The Perfect Divorce'
This week's How Success Happens guest is a bestselling thriller writer who has been called "The Queen of Twists." So there was a 50/50 chance I would be murdered by the end of our maybe it was I who turned out to be the killer? Spoiler alert: Neither of those things happened. But instead, Jeneva Rose, whose new novel, The Perfect Divorce, hit No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list, shared incredible tips for creative people who are looking to turn their passion into a business. Rose's background in marketing shapes every part of her writing, an edge that helped her turn her breakthrough novel, The Perfect Marriage, from a small press release into a bestseller. In this episode, Rose breaks down how she creates viral TikToks, her "binge-writing" approach to her books, and answers a question that has plagued this interviewer's mind: Do audiobooks count as reading? You can listen to our conversation below, or on your podcast platform of choice. And check out highlights of our chat here, which have been edited for length and clarity. Subscribe to How Success Happens: Apple | Spotify | YouTube Congrats on The Perfect Divorce hitting No. 1. How does that feel? It feels surreal. My brain hasn't caught up. Being No. 1 on the bestseller list is a pretty big sign of success, but how do you personally define success? It used to be the accolades of having the bestseller status, selling millions of copies and the big advances. But I think my definition of success changed about a year and a half ago, and it was when I was facing severe burnout. I didn't have the right team around me, so when I hit my breaking point, I knew I needed to make a change in order to continue this career. I changed up the whole team around me, and now I define success as being able to breathe, to have other people in the room speak on my behalf and to take a day off without feeling guilty that I should be doing something to progress my career. That's what success is. Related: Barbara Corcoran Reveals Who the Cheapest Shark Really Is — And Explains the True Passion That Drives Her Success When The Perfect Marriage first came out, you weren't yet a known writer. As you wrote the follow-up, were you keenly aware that every sentence you typed was likely going to be read by millions of people? It's the same thing when I create my videos for social media or write my books. I forget that other people are going to read or see it. I write my books for me. The first book I ever wrote was literally for myself. I was not trying to get published. It was to work through the grief of losing my mother. What were you doing before you became a writer? I was a global senior social media manager, so I actually wrote my first four or five books while working full-time. The job was basically 8 to 5, so I wrote during nights and weekends. I would do these big writing sessions where I worked from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. I continue to do that even though I've been a full-time author since March of 2021. I feel like if I'm binge-writing it, that makes it bingeable for a reader. Can you tell us a bit about how you map your thrillers out? Or do you make it up as you go along? I will not start writing a book until I can summarize it in a sentence or two, so it has that very commercial hook. I enjoy writing the back marketing copy, so that's the second piece I write before I start the story. Then I do my character sketches and my setting sketches, so I feel like I really know them. That's all my research. I do a little bit of an outline, but never for the entire book, because I want the story to be able to change and the characters to breathe and not to be stuck with this outline. So sometimes I surprise myself. I usually know the big twists, but other small twists and reveals are usually surprises that I did not intend to write. They came out during a writing sprint. Related: Writing a Book? Here's How to Find Your Audience and Become a Bestselling Author Success doesn't often come easily — any advice you can share about dealing with rejection? Well, not to brag, but I've had over 400 rejections in my career. But from the very beginning, I knew not to take it personally. I knew this was a creative career, and rejection was inevitable. So I treated every "no" as a "not right now" or a "noble attempt." Now that I've had agents and editors who rejected me back then want to work with me now, I never treat it as, "Oh no, I'm going to be spiteful." I think everything happens for a reason. If it happened a different way, I wouldn't have the career I have right now. Maybe even the books I've written would be different, or I wouldn't have as many under my belt if I didn't have to work so hard and long to make all this happen. Can you talk about the marketing breakthrough you had for The Perfect Marriage with TikTok? I had a very small publisher, and there was no marketing budget. I know that I was going to be the one who had to market it. So I got on Instagram and Facebook. Then I saw TikTok, and at the time, it was considered an app for teens dancing. But I scrolled around and I realized, no, there are other things on here. People are clamoring for community. They want to share their likes and dislikes. So I started marketing my book on there, and one of my first videos got five million views and ended up shooting The Perfect Marriage up to No. 3 on Amazon. So I started growing a readership from that. But I knew that I did