c. 2007 Religion News Service
VANCOUVER, Wash. _ Karen Kingsbury, the reigning queen of Christian fiction, lives on a hilltop just outside Vancouver in a spacious modern Tudor house, with a sweeping driveway and a large, landscaped pool.
This is the house that Life Changing Fiction built. That’s her trademark, says the winner of the 2007 Christian Book Award, because that’s how her fans describe her work.
She started writing inspirational fiction in 1998 and now has 6 million books in print. Last year alone, the 44-year-old sold 2 million copies and made, she says, from 25 cents to $2 for each one sold.
She earns enough that her husband, Don, a former high school Spanish teacher, volunteers as a freshman football coach at a nearby high school only because he wants to. Their six children _ ages 10 to 18, with three boys adopted from Haiti _ don’t need to worry about college tuition. Kingsbury’s payroll includes her only daughter, her mother and her two sisters. The money she earns for lectures, she donates to charity.
Before you dismiss her as a marvel of Christian marketing, consider this: Kingsbury’s novel “Just Beyond the Clouds” ranked No. 17 on The New York Times best-seller list for paperback trade fiction for Oct. 7; “Summer” ranked 15th the previous week. That’s the list that includes “Water for Elephants” (No. 1) and “The Kite Runner” (No. 3). Kingsbury, who claims her own shelf in religious and general bookstores _ and at many a Wal-Mart _ is a crossover Christian author.
Clearly, religious publishing is thriving. A survey in August of Americans who read books found that two-thirds choose the Bible and other religious books, more than any other category. Last year, religious book sales increased 5.6 percent in net revenue, the largest increase in dollar sales of all the categories tracked by the Book Industry Study Group, a leading trade association.
In an industry in which publishers are delighted if a novelist finishes two manuscripts a year, Kingsbury hammers out five, mostly in the five hours a day at her home office while her children are in school. She wrote “Ever After,” the story of two couples divided by the war in Iraq and winner of the Evangelical Christian Publishers award, in five days.
“Karen finds writing therapeutic,” says Rick Christian, founder of Alive Communications and Kingsbury’s agent for nine years. “A conversation on a soccer field can become a whole book. Her imagination is just like one of those magical gardens in a Dr. Seuss book.”
The prolific Kingsbury rules online and in person, too. Her Web site (http://www.karenkingsbury.com) got about 29,000 new hits in July. She receives about 500 letters and e-mails a week. She travels a couple of times a month to lecture and sign books. She insists on taking a digital photo with every reader who wants one. She spends a few minutes in conversation with everyone who stands in line to meet her. She listens to their stories. In her mind, her fans are important _ the people she writes to _ but on her working list of priorities, readers come after God and family.
“I have wanted to be an author since I was 5,” Kingsbury says. “I wanted to be the next Danielle Steel. But newspapers were my plan B.”
And, as often happens, plan B came first.
In 1988, when Kingsbury was a young newspaper reporter in Los Angeles, she met Don at a health club. “He was clean-cut, an athletic guy who didn’t drink, smoke or do drugs,” she says. He brought his Bible with him on their first date. That three-way relationship _ Karen, Don and the Bible _ had its ups and downs, but eventually she bought her own Bible and rethought her faith.
By 1991, she and Don married, and when their first child came along, she wanted to work from home. She wrangled book deals for four true-crime novels. Her writing met with mixed reviews, but Kingsbury’s first book deal tripled her annual reporter’s salary.
But her work, the career she dreamed about, was depressing. “I had to post Scripture on my computer screen to keep going.” So she tried something else.
By then the family lived in Arizona, and she wrote “Where Yesterday Lives,” about five adult siblings called home when their father dies. She wept when she wrote it and, years later, her books still strike at the heart _ without happily-ever-after endings.
“I write tear-jerkers,” she says, “not romance novels.” Her writing includes “a layer of romance,” but her characters tackle real-life problems, from abuse to war. In her books, characters die. Loved ones walk away. Relationships don’t work out. “But the endings are hopeful,” she says, “if you have faith.”
Her editor at Zondervan says Kingsbury writes about redemption, reconciliation and forgiveness. “She reaches into you, rips out your heart and helps mend it with stories,” says Sue Brower, who’s known the author for six years.
Kingsbury targets her demographic: women ages 25 to 65, says Jana Riess, religion book review editor at Publishers Weekly. But Kingsbury’s editor sees a readership beyond that.
“The crowds at her book signings are old and young, white and black, urban and suburban,” Brower says. “If Karen writes for a demographic, it’s the Hallmark demographic, people like me who cry over Hallmark commercials: People coming through tragedy, distress, pain and hurt, coming through it with hope.”
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The Kingsbury home is decorated with Thomas Kinkade paintings of light and framed Bible verses. Every morning the family meets in the kitchen to read a chapter from the Bible.
“In our family, it’s God first, family and then career,” says daughter Kelsey, a high school senior who’s weighing her college options. She writes a little poetry herself, but her real interest lies in musical theater.
“My friends know she’s famous,” Kelsey says. “Sometimes they joke around that she should put them in one of her books. But to me, she’s just Mom.”
(Nancy Haught is a staff writer for The Oregonian of Portland, Ore.)
KRE/PH END HAUGHT
1,000 words, with optional trim to 900
A photo of Kingsbury is available via https://religionnews.com.
