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Fame & Fortune: Author Janet Evanovich
No mystery to her investing: She's 'Plum' conservative |
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Evanovich: You really
sell books by word of mouth, more than any other product. You can
put lots of product out in the stores and it will stay there and
you can slowly build with advertising and lots of other stuff, but
when you sell a book, you really sell by word of mouth because you're
only putting that product out essentially once a year, then it's
an old product. So you have to have people talking about it and
moving it around. I think it took me six books to get enough people
reading me and enough books out there that when the word of mouth
started happening, it actually meant something. And that's still
working for us. For two years now, I've held No. 1 on The New York
Times for three weeks.
Bankrate: Did you always
have a head for business?
Evanovich: No, I was always
kind of the weird kid, sort of the goof-off who walked to my own
beat. I was a stay-at-home mom. Whatever job I had, I always tried
to do the best job I could, and when I became a writer, I just had
that same philosophy. What I realized after a couple romances was
that you couldn't neglect the business side of it because that was
an integral part of being the best you could be as an author. Because
there just were not enough things in place that worked well enough
for you. Publishers all have thousands of authors to take care of.
As women romance writers, we knew we had to take care of our own
business. We knew we could not afford the luxury of sitting back
and being housewives at this profession. So we started up organizations
like Romance Writers of America and Sisters in Crime and Novelists
Inc., and we promoted the concept that we were professionals and
we were smart. I think it was because of my romance background and
this knowledge that we could never allow the public and the publishers
to take us for granted, as housewives. We had to be smart. We had
to be businesspeople.
Bankrate: You now have your son Peter managing your investments. Do you prefer a certain kind of investing?
Evanovich: I don't. I leave that entirely up to Peter. He's very conservative; we don't do a lot of speculating. In the beginning, I think he did more stock market things and dabbled in all kinds of stuff. After a couple years of this, we decided that we don't make money through investment, we make money through my writing and my daughter's promoting, and Peter's job is more to guard the money. We still make money on our money, but he doesn't spend his time watching what is happening in the stock market everyday. He makes very sound, long-term investments, bonds and real estate. We do very boring investing. And then I do my best to spend it as fast as I can! Hey, I'm from Jersey, that's what it's all about! Cartier, here I come.
Bankrate: Is there anything about your career you would have done differently?
Evanovich: For one thing, I wouldn't use Evanovich. It's just way too long to write at a signing and it doesn't fit on the book page. My average signing, I'll have 2,000 to 3,000 people out at a signing, and I'll have that every night. My signings have been getting shorter and shorter because the human thumb can only take so much.
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