not want to just keep marketing my books. I wanted to be able to actually connect with my readers, share parts of my life — my husband, my dogs, behind the scenes, my humor and my personality. I made sure that it wasn't just transactional. It was more about creating a community between me and my readers. Related: The Pep Talk From Mickey Mouse We All Need to Hear, Compliments of Chris Diamantopoulos What was the video about? It created a BookTok trend. I pretended that I was the protagonist in my book, and told everyone that my husband was accused of murder and that his mistress was the victim. Then I held up my book and said, "Actually, this is the plot of my new book." It just hooked people. It doesn't really work anymore because other authors have done it. Publishers even did it. Readers did it about their favorite books. So it got very saturated. Now I try to be as natural as possible when I'm on camera. Important question: Does listening to the audiobook count as reading? Yes. Listen to the entire conversation here and be sure to subscribe to How Success Happens: Apple | Spotify | YouTube
Yahoo
15-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
After 400 rejections, Jeneva Rose used her social media savvy to build a BookTok empire. She's back with ‘The Perfect Divorce'
Jeneva Rose is one of the BookTok community's biggest success stories. Her first novel, a thriller about an attorney who has to defend her own husband during a murder trial called The Perfect Marriage, went viral on TikTok and became a bestseller. Its success paved the way for several future hits from the author, like Home Is Where the Bodies Are and You Shouldn't Have Come Here. Now the sequel to The Perfect Marriage, appropriately titled The Perfect Divorce, is out April 15. It follows the main character from the original into yet another sticky marital situation involving infidelity and homicide. To be putting out so many new books, including a sequel, is any author's dream. Rose is just happy to be writing and hoping to stay busy as long as she can. She spoke with Yahoo Entertainment about the secret to her social media success, her emotional women's fiction debut and her biggest dreams for her career. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. How did you get started writing? I tried writing books several times in high school and college, but I never made it past page 80. It wasn't until 2016 when I had a corporate job as a social media manager that I realized 'I'm gonna write.' I wrote The Girl I Was, which is a women's fiction novel that's being released in the summer, but it was the book I wrote to work through the grief of losing my mom in college, to heal myself and prove to myself that I could write a book. Before I finished writing that book, I knew that I could write another. I had fallen in love with having something tangible that I was working toward outside of my full-time job, and something that I could show others or force my husband to read. You've released a thriller every year since 2020. How did that become your go-to genre? The next book I wrote was [2020's] The Perfect Marriage. Thrillers were my favorite genre to read — still are. I was like, 'I want to write something that would be for others — I guess whatever I would actually read?' That's what I wrote. Then I just couldn't stop. Thrillers are so much fun to write and plot, and it's really challenging to fool the reader. You can't just have a twist out of left field that they never saw it coming. You've got to build this puzzle, but make it make sense. It's a challenge, and it's fun to fool people and lie to them. You are one of the most profound examples of an author who has successfully marketed and gone viral on social media, especially TikTok. You mentioned that you have a background in social media management, but how did you decide that you'd need to be doing your own social media marketing as an author? I got a lot of rejections — over 400 in my career. I'm grateful for it because rejection keeps me humble. When I did sign The Perfect Marriage, it was with a very small publisher with no marketing budget. It was a risk, even doing that, because I had been querying other books that were getting rejected left and right. If it doesn't sell, [people will] now be looking at my sales record. So I knew from the very beginning that going down that route, if I wanted this to be a career, I was going to have to put my all into it. I believed in the book, even though no one else really did. The rejections I got were like, 'This will not stand out in the market' and 'No one wants to read a legal thriller unless it's written by John Grisham.' And I was like, 'Hey, first of all, it's not a legal thriller!' [The main character is a lawyer,] but hardly any of it takes place in the courtroom. So I started just having fun with it — coming up with ways to hook someone that would make them put down their phone and pick up a book. It would be difficult, I knew that, because getting someone to set their phone down is — well, I can barely set my phone down. As your audience has grown, has it become more difficult to figure out what you're going to share online? Only one publisher was always forcing me to post, and I had to tell them I know what I'm doing, and what works for me is doing it organically. You might need to reveal the cover, but I'm not going to record that video until I feel like recording it and I'm in the mood to. I think that really shines through in my