Having that 'stick-to-itist' factor

 

“Somewherealong the line, I realized that I liked telling stories, and I decided that Iwould try writing. Ten years later, I finally got a book published. It washard. I had no skills. I knew nothing about the business of getting published.So I had to keep working at it.” – Janet Evanovich
Born April 22,1943, Evanovich now has over two hundredmillion books in print worldwide and is translated into over 40 languages.  After those initial struggles, she gainedfame and loyal readers with her contemporary mysteries featuring StephaniePlum, a former lingerie buyer from Trenton, NJ, who becomes a bountyhunter to make ends meet.
Evanovich’s writing has combined aterrific and sometimes droll sense of humor (“If you want to cry, you're notgoing to like my books”) with a knack for setting up mystery, suspense andkeeping her readers totally involved.  “Iactually really suck at naming books, so lots of years ago, readers weresending in their ideas for titles,” she explained.    “What we realized is that they were smarterthan us. So we thought, Hey, go for it. So now we have a contest every year.”
Evanovich is testament to perserverance.  During those first years oftrying she had dozens of rejection letters for her first booksbefore she finally connected with a romance novel for which she received$2,000.  “I thought it was an astoundingsum,” she recalled.  Today, she is worth nearly $150 million.