After 15 years of rejection, Costa Mesa author earns nationwide acclaim with her thriller ‘Count My Lies’

Costa Mesa-based author Sophie Stava beamed under bright lights and the gaze of a national television audience as she fielded questions about her first published novel, “Count My Lies,” on its release day, Tuesday, March 4. The domestic thriller about a compulsive liar who becomes a nanny for a family with secrets of their own was featured as the book of the month by “Good Morning America.”

“It was another fantasy come true, something you secretly wish for yourself but you don’t say out loud because how crazy does that sound?” Stava told the Daily Pilot before knocking on a wooden table in the Newport Beach Public Library to ward off bad luck during an interview Tuesday. “There’ve just been so many ‘pinch me’ moments.”

Multiple publishers showed interest in “Count My Lies” before she inked a deal with Scout Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, last year on Valentine’s Day. She said seeing it promoted alongside Stephen King’s latest title and compared to one of her own favorite novels — Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl” — has been nothing short of surreal.

She’ll dive into the path that led to her novel’s critically lauded debut, her inspirations and more during a meet-and-greet Tuesday evening, April 8 in Newport Beach. That event will be held at the Central Library on Avocado Avenue, where earlier this week 29 people were on a waiting list to check out the dozen or so copies on loan there.

Her recent success comes after well over a decade of rejection, soul-searching and perseverance.

“Having 15 years of ‘no’ or ‘not now’ and ‘not yet, but your close,’ I had a lot of time to fantasize about an editor saying ‘I want to work with you; I see something special here,’” Stava said.

“Count My Lies” by Costa Mesa-based author Sophie Stava sits on a table in the Newport Beach Central Library on Tuesday.

(Eric Licas)

Stava studied literature at UC Santa Barbara before going into the marketing field after college. That paid the bills, but never felt like the right fit for her.

Things came to a head when a company that provides SAT training hired her be their director of marketing. But they wound up having her cold-calling potential customers instead.

“Needless to say I wasn’t great at it,” Stava said. “I was let go, and I said to my husband, who I was dating at the time, ‘I’m never going back to the corporate world.’”

She responded to a vague Craigslist post seeking a ghost writer around 2012, as hype was growing over the erotic romance title “50 Shades of Grey.” Her client gave her a rough outline of a love story and paid her $6,000 to flesh out its characters and narrative.

Stava tried to follow that up by self-publishing a romance novel in her own name, but that effort failed to turn a profit. She managed to maintain confidence in her talent thanks to the support of close family and friends, and eventually decided she needed to focus solely on writing.

“So much about selling is about timing, about what the market is looking for, what they think editors are looking for,” Stava said. “It’s sort of like timing the stock market.”

She hired an agent to make up for her shortcomings as a marketer. And instead of trying to cash in on a waning trend of erotic fiction, Stava turned inward to her personal favorite genre of literature: thrillers.

Stava poured herself into creating her first mystery novel, refining it over numerous revisions. But after two years had passed, she was still unable to convince an editor to pick up the title.

“It was devastating,” Stava said. “I thought with every revision I was gonna hear, ‘It’s ready. We’re going to send it to editors.”

The writer said she wasn’t sure if it was conviction or “delusion” that drove her to start over on her third book. But, unlike her previous efforts, the drafts that eventually became “Count My Lies” immediately caught the attention of publishers and editors.

Stava thinks the strength of her novel lies in it’s page-turning plot. She also believes the issues of identity, public perception and authenticity its characters navigate are deeply relatable to audiences in the era of social media.

“At it’s core, ‘Count My Lies’ is about the desperation for connection, to be seen, to be accepted,” Stava said. “I think that really resonates with people, especially after the pandemic when a lot of us were really isolated and lonely, and we missed a lot of those connections.”

Stava said she considers herself a reader first and a writer second, so she’s honored by the knowledge other bookworms are getting lost in a fantasy born of her imagination. It would never have come to life without her parents, who inspired her love of reading and served as her earliest critics, and the constant encouragement of her husband.

“He said, ‘It won’t happen if you stop writing; it can only happen if you keep writing,’” Stava recalled.

She’s not resting on her breakthrough success and is already hard at work on the second draft of her next book. She described it as a domestic psychological thriller about a woman who moves to the East Coast with her family and “falls into a group of women who seem to be up to no good.”

“My mind is spinning,” Stava said. “Words are coming.”