videos. It doesn't look like I'm being forced to record. One of my publishers sent me a PowerPoint presentation to use for how they cover. I said, sure, I can post this, but it's not going to do well. I can just do it the way I want to do it, which is just using a green screen. I even put it out there: 'My publishers wanted me to show you a PowerPoint, but I knew you wanted to see my face really close up.' It can't look like it's corporate! It's real, it's raw and it's however I look that day. So, you have three books a baby coming out this year … Oh my God, yes. That's nuts! We know about and the first book you ever wrote, . What's the third? It's called Dating After the End of the World [which comes out Sept. 30]. It's a zombie apocalypse book that I wrote for my dad. That's why I write all these books — they're always for someone. I'm taking requests now, I guess. [Laughs] Publishing The Girl I Was feels like a full-circle moment. My baby is due in July, as is the book [July 15], and that was the book I wrote for myself to write through the grief of losing my mom. I think it's kind of wild that that book is coming out the same month that I'm becoming a mother. My bonus exclusive content for the Barnes & Noble release — it almost makes me want to cry; I'm not an emotional person, even pregnant: It's a poem that my mom wrote when she was pregnant with me, and I found it going through all of her stuff while looking for old photos. Now I'm emotional too. I'm very excited for that because my mom passed away when I was 18, and I didn't realize a lot of the things that I probably would have learned if I'd had more time with her as an adult. I didn't know that she dreamt of being published, so being able to put that poem in there, it's like her being published for the first time. There were a lot of things I didn't know about her, and she wrote about that. And these poems — there's hundreds of them. Something that I also found extremely lovely was that your latest release, returns to the story of Sarah Morgan, the main character from In your acknowledgments, you say that it's not the end of her story. What keeps you coming back to this character? I knew when I wrote the first book that I wasn't done with her. I had an idea for a second, and I knew how that story would open. And now I have an idea for a third one. There are threads of it in the sequel. It would tie into the mother-daughter aspect. Sometimes I know I'm done with a character when her story has been told, but with Sarah there are a lot of things that have gone right for her. She thinks they've gone right because of how she controls everything around her. I think she needs to further lose control of her life to realize her place as a mother and what she's teaching her daughter. What's on your vision board for the future? There's always the goal and dream of actually seeing my books turned into a film or TV series. Things get optioned, but it kind of hangs out there for a while. But in my career, from the beginning I just wanted longevity. This was a career that was very difficult to break into, then it's very difficult to maintain it. I just want longevity and for my readers to continue to stay with me so I can continue to write. I can't return to a nine-to-five job! I was just talking about what with my husband the other day. What if I had to? I don't think I could do it! Don't even think about it! It was because I saw my Facebook memories from when I left my full-time job to pursue publishing as an author in March 2022, so it's been three years, which is a lifetime in publishing. I just want that to continue for years to come and to keep telling my stories. The Perfect Divorce is available for purchase on April 15.
USA Today
15-04-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Author Jeneva Rose isn't done with 'The Perfect Marriage' series anytime soon
Author Jeneva Rose isn't done with 'The Perfect Marriage' series anytime soon Bestselling author Jeneva Rose didn't expect she'd ever be able to publish a sequel to 'The Perfect Marriage.' But like any good thriller writer, she left a few clues unanswered. 'The Perfect Marriage' follows a seemingly copacetic couple, Sarah and Adam Morgan, whose lives turn upside down when Adam is accused of murdering his mistress and top-dog attorney Sarah decides to represent him. 'The Perfect Divorce' (Blackstone Publishing, out now) adds even more twists to the murder mystery that's sold over one million copies and has been acquired for a film adaptation. Rose wrote 'The Perfect Marriage,' published in 2020, on weekends and evenings as a passion project outside of her full-time job. Now that she's got a fanbase of hungry readers, several other thrillers under her belt and three (that's right – three) books coming out in 2025, Rose says the pressure is on. Stepping back into the world of Sarah for the first time in years, she didn't want to let her readers down. But as early reviews for the book poured in, her anxieties eased. 'People are saying it's better than 'The Perfect Marriage,' I'm a little offended by that,' Rose says, laughing. 'The Perfect Divorce' picks up after 'The Perfect Marriage' twist ending The investigation into Kelly Summers' murder in 'The Perfect Marriage' hinged on three sets of DNA evidence. Two are explained away, but that third set of DNA is revealed without much additional explanation. Until now. 