Jeneva Rose is a whirlwind. When the publishing world didn’t work for her, she created her own.
Like most aspiring authors, she first took the conventional route to hoped-for literary success. For her efforts, agents and publishers turned her down a combined 500 times. After she finally connected, she fired her agent before she found a publisher.
“At the time it sucked, but it makes it so much sweeter to appreciate now,” she says.
Rose wanted to write from an early age, but she could never finish a book. In her gap year of college Rose wrote comedic screenplays, but nothing hit. Her first attempt at a novel began in 2009. She was impatient, maybe a bit unfocused because “the idea of writing one was daunting,” and she could never get beyond writing the first eighty pages of a manuscript.
After college she worked in digital marketing. But teetering on the rim of her bucket list was that novel. When her mother died suddenly, Rose worked through her grief by completing a manuscript of women’s fiction—her first. She realized she loved the process. That said, she still thought she was “one and done.” Back to the corporate world. Fortunately for everyone, she decided to keep writing, which would eventually lead to her debut novel.
“I decided to try writing a new book in a new genre, a psychological thriller, for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo),” she says. “It was born from an idea I had been holding in my head for more than eight years, one that begged to be written. I wrote fifty thousand words in November, took a small break, finished it in January, edited it in February.”
Her psychological thriller, The Perfect Marriage, follows a top criminal defense attorney who faces her most challenging case ever: she defends her husband, who is accused of murdering his mistress.
“By April I had several offers of representation. I thought I had made it. Finally, after one hundred rejections, I had someone in my corner that would take my writing career to the next level.”
Her agent shopped The Perfect Marriage for nearly eighteen months with no luck, when Rose attended her first ThrillerFest, the annual writers conference put on by the International Thriller Writers. During the conference she began to realize she needed to fend for herself in the publishing world. Others weren’t going to do it for her. The publishing world as she originally envisioned didn’t exist for her. So, a few months later she fired her agent and on her own landed a British publisher who accepted un-agented submissions.
When The Perfect Marriage, was finally published in 2020, she still had no agent. And like most smaller publishers, hers had a limited marketing budget to launch The Perfect Marriage. So, she created a promotional video and posted it in January 2021 on TikTok. She got more than five million views and The Perfect Marriage shot to number three on Amazon. She sold 8,000 copies in three days.
She posted another promotional video and got 900,000 views followed by another bump in sales. By then she was on a roll and understanding her own power. The more online video ideas she came up with, the more they went viral.
“I credit my success to social media,” she says. “We’re in the entertainment industry. The biggest hurdle is to get your point across very quick.” And she’s learned from trial and error.
“I’ve always been a person that has to learn things the hard way…and take the path less traveled.”
A film producer on Instagram expressed interest in optioning the film and TV rights to The Perfect Marriage. “With a contract in hand, I needed someone to handle it, so I started cold querying film agents with no luck. However, an author friend of mine offered to introduce me to her film agent who ended up handling the contract.”
The film agent asked if Rose had any other books she could option. “Yes, but I don’t have a literary agent,” Rose admitted. Looking back at what happened to her writing career the next few years, you’d question why she’d bother with one. Between 2020 and 2023 she sold more than 1.5 million copies of her novel The Perfect Marriage and other works and garnered 780,000+ social media followers. She became a publishing dynamo.
After she published two more books with small publishers, the Big Five started wooing her and wanted to poach her work from her small publishers. That’s right, publishers. As in plural. When one of the Big Five offered her an exclusive contract, she turned it down. Jeneva Rose refuses to work with a single publisher.
“You don’t have to be exclusive,” she says. In the first years of her alternative publishing universe, she worked with five publishers and flipped a polite pinky to many of the sluggish behemoths.
“This career is extremely difficult as it is,” she says, “so I never want to put all my eggs in one basket, and that’s been my mindset from the beginning when I signed with two publishers in a span of one month. Every publisher has their strengths and weaknesses and being able to work with more than one, means multiple teams are putting their best foot forward to grow my career. It’s also been an incredible learning experience, and now some of my publishers are even working together to cross promote my titles, which is truly amazing.”
Today, after several novels, she found an agent, honed her skills, and has no issue blasting through eighty pages of manuscript. Rose describes herself as both a plotter and a pantser. “I know the beginning and I know where I want to go…I will not write a book if I can’t describe it in two sentences…This is because I come at writing from a marketing standpoint first and foremost, probably due to my background in social media and digital marketing, which I worked in for ten years before becoming a full-time author.”
Could we be looking at the next generation’s James Patterson?
When she’s ready to write, she often goes through writing sprints that are timed, and then takes a break in between. But, she explains, “When I start writing, I don’t stop.” She loves writing multiple points of view in first person. Only two of her manuscripts have been written in third.
Just talking to her could exhaust you as she mentions all of the things she’s doing to build her career—and her publishing world. Now her husband is helping fulltime. She readily admits she’s a Type-A author—meaning she’s not only a writer but publicist, marketer, and brand builder.
“I’m all or nothing, which isn’t good for some things,” she says. And what might those some things be? She conquered it all in fewer than four years.
Everything appears to be coming together. Her nonstop, tornado-style work ethic combined with every aspect of her alternative publishing world has achieved much of Rose’s early publishing ambitions. For her, this is a perfect marriage.
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The Perfect Marriage
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Writing Time 5 months, 2 rewrites
Agents Contacted: 200, fired her first agent before found publisher
Agent Responses: 2
Agent Search: 2-3 weeks
Time to Sell Novel: 2 days after she started submitting to small publishers
First Novel Agent: none
First Novel Editor: none
First Novel Publisher: Bloodhound
Inspiration: My mother, Debra
Advice to Writers: Write through everything, the rejections. Just keep writing. Don’t be the first person to stand in your way. I was thinking I couldn’t do it.
Website: JenevaRose.com
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–Author photo: Katharine Hannah
