The last blog I posted was about bestselling author, Jeneva Rose. I didn’t follow up last week with the promised second part (about her 500 rejections) because… well, Trump.
No-one was going to tear themselves away from the riveting images of Trump’s private jet idling at Palm Beach International Airport while we all waited with bated breath for the ten-second glimpse of him boarding it. Not to read my blog, anyway!
Audacious
This week, back to Jeneva and her audacious attempts to become a published bestselling author. Why audacious? Let me explain: It took me a long time to read The Perfect Marriage after a fellow CamCat Books author mentioned it to me. I loved the premise — a top defense attorney defends her husband on charges of murdering his mistress. It should have kept me riveted.
Instead, I kept looking to the bottom of the page on my Kindle in disbelief at how many pages I still had to read to get to the end. When I did finally finish reading, I just had to find out how on earth the book had gotten onto bestseller lists. (As I did when I learned that Falling by T.J. Newman was rejected by 41 agents, but then ended up on the NYTimes bestseller list.)
In Jeneva’s case, I needed to know how TPM had even gotten published in the first place. First, I decided to check what other reader/reviewers felt about the book. I couldn’t imagine that I was the only one who thought it was a truly shitty legal thriller. Still, I was taken aback by exactly how many readers thought it was “the worst book they’d ever read.” I know quite well how hurtful some reviewers can be, but, as I wrote in my last blog, this was a whole new level of harshness and vitriol.
Drivel
Is this thriller self-published? Did anyone edit this drivel? Those were among the kindest questions asked by reviewers giving the book 1-star on Goodreads and Amazon. I knew the answer.
Yes, it was edited. Kind of. I’d already ascertained from Jeneva’s acknowledgments at the back of the book that Clare Law, a British editor, had worked on “refining” it. This, at least, explained the numerous factual legal errors. I assumed that a British copy editor probably knew even less about the legal system in the state of Virginia than Jeneva Rose did.
I then discovered The Perfect Marriage was published in July 2020 by Bloodhound Books, a publisher in the U.K. — a somewhat odd choice for an American author, I thought. Now, I was really curious about Jeneva’s publication journey.
500 Rejections
So, I googled some interviews Jeneva had given about her books. “Over the course of querying three novels and going out on submission three separate times, I have faced over 500 rejections,” she told an interviewer in April 2022.
She spoke about getting 80+ rejections from agents after writing her first women’s fiction novel, The Girl I Was. She shelved that manuscript, and in 2017 set out to write a psychological thriller (The Perfect Marriage.) She wrote 50,000 words during NaNoWriMo in November; finished in January 2018, edited it in February, and by April had several offers of representation after 100+ rejections by other agents.
Eighteen months later she parted company with her first agent after two major rewrites and two rounds of submissions to publishers. “The Perfect Marriage was rejected by every major and mid-size publishing house,” Jeneva told an interviewer.
Early Adopter of Tik Tok
But, she was just not going to take NO for an answer. She wrote two more books, and queried agents again. That resulted in more than 100 rejections , “most with no reply,” she adds. She returned to The Perfect Marriage.
“I decided to submit it directly to small publishers who accept un-agented manuscripts.” Two days later, she had an offer of publication from Bloodhound Books, a tiny publisher located in Cambridge, some 60 miles from London in the U.K.
She added: “I knew it would be on me to market the book [but] I knew with my 10 years of social media and digital marketing expertise I could find my readership… As an author, I was an early adopter of Tik Tok back when it was considered “lowbrow.”
This, of course, begs the question of when did it stop being lowbrow. But no matter.
Tik Tok Meanie
It’s dizzying to watch Jeneva’s Tik Tok posts. In some she appears with husband, Drew, a sweet-looking man who nevertheless exhibits a biting talent for mocking and ridiculing other authors. In several posts I viewed, Drew would stop play on a 50 Shades of Gray movie (based on books by E.L.James) then mimic and ridicule the lines spoken by the two protagonists with Jeneva cackling maniacally in the background
Jeneva herself also projects a mean-girl spirit when she challenges reviewers who have criticized her writing. Usually, it’s a no-no for authors to engage with readers who have posted bad reviews. But Jeneva has a running feud with a reader named Scott who initially contacted her by email through her website, writing: “You could really use a legal consultant if you’re going to write a legal thriller.”
Jeneva says, she thanked him and wished him a Merry Christmas. Unfortunately, Scott followed up with a couple more emails prompting Jeneva to really go to town on him. Her fans have revelled in her snarkiness, with one sending her some “Don’t Be A Scott” bookmarks and stickers.
“There’s nothing I love more than being petty,” said Jeneva on a Tik Tok video showing off the bookmarks and stickers as hubby Drew grins beside her.
Trending on TikTok
Some reviewers who posted on Goodreads referred to Jeneva’s Tik Tok posts. One wrote about seeing Jeneva first on Tik Tok with her “funny video skits mocking cheesy, over the top dramatic movie scenes. So, I was shocked,” adds the reviewer, “to find almost 70% of this book (TPM) is over the top, unnecessary dramatics.”
Another wrote “I read The Perfect Marriage because it was trending on Tik Tok thanks to someone sending the author emails telling her the book is terrible. Well!! He was not wrong but it did get her a book sale.”
Best TikTok Video
What really put Jeneva on the map was a Tik Tok video she posted of her husband posing as a real life husband who tells viewers that he’s on trial for killing his mistress and that his lawyer wife is going to be his defense attorney.
Jeneva describes it as “a trend I started on Tik Tok where you tell a story as if it were your own but at the end you hold up your book explaining that it’s actually the plot of your novel…”
She adds that the video amassed 4.5 million views. Over 11,000 copies of TPM sold in just four days after that. “That Tik Tok made me an Amazon Charts, Publishers Weekly and Barnes& Noble bestseller,” says Jeneva. “It literally made my career.”
Jeneva has said the video prompted mail from viewers who thought that her husband on TikTok was describing real-life events. She laughs about a viewer who subsequently saw another video of her and Drew together and who wrote, asking: “Did they let him out on bail???”
Given that Tik Tok/BookTok videos are aimed essentially at a YA audience (aged 16-24) it’s possible some of them could be confused by such a video.
As another Goodreads reviewer lamented, expressing total surprise at all the 5-star ratings the book garnered: “The people that liked this must lack any knowledge on how the legal system works or aren’t cognizant of the fact that a book should actually go through a proper editing process before being published.”
That sounds about right — especially if most of those ratings (awarding stars without written reviews) came from her Tik Tok audience –now numbering 600,000 followers. It’s an audience that would most likely have no idea, or much less care about what is correct in either law enforcement or legal processes.
For all I know, they might even not care about actually reading the book before flipping to Goodreads to award the book 5 stars–Just because they saw it trending on Tik Tok.