Kaira Rouda was at a romance writers conference in Cincinnati when she realized she didn’t belong there. She’d decided she was not quite a fit with the romance genre and wanted to turn to something darker. So, she tried to cancel her conference pitch session with Harper Collins Editor Margo Lipschultz. Margo said drop by anyway.
“I was just kind of learning. I didn’t know how the world worked back then,” Rouda says.
They talked and during their meeting, Rouda mentioned she’d just handed her agent, Katie Shea Boutillier of the Donald Maass Agency, a new psychological suspense novel, Best Day Ever. Boutillier, who’d been repping her women’s fiction, initially wasn’t interested, but Lipschultz was.
Not long after, Harper Collins made an offer, but not just any offer. It was starting a new commercial imprint, Graydon House, (part of its Harlequin division) and wanted Rouda’s novel as one of three books to ride the marketing wave for the imprint’s launch.
“It’s never going to happen like that again,” Rouda says with a smile.
Her publisher invited her to Book Expo America at New York City’s Javits Center. Just after she passed through the doors of the giant exhibit hall, she looked up and was shocked. There, hanging from the ceiling, was a giant banner displaying the cover of Best Day Ever.
She staggered backward trying to take it in. “Are you okay ma’am?” a man in a nearby vendor’s booth, asked.
“That’s my book,” she replied, still looking up.
“That was my magical publishing moment,” she says. Yet in a publishing career that didn’t start until her mid-forties, Rouda has enjoyed her share of the magic, from USA Today bestsellers to positive reviews of her work.
She realized she wanted to write novels when she was in third grade, but as is often the case, her writing life took a more practical turn early in her career. She became a journalist, wrote marketing and advertising copy, became a vice president of marketing for an Inc. 100 firm and franchisor. She then entered the family real estate business, her goal to build its national brand. Her first book was a non-fiction inspirational business book for women. She’s now written dozens of books including non-fiction, women’s fiction, romance and what she terms her passion—psychological suburban suspense.
“I’ve always been fascinated by what’s underneath perfect lives,” she says. “…Every women’s fiction book I wrote kept getting more sinister. And with Best Day Ever, I found my place. I think I have too much darkness in my head. And this is a way to process it.”
“I’m a product of the suburbs. It’s the kind of place I like to set my people.” Which is what she did in her first crime novel, The Best Day Ever, her fourteenth published book.
Her novel starts with Paul and Mia getting away for the weekend from their home and two young sons in Columbus, Ohio. Paul sees this as their best day ever together as they drive to their cottage in Lakeside, (a real town) two-and-a-half hours away. If you’ve been married or in a long-term romantic relationship, you’ll recognize much of the couple’s conversation as they pass the time riding through the countryside. Rouda captures the relationship with the clarity of someone who knows (she’s been married for more than thirty years), yet she drops subtle warning signs along the way. When the story begins to turn darker, Rouda peels back Paul’s camouflage and infuses him with every misogynist trait she’d observed over the years from different business managers and bosses.
“I did have a spectacularly long list of bad men to draw from,” she says. It was so bad at one point she filed a class action lawsuit against an employer. “It’s just so pervasive. It’s in the air, and the water, and everything. I thought it would be better by now. Obviously, it’s not.”
“The Mad Men era of consumerism was hellbent on keeping women in the kitchen. And my characters remember that message. They are those consumers and, in many cases, my female characters are fighting to redefine that implied destiny.”
As for her first crime novel, “Paul came into my head. I had a setting. We used to have a lake house (at Lakeside, Ohio), and I love road trips,” she says. “And the title stuck all the way through the publishing process.”
Most of her novels have a marriage component. “They’re the closest relationship that can turn on you.”
So many bad men show up in her novels and meet a tragic end, she jokes, her husband, Harley, sleeps with one eye open. She uses her experiences to devise ways to kill off bad male characters. Even on a vacation to Utah, the couple was looking into a gorge when Harley told her he expected one of her characters would one day meet his fate at the bottom.
“He’s a good sport…I think he’s a little used to it by now. He says if something ever happens to him, everyone’s going to look at my Internet search history.”
Like most authors, she pulls ideas for her novels from everyday living. While her husband was a member of Congress for one term, she was in D.C. and learned about “the widow’s mandate,” where widows of Congressmen who die in office have a history of filling out their unexpired terms. More than forty-five have done so. At one time, it was the most available path for women to serve in Congress. Rouda took the idea and turned it into another novel, The Widow, where the wife plans to off her husband so she can take over his Congressional seat.
Rouda subtly oozes Type-A personality and Post-It notes advocacy. Yet, she’s not a plotter when it comes to organizing and crafting her ever-darkening fiction. She’s strictly a pantser. So, on occasion she can be forgiven if she misses one of her targets. Years ago, she found her bucket list in the bottom of a drawer she’d written in the early nineties around the time she and Harley married. Her first goal was to have a family, second was to write a novel. Yet she didn’t write one for years. She credits a stranger with setting her on her path to a life of crime. During a conference where she was promoting her nonfiction business book for women entrepreneurs, “a woman asked if I’d done everything I’d wanted to do.”
“I want to write a novel,” Rouda replied.
“Why haven’t you?” the stranger asked.
Rouda paused. “You’re right,” she told the crowd. It was a moment of stark clarity. She needed to put her immediate priorities aside to reach the second most important goal of her life.
Just after she and her husband sold their residential real estate business, which had started in Ohio and spread to twenty-two states, they moved to Laguna Beach in Southern California and her fiction writing career began. Harley stayed on with the business for a while, but Kaira couldn’t. She’d been head of marketing, and the purchaser had its own marketing division. The four kids were in school, so she began to write during her newly found free time. A year later she completed her first crime novel. Since then, she’s written many more and, she says, “I just get darker and darker and darker…The more you write, the more truth comes out in your stories.”
“Maybe,” she says, “it’s a kind of confidence.”
Unlike in the super competitive business community, Rouda has found writing a more collegial pursuit. She’s made friends with dozens of authors, all of them cheering on each other’s success.
And as for her criminal beginnings, Best Day Ever became a USA Today and Amazon Charts bestseller and was translated into thirteen languages. Critics raved as did the residents of Lakeside, Ohio. They invited Rouda back to be a keynote speaker for their one hundred and fiftieth anniversary, and she went.
After all, she loves a good road trip.
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Best Day Ever
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Start to Finish: A year
I want to be a writer: 3rd grade
Experience: Business nonfiction and women’s fiction books
Agents Contacted: Already had agent from previous published works
Agent Responses: Previously, hundreds of rejections
Time to Sell Novel: Two months
Novel Agent: Katie Shea Boutillier, The Donald Maass Agency
Novel Editor: Margo Lipschultz
Novel Publisher: Harper Collins imprint Graydon House (folded into Harlequin Trade Publishing in 2025)
Inspiration: All the horrible male bosses I had over the years.
Advice to Writers: Just finish that manuscript.
Website: KairaRouda.com
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