'The Perfect Divorce' is set 11 years after the events of the first book. Sarah has moved on, opening a nonprofit organization and starting a family with her new husband, Bob. But history has a way of repeating itself, and Sarah is determined to learn from her past relationship. So when she discovers Bob had a one-night stand, she swiftly files for divorce. But then the woman Bob slept with goes missing and new revelations in the decade-old Summers case send Sarah and Bob back into the interrogation room. That third DNA component is what drove Rose to pick up Sarah Morgan's story again. She didn't want to write a sequel just to write a sequel – she needed a catalyst to reopen the case, so to speak. 'What more do readers need to learn about her? It needs to be as twisty and jaw-dropping as 'The Perfect Marriage' because it's a thriller and that's what readers expect these days – you need to make their jaws drop,' Rose says. Once she had that, she spent a day with the Appleton Police Department in Wisconsin on a ride-along and taking tours of the forensics department. She spent so much time with them that she named two characters – Lieutenant Nagel and Chief Deputy Olson – after the police officers she met. And then she got into the nitty gritty – asking them what they would need, hypothetically, to reopen a case like the one in 'The Perfect Marriage.' The result is several interwoven cat-and-mouse games as the cases and bodies pile up in 'The Perfect Divorce.' The book is also a departure from Rose's style in 'The Perfect Marriage,' told from Sarah and Adam's alternating perspectives. Now, readers get inside the heads of Bob, former deputy Marcus Hudson and other new characters. Rose said writing Bob's perspective was a favorite because he played such a major role from the sidelines in 'The Perfect Marriage.' More to come for 'The Perfect Marriage' series Readers will also find a few extra easter eggs in the novel's endpages and author acknowledgements, where Rose has become notorious for dropping hints about future work. 'I'm not done with (Sarah),' she says. 'There's so much for her as a character and her growth.' A future book, she hints, could focus on Sarah's relationship with her daughter as she ages. In the first book, readers find out the truth about Sarah's murky (and deadly) relationship with her mom. How could that play out in this generation? 'What happens when she has a daughter that's a teenager and can no longer be a child that everything is hidden from?' Rose says. 'What happens when that daughter finds out everything that their mother has done in order to protect them?' Love a twisty, romantic thriller?: 10 books similar to 'Verity' by Colleen Hoover Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY's Books Reporter, where she covers buzzy releases, chats with authors and dives into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, subscribe to our weekly Books newsletter or tell her what you're reading at cmulroy@
Yahoo
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
After 400 rejections, Jeneva Rose used her social media savvy to build a BookTok empire. She's back with ‘The Perfect Divorce'
Jeneva Rose is one of the BookTok community's biggest success stories. Her first novel, a thriller about an attorney who has to defend her own husband during a murder trial called The Perfect Marriage, went viral on TikTok and became a bestseller. Its success paved the way for several future hits from the author, like Home Is Where the Bodies Are and You Shouldn't Have Come Here. Now the sequel to The Perfect Marriage, appropriately titled The Perfect Divorce, is out April 15. It follows the main character from the original into yet another sticky marital situation involving infidelity and homicide. To be putting out so many new books, including a sequel, is any author's dream. Rose is just happy to be writing and hoping to stay busy as long as she can. She spoke with Yahoo Entertainment about the secret to her social media success, her emotional women's fiction debut and her biggest dreams for her career. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. How did you get started writing? I tried writing books several times in high school and college, but I never made it past page 80. It wasn't until 2016 when I had a corporate job as a social media manager that I realized 'I'm gonna write.' I wrote The Girl I Was, which is a women's fiction novel that's being released in the summer, but it was the book I wrote to work through the grief of losing my mom in college, to heal myself and prove to myself that I could write a book. Before I finished writing that book, I knew that I could write another. I had fallen in love with having something tangible that I was working toward outside of my full-time job, and something that I could show others or force my husband to read. You've released a thriller every year since 2020. How did that become your go-to genre? The next book I wrote was [2020's] The Perfect Marriage. Thrillers were my favorite genre to read — still are. I was like, 'I want to write something that would be for others — I guess whatever I would actually read?' That's what I wrote. Then I just couldn't stop. Thrillers are so much fun to write and plot, and it's really challenging to fool the reader. You can't just have a twist out of left field that they never saw it coming. You've got to build this puzzle, but make it make sense. It's a challenge, and it's fun to fool people and lie to them. You are one of the most profound examples of an author who has successfully marketed and gone