Jo Watson Books in Order

If you want the travel rom-coms first: Burning Moon → Almost a Bride → Finding You
If you like office romance and sharp banter: Love to Hate You → Love You, Love You Not → What Happens on Vacation
If you want the fate-and-second-chance books: You, Me, Forever → Truly, Madly, Like Me → Just The Way I Am
If you want her newer standalones: What Happens on Vacation → Love at First Flight → The Ex Effect
If you want her YA novel: Big Boned

Jo Watson is a South African author who came to novels from the world of performance and scripts. She studied at AFDA, where she earned an honors degree in Live Performance, and for years worked across the kind of jobs where story comes first, theater, television, film, advertising, and copywriting. Long before she was known for rom-coms, she was the person shaping scenes, dialogue, and story beats in several different formats.

She has often described herself as a storyteller first.

Books were not the original plan. In 2013, while looking for a way to reach readers beyond her immediate circle, Watson found Wattpad and entered a Harlequin writing competition. She wrote Burning Moon fast, almost on a dare to herself, and the response changed everything.

That first novel took off online, won a Watty Award, and helped launch a career she had not expected to have. Her audience on Wattpad grew quickly, eventually climbing into the tens of millions of reads, and publishing deals followed. Watson later became a two-time Watty Award winner, which tells you a lot about how strongly readers connected with her voice from the start.

What readers tend to like about her adult fiction is the mix of chaos and heart. In books like Almost a Bride, Love to Hate You, and What Happens on Vacation, she takes women whose lives are already wobbling, adds a bad decision or two, and then lets humor do some of the heavy lifting while the emotional stakes sneak up behind it. The banter is sharp, but the characters usually have something real to work through as well.

Travel runs through a lot of her early work. The Destination Love novels, including Burning Moon and Finding You, send their heroines to Thailand, Greece, tropical resorts, and other far-from-home places where old plans fall apart and new ones start to make sense. Those books are fun and breezy on the surface, but they are also interested in embarrassment, grief, identity, family baggage, and the strange freedom that comes when life stops behaving.

Her later books keep the romantic-comedy spark but stretch it in different directions. You, Me, Forever, Truly, Madly, Like Me, and Just The Way I Am lean into fate, reinvention, and second chances. Love at First Flight plays with fake dating, while The Ex Effect turns an old romantic disaster into a second-chance setup. Even when the premise is big, Watson keeps the people at the center feeling messy and recognizable.

She likes stories about people taking up space.

Then there is Big Boned, her young adult debut, a body-positive coming-of-age novel about art, self-worth, anxiety, and finding the courage to speak up. It shows another side of her writing, but it still fits with the rest of her work. Watson returns again and again to characters who have been told, by family, partners, schools, or the internet, to be smaller than they are.

Official bios still mention some of the details readers enjoy most about her, her love of Adidas, her devotion to Depeche Mode, and the fact that she did not set out to become a novelist at all. She now writes full time and lives in South Africa with her husband and son. It is a neat outcome for someone who started by uploading a story online and seeing what might happen next.