Fame & Fortune: Author Janet Evanovich No mystery to her investing: She's 'Plum' conservative
Page | 1 | 2 | 3

Evanovich: I was the token humor writer. Each romance line had a token humor writer and I was it, so when I moved into mystery, I brought that with me. People used to say Sue Grafton was funny, but I'd look at that and go, "Well, she may be amusing but she's no 'I Love Lucy.'" I WAS "I Love Lucy!"

Bankrate: Changing tastes had a lot to do with nudging you out of romances.

Evanovich: The little category romances that Tami and I were writing kind of collapsed; "Second Chance" collapsed, "Loveswept" went away, and we all sort of lost our jobs. There was no good movement within romance at the time, economically you were kind of limited and there was no place to grow. I actually wanted to do romantic adventure and I couldn't get a contract for it. Tami was forced out of romance because she wanted to do darker romances. We just had to leave the genre. There was just no way to grow your audience other than writing more and more books. I was putting out four books a year and that was insanity. I would have to tape the name of my hero and heroine to my computer screen, because for the first six weeks I was writing, I couldn't remember their names! I mean, I tried to be Nora Roberts, but I couldn't do it.

Bankrate: Which turned out to be great news for your fans. Do you remember the moment when your career really took that upward climb?

Evanovich: There were two. One was, I had written these 12 romance novels and had taken a year and a half off to start the Plum series, so I knew something of the business and I knew what was important and could do things for me, and just before book one went to print, I sold that book to Columbia TriStar for almost $1 million, and I knew what that was going to do to my career. I just knew that deal was going to give me a boost that tons of other people weren't fortunate enough to have. And it did; it just didn't boost me quite as far as I thought it would, because, for one thing, the movie was never made. That was one moment. The other one was with book six ("Hot Six"), which was the first time I made No. 1 (on the New York Times best-seller list). That was the one that made my growth start going exponential. And it was because I put the cliffhanging ending in book five ("High Five"). I knew that I had to do something to get a lot of velocity going so I could get higher on the list that first week. That really was what shoved me up to No. 1, because every Evanovich fan was in the store that first day buying that book.

Bankrate: Was that the moment you went from clever titles to establishing a brand?

Evanovich: Yeah. I have a very smart agent who has done very well for me, Robert Gottlieb, and he saw that we needed to work at the brand. We realized that this was not just a woman's book. We had a lot of men who loved the book, we had kids, we had a very diverse audience, and Robert worked to get a cover on it that everybody would relate to and that was really representative of the book. We started going with the superbright colors and featuring the number and trying to get a brand look to all of the products. Recognizing all of those things really helped.

Bankrate: What is the secret to selling books?