viral on social media, especially TikTok. You mentioned that you have a background in social media management, but how did you decide that you'd need to be doing your own social media marketing as an author? I got a lot of rejections — over 400 in my career. I'm grateful for it because rejection keeps me humble. When I did sign The Perfect Marriage, it was with a very small publisher with no marketing budget. It was a risk, even doing that, because I had been querying other books that were getting rejected left and right. If it doesn't sell, [people will] now be looking at my sales record. So I knew from the very beginning that going down that route, if I wanted this to be a career, I was going to have to put my all into it. I believed in the book, even though no one else really did. The rejections I got were like, 'This will not stand out in the market' and 'No one wants to read a legal thriller unless it's written by John Grisham.' And I was like, 'Hey, first of all, it's not a legal thriller!' [The main character is a lawyer,] but hardly any of it takes place in the courtroom. So I started just having fun with it — coming up with ways to hook someone that would make them put down their phone and pick up a book. It would be difficult, I knew that, because getting someone to set their phone down is — well, I can barely set my phone down. As your audience has grown, has it become more difficult to figure out what you're going to share online? Only one publisher was always forcing me to post, and I had to tell them I know what I'm doing, and what works for me is doing it organically. You might need to reveal the cover, but I'm not going to record that video until I feel like recording it and I'm in the mood to. I think that really shines through in my videos. It doesn't look like I'm being forced to record. One of my publishers sent me a PowerPoint presentation to use for how they cover. I said, sure, I can post this, but it's not going to do well. I can just do it the way I want to do it, which is just using a green screen. I even put it out there: 'My publishers wanted me to show you a PowerPoint, but I knew you wanted to see my face really close up.' It can't look like it's corporate! It's real, it's raw and it's however I look that day. So, you have three books a baby coming out this year … Oh my God, yes. That's nuts! We know about and the first book you ever wrote, . What's the third? It's called Dating After the End of the World [which comes out Sept. 30]. It's a zombie apocalypse book that I wrote for my dad. That's why I write all these books — they're always for someone. I'm taking requests now, I guess. [Laughs] Publishing The Girl I Was feels like a full-circle moment. My baby is due in July, as is the book [July 15], and that was the book I wrote for myself to write through the grief of losing my mom. I think it's kind of wild that that book is coming out the same month that I'm becoming a mother. My bonus exclusive content for the Barnes & Noble release — it almost makes me want to cry; I'm not an emotional person, even pregnant: It's a poem that my mom wrote when she was pregnant with me, and I found it going through all of her stuff while looking for old photos. Now I'm emotional too. I'm very excited for that because my mom passed away when I was 18, and I didn't realize a lot of the things that I probably would have learned if I'd had more time with her as an adult. I didn't know that she dreamt of being published, so being able to put that poem in there, it's like her being published for the first time. There were a lot of things I didn't know about her, and she wrote about that. And these poems — there's hundreds of them. Something that I also found extremely lovely was that your latest release, returns to the story of Sarah Morgan, the main character from In your acknowledgments, you say that it's not the end of her story. What keeps you coming back to this character? I knew when I wrote the first book that I wasn't done with her. I had an idea for a second, and I knew how that story would open. And now I have an idea for a third one. There are threads of it in the sequel. It would tie into the mother-daughter aspect. Sometimes I know I'm done with a character when her story has been told, but with Sarah there are a lot of things that have gone right for her. She thinks they've gone right because of how she controls everything around her. I think she needs to further lose control of her life to realize her place as a mother and what she's teaching her daughter. What's on your vision board for the future? There's always the goal and dream of actually seeing my books turned into a film or TV series. Things get optioned, but it kind of hangs out there for a while. But in my career, from the beginning I just wanted longevity. This was a career that was very difficult to break into, then it's very difficult to maintain it. I just want longevity and for my readers to continue to stay with me so I can continue to write. I can't return to a nine-to-five job! I was just talking about what with my husband the other day. What if I had to? I don't think I could do it! Don't even think about it! It was because I saw my Facebook memories from when I left my full-time job to pursue publishing as an author in March 2022, so it's been three years, which is a lifetime in publishing. I just want that to continue for years to come and to keep telling my stories. The Perfect Divorce is available for purchase on April 15.
