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 and a baby coming out this year …
Oh my God, yes.
That’s nuts! We know about The Perfect Divorce and the first book you ever wrote, The Girl I Was. 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, The Perfect Divorce, returns to the story of Sarah Morgan, the main character from The Perfect Marriage. 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.
