Author profile: Beloved author Debbie Macomber wraps up OutLoud Author Series

Debbie Macomber is a big name author and a fan favorite.

Calling from her home in the Pacific Northwest - on a 'beautiful, sunshiny day” - Macomber noted that she's just as big a fan, in fact, of all her fans.

'From the very beginning of my career, I have loved meeting with readers, getting their feedback and talking to them,” she said. 'My daughter says I was social media before there was social media, because I was one of the very first authors to put their mailing address in a book. That was very important to me. I have changed the choices in my career three or four different times just based on reader feedback.”

Referred to as the 'official storyteller of Christmas,” Macomber's Christmas books - she'll be releasing her 10th Christmas book in October and has had half of those stories turned into Christmas movies - are a good example, she said.

'When I was first contracted to do Christmas books they were just 125 pages,” she said. 'The feedback from readers was that they loved the story but they wanted more. I was contracted for three of those books and the publishers didn't pay me a penny more, but I doubled the length and sales escalated. And that all came from reader feedback.”

'What the readers tell me and share with me is really important to me as an author,” she said. 'Meeting my readers is always fun, too. And I am so touched and humbled when they come up and say your books got me through chemotherapy or my husband died and I was able to sleep for the first time after I read your book. Although it is funny to hear that your books put someone to sleep.”

Macomber, who has been writing romance novels for several decades to much acclaim, will be in Cedar Rapids on Friday night to engage with yet another crowd of eager fans as she wraps up the OutLoud Author Series presented by the Metro Library Network.

With more than 200 million copies of her books in print worldwide, the No. 1 New York Times best-selling author said her writing career has certainly evolved over the years.

'Using a rented typewriter back in the day on a kitchen table with four little kids running around, is how I got started. It was all a very gradual process. I hired a part-time assistant back in the 80s and remember renting an office back in the 90s. Now I have a staff of 12 because my career has gotten so multifaceted, and I just can't do everything myself. Everybody has their job to do and they do it well and they represent me well,” she said of her team, which includes her daughter as her CEO.

Macomber not only continues to churn out best-selling, heartwarming novels, but also operates a Hallmark Store - which features some of the 144 Debbie Macomber Cedar Cove series product - and The Grey House Cafe, a lovely restaurant housed in a Victorian jewel of a home in Port Orchard, Wash., the setting of her celebrated Cedar Cove series and the city Macomber now calls home.

Not surprisingly, Macomber said she's always had a natural passion for stories.

'I am a natural born storyteller; that is really the gift God gave me,” she said. 'When I started out, I had to learn to be the writer and that was a process, but the storytelling has always been a part of my life.”

She said even as a small child she remembers going to sleep making up stories in her head. She also has a pretty memorable story about her first visit to the public library.

'I grew up in Yakima, Washington, and when mom took me to the library for the first time the children's librarian handed me the book. My mother says I took hold of it with both hands and put it right next to my heart. And from that moment on forward, she said I would not go to take a nap or go to bed at night unless I had a book in my hand.”

While the story is very touching, Macomber said the best part of the story is that that librarian who handed her the book was Beverly Cleary.

And as her career started very simply, she said she sticks to a very traditional writing process even today.

'I do my work a really old fashioned way with a pen or pencil and a pad,” she said. 'I just start writing down ideas for different chapters and then build the story from there. It's like building blocks. Then I write the synopsis, and my editor and my agent read it and they give me feedback on it, and I change what is necessary and start writing.”

She said she needs to treat the writing like work in order to get it done.

'For me, this is my career, it's my business and I treat it very much like that,” she said. 'I don't write only when I feel inspired. If I did that, we'd be on food stamps,” she said with a laugh. 'But I love what I do; I really genuinely love being a writer. And once I get an idea, as soon as I have it I start developing the characters.”

Her books are theme based as opposed to setting based as with many of her past series books. 'If Not for You,” her latest hardcover that was released in March, for example deals with healing. And her next release, slated for August, 'Any Dream Will Do,” is about second chances and redemption.

Macomber said she's working on a book now that was inspired by a local news story and hits on a theme she'd like to address. The book, titled 'The Cottage by the Sea,” will be released next summer.

'It is about someone who has lost their entire family and the idea is that she creates her own family,” she said. 'After she's lost everything, she goes to the one place that made her happy as a child which is the cottage her family rented every year for a week. So she goes to the sea and there's a peace that comes over her. She was the character I created to go along with the premise I had.”

It wouldn't be surprising to see Macomber write a novel about perseverance, given her own experiences over the course of her career.

'I certainly enjoy the fact that I never gave up, because it wasn't easy for me to get published,” she said, noting that she has dyslexia. 'I didn't learn to read until I was 10 years old, in the fifth grade. I was always at the bottom of my class, and I struggled through school. I barely graduated high school and married as a teenager. So I just think it's a testament to God's sense of humor that he would take someone who struggled all through school and make her a best-selling author.”

Macomber's fans around the world certainly must appreciate God's sense of humor then.