Meet Saralee Rosenberg

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Saralee Rosenberg. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Saralee below.

Saralee, thank you so much for making time for us. We’ve always admired your ability to take risks and so maybe we can kick things off with a discussion around how you developed your ability to take and bear risk?

Risk taking, whether it be taking a creative leap on a project or powering through a life challenge requires courage but mostly conviction. Or as I taught my children, you can have fear or you can have faith but you can’t have both. Yet developing a steady faith in our decision making ability isn’t something inherent in us like standard equipment in a car. Faith is the reward we get after making a ton of crappy decisions and realizing how avoidable they were if only we had honored the voice in our head and our heart. Once we listen and learn, we can rely on the wisdom of our higher self and trust that the answer or choice is right. And though that may come off as new age woo-woo, prove me wrong. How many times have you ignored your gut, talked yourself out of following a path that felt right and then looked back and said to yourself, why, why, why did I not go with the idea I loved instead of taking a safer route?

Case in point. I just submitted a manuscript to my editor, a novel that I believe is the best I’ve ever written. But the working title I chose early on was one that I fell out of love with by the time I was ready to hit send. It was clever yet not intriguing and frankly, the biggest drawback was that it was forgettable. In today’s competitive marketplace that is a deadly sin… the goal is to court controversy not blend in to the stacks. One night while working on the final edits I got a new title idea that made me laugh. I mean really laugh. It felt daring and original, but mostly I loved it because it was an accurate reflection of the protagonist’s journey. The risky aspect was that it included the F bomb.

Immediately my annoying muses, the ones who like Mikey in the Life cereal commercials, don’t like anything, were listing the reasons Fuck would never fly in a title. Librarians would banish the book. Certainly no awards committees would consider honoring a novel with such an inappropriate title. And likely, a bookseller would reject it for potentially causing book buyers to give it a thumbs down based on that one inflammatory word.

But here’s the great thing about taking risks. Once you realize that it’s a much bigger risk to ignore your inspired ideas, you go with it and have faith that you made the right choice. And in this case, even if the title is ultimately changed, when I shared it with my editor, she got it and laughed hard. Exactly the reaction I was hoping for.

Now it’s up to her to decide whether to take the risk, but I believe with all my heart if she does, readers will absolutely fall in love.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

Here is my story and I’m sticking to it.

Nearly thirty years ago, I had a psychic reading with a woman I had never met. She predicted that over the next few years I would become an author and appear on Oprah. It was such a laughable statement to make as at the time I was a young working mom who held a demanding job as a VP Marketing for a media trade association. In fact, I was so convinced that this woman was a charlatan I demanded a refund… but the joke was on me. Several years later, my husband told me a client had started a small publishing firm and was looking for someone who could write a book about the best places to live in Florida. My husband, who knew nothing of that long ago psychic reading, said he recommended me. “You’re joking,” I said. “I’m about to have our third kid, I’ve never written a book and I’ve never lived in Florida.” “You’ll figure it out,” he replied. “And then you can quit your job and work from home.” Which is exactly what happened. The book DESTINATION FLORIDA: THE GUIDE TO A SUCCESSFUL RELOCATION, came out and was such a success, it led to me writing two other relocation guides, including 50 FABULOUS PLACES TO RAISE A FAMILY, which wait for it… landed me an appearance on Oprah.

While working on other non-fiction books about relocation and personal finance, I got an idea for a novel and wondered if I had the courage to move out of the space I had grown comfortable with and try something very different on the creative spectrum. But when the idea consumed me I knew I had to at least try. Again, I had never written fiction and had no clue if I would enjoy the challenge let alone be good at it.

Long story short. It took three years to write that first novel, a year to find an agent who was willing to represent me, and a year for her to sell it. But not to a publisher. She had the interest of a Hollywood agent who negotiated the rights on behalf of Bette Midler and her production partner, Bonnie Bruckheimer. Bette had just starred in the film, FIRST WIVES CLUB, and was interested in producing a similar type comedy. My novel, ALL IN THE CARDS, was about two suburban housewives who loathed one another and she optioned my unpublished manuscript. Sadly, a few years went by and the movie never got made and the rights reverted back to me. In the meanwhile, I had written a second novel, titled A LITTLE HELP FROM ABOVE. That got picked up by a division of HarperCollins and I went on to write three more novels for that publisher. The last one, DEAR NEIGHBOR, DROP DEAD, was a rewrite of my first novel that Bette Midler loved but couldn’t produce as a film.

Currently, I have completed a new adult novel which is on submission and a second novel, my first book for middle grade readers. Fingers crossed!

By the way, that psychic never gave me a refund and went on to become a dear friend. It was, in fact, all in the cards!

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

I once read that an an author is a writer who never gave up. At the time, I had spent three years drafting my debut novel, ALL IN THE CARDS, and another year trying to find an agent. After receiving enough rejections to wallpaper our small bathroom, I was convinced that I would never land a deal. And then one day I got a call from a wonderful NY agent who said I had written the funniest, most touching novel she’d read in years… the rest is history.

In my book, the three most important aspects of success are perseverance, faith and joy. My father always said if you love your job you will never work a day in your life and he was right.

How would you spend the next decade if you somehow knew that it was your last?

Easy A. I would live my life exactly as I live today. I would spend time with my husband of 47 years, my three adult children and their spouses and my now six grandchildren. I would travel, read, hang out with great friends and never be far from a bottle of good wine. Mostly, I would devote my free time to working on a novel because I pretty much can’t breathe unless I am immersed in world building (and word building). Nothing has been more gratifying than writing a novel that explores that which scares the crap out of me, and taking three dimensional characters (always flawed) on a grand journey. Even better, is talking to readers, and discovering aspects of my stories that were not on my radar. That love affair is one I will take to my grave.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.saraleerosenberg.com
• Instagram: @saraleenovel1
• Facebook: Saralee Rosenberg Author Page