Happily ever after

After what was a long and bumpy road, author Devney Perry found her niche, and a loyal following, in a world of romance and intriguepe a subtitle

By MSU Alumni Foundation

August 22^nd, 2025

Devney (Black) Perry ’04 remembers a Wednesday in 2016 as one might recall an anniversary or a birthday. She’d had a varied and successful career but at the time was staying at home to raise her two sons. Her oldest was at day care; her youngest, just 6 months old, was napping.

During that time, Perry was reading a lot, mostly romance novels, often more than a book a day.

“I went from having a career with a lot of responsibility, long work hours, to where I didn’t have that external challenge,” the Montana State alumna recalled recently. “My house had never been cleaner. You could have eaten off the floors.”

And while she adored being a typical stay-at-home mom and respects those parents who choose to fill that role, she also realized that it wasn’t, at least for her, a long-term solution. Legos and Disney films had lost some of their charm.

“I needed something that was mentally challenging,” she said.

Her voracious reading was helping to fill that gap, Perry said, but the problem with reading that many books was that she was running out of books that she found worthy of her limited time.

“I was talking to a good friend of mine, and I was like, ‘I think I’m just going to try to write a book,’” she said. “That day, I sat down and pulled out my laptop, and I wrote a chapter. And that was it. It was not a great chapter, but we fixed it later.”

Nine years later, Perry has written hundreds of chapters in more than 50 novels, all in the romance genre and often with her home state of Montana as a backdrop. Her books have landed on the bestseller lists of Amazon, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal. Her most recent book, “Shield of Sparrows,” was recognized in May as a New York Times bestseller.

While Perry takes great satisfaction in the career she has carved out in an ultra-competitive profession, writing was not what she envisioned for herself. Born in Lewistown and raised from the age of 8 in Great Falls, Perry had sought to follow in the footsteps of her mother — a nurse — and entered the pre-med track when she enrolled at Montana State in 2000.

“That was always my path,” she said. “I wanted to go into the medical field.”

During her freshman year, however, Perry concluded that “I didn’t want to go to school for another decade,” and she began exploring other possibilities. Elected as a senator to the Associated Students of Montana State University and later as vice president of the student government, she took some political science courses and considered going into the legal profession.

Ultimately, though, she decided to pursue a degree in agricultural business, which she saw as a way to combine her interests in science and business with her Montana roots. Not long after earning that degree, Perry married her now-husband Bill ’02 — they met while both were serving with ASMSU — and moved to Havre where Bill took a job with Northwest Farm Credit Services, now known as AgWest.

“Montana is so special to me. Where’s home? It’s always Montana.”

Perry saw Havre as “a great little town,” although there weren’t many opportunities in her chosen field. Instead, she worked for a while for a finance company and later managed the city’s shopping mall. When Bill’s company transferred him to Bozeman, Perry landed a job with Zoot Enterprises, a surging tech company, followed by a stint at Printing For Less in Livingston.

Roughly two years later, Perry took a job at AgWest when Bill was again transferred, this time to its headquarters in Spokane, Washington. Perry recalled working her way up at the company during the next four to five years, but when another transfer meant another move to Bozeman, she decided to jump off her career path. At the time, she was pregnant with the couple’s second child.

“I knew that finding another job was going to be difficult because I was going to need maternity leave right away,” Perry remembered. “We decided that I would stay home and hold down the fort for a while.”

While Perry has found success as a novelist — publishing at least four to five books a year — she stressed that the road has been long and often bumpy.

“There has been a lot of learning over the years, finding my own voice, finding my style and embracing that over time,” she said. “It has been this wonderful slow build. There are some authors who will have that lightning strike on their first book, and it goes gangbusters, and everyone knows who they are. But I think it can also be such a cool thing for all the writers who just keep churning out words, year after year.”

A key for her, Perry said, has been treating her writing as a job — “especially since I didn’t have one when I started” — with strict daily goals. While she didn’t set such expectations when she first started, now, 50-plus books into her career, she insists on writing between 2,000 and 4,000 words each working day.

“If it takes me three hours, great,” she said. “Sometimes it takes me eight; sometimes it takes me ten. It depends on the number of distractions.”

When her kids were toddlers, those distractions were plentiful, she remembered, and she would sneak her writing in mostly around naptime. Now, after another move back to Spokane, “They leave for school for the day, and I jump right into whatever it is that I have to accomplish,” she said.

Without a track record as a writer, getting the attention of an agent or a publisher was at first challenging, and Perry, as most romance novelists do, has independently published most of her books. That route has required that she learn all the facets of getting her words in front of her readers, everything from branding to hiring editors, cover designers and narrators for her audiobooks.

“It has been a great balance for me,” Perry said. “Not just the writing, but I also enjoy the marketing side of it and the business management side of it. It has been a really great fit for me personally because there are a lot of hats that you have to wear.”

For Perry, with so many novels, keeping her stories fresh and unique is part of the enjoyment that she finds in her writing. Some romance novelists, she noted, will lean into tried-and-true formulas that have worked for them, book after book.

“That’s not ever been super exciting for me to write like that,” she said. “So, I try to mix it up. At the same time, you want to have that same voice so when people pick it up, they know that it’s my book.”

She does require, however, that each of her books ends with a “happily ever after.”

“If you call it a romance novel, it’s got a happily ever after,” Perry said. “It’s a requirement. I don’t like the feeling at the end of a book if you are sad and it’s unsatisfying, so that is something that I not only need to have for my readers but for myself, too.”

Another constant in her books has been Montana, and the state, in both real and imagined places, often plays a key role, much like a central character would, Perry said.

“For me, it’s very fulfilling to write about a state and a place that I know, that I can see in my head, like it’s a movie,” Perry said. “And I think that comes across on the page.”

“Montana is so special to me. Where’s home? It’s always Montana.”

Landing on bestseller lists has brought a special satisfaction, Perry said, although loving what she does and cultivating a loyal following of readers has been the real reward.

“That validation, that great feeling of knowing that all the hard work that you put in, all the writing, year after year, that it does pay off. At the end of the day, I write because I love it. If I didn’t get paid to write, I would still write. This is my dream job.”

Still, even with all that success, the book that gives her the most satisfaction is “Coppersmith Farmhouse,” the one she started with a single chapter after a conversation with a friend back in 2016.

“That book will always, always be the one that I am most proud of,” she said, “because it was the start of now, the start of what my career has become.”