30 Astonishing Facts Every Fan Should Know About Nora Roberts

4 February 2019, 11:35 am EST By Ruby Karnick

Nora Roberts, the most famous author of more than 225 romance novels, can also be known by her pseudonyms J. D. Robb for the in Death series, Jill March and Sarah Hardesty for the publications in the UK. Here are some really interesting facts about the American author:

She is the first author to be inducted into the Romance Writers of America Hall of Fame, with other authors honored being Jo Beverley and Jennifer Greene.
She has seven Golden Medallion Awards, fourteen RITA Awards plus two RITA Awards as J.D. Robb, and three Quill Awards to her name.
Several of her books have been adapted into TV movies and have been aired on Lifetime, which was produced by the Peter Guber's Mandalay TV and Stephanie Germain Prods.
She has been repeatedly included in the Giving Back Fund's annual lists of the most philanthropic celebrities, especially with the Nora Roberts Foundation.
In the year 1997, Roberts was awarded the Romance Writers of America Lifetime Achievement Award. The said award was renamed as the RWA Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008.
Nora Roberts Foundation endowed the Nora Roberts Center for American Romance at McDaniel College that supports academic scholarship on the American romance novel.
Every one of her novels has been ranked as a New York Bestseller, since the year 1999, and around 124 novels have been ranked among the Times Bestsellers also.
In the years 1999 and 2000 Nora Robert's novels accounted for four out of five bestselling romance novels in the U.S., and just in the year 2000, she had 13 best sellers.
It is said that Roberts played a pivotal role in the shift of romantic novels from typical eighteen-year-old heroines and superficial male portrayals to more realistic approach.
She wrote her first story, at the age 30, while being stuck in the house due to a snow blizzard in the year 1979. Her first novel "Irish Thoroughbred" was published around two years later.

Eleanor Marie Robertson was born on October 10, 1950, as the youngest of five children to Bernard E. Robertson and Eleanor Robertson, in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Both of her parents are of Irish descent, and she often describes herself as an "Irish woman through and through."
It was during her second year in high school, Montgomery Blair High School, that she met her first husband, Ronald Aufdem-Brinke. The duo got married immediately after the graduation, against her parents’ wishes, but divorced in 1983.
The couple had two sons - Dan and Jason, and Roberts spent most of her time with her kids, a period she refers to as her "Earth Mother" years.
She met Bruce Wilder, her second husband in July 1985, when she hired him to build bookshelves. He owns a bookstore named "Turn the Page Books" in Boonsboro, Maryland.
Roberts and her husband reportedly own the Inn BoonsBoro, in Boonsboro, Maryland, where the suites are said to be named after inspiration from literary romantic couples with happy endings.
In the year 2007, she was named as one of the 100 Most Influential People by Time magazine. Roberts was one of only two authors on the list, the other being David Mitchell.
It is reported that Roberts writes trilogies, finishing all the three books in a row, in an effort to remain with the same characters. She often does the same with her famous "In Death" series also.
She is an ardent baseball fan, and has been honored by the local minor league baseball team Hagerstown Suns several times.
She is the third author, only after Stieg Larsson and James Patterson to have sold over 1 million books on Kindle, making her the first female author to have achieved it.

In September 2001, for the first time, the first and second spot on the Publishers Weekly bestseller list, was occupied by Roberts as her romance "Time and Again" was number one, and her J.D. Robb release "Seduction in Death" was number two.
She reportedly works eight hours a day, every day, without any holidays and even on vacations and begins with envisioning a key incident, character or setting.
Coming from a family of avid readers, she has had books as primary importance throughout her life, but had never written anything until the age of 30.
Before her first successful "Playing the Odds," the first novel in the MacGregor family series, published in 1985, she had around 23 novels published under various Silhouette imprints.
For her second pseudonym J.D. Robb, the initials "J.D.," where taken from her sons' names - Jason and Dan, while Robb is a shortened form of Roberts.
She initially decided to take the pseudonym of D.J. MacGregor, with the MacGregor series name, but right before publication, she discovered that this pseudonym was used by another author.
In the year 2001, she had 10 best-selling mass-market paperbacks, according to Publishers Weekly, without adding the books written under the J.D. Robb name.
Another best-selling author Janet Dailey, in the year 1997, admitted to have repeatedly plagiarized Roberts' work, and as a result Roberts sued Dailey, and donated the settlement to various literary causes including the Literacy Volunteers of America (now ProLiteracy).
She was one among the authors who strongly criticized Cassie Edwards, for copying many passages from much older sources without giving any kind of credit.
Roberts has won an unprecedented 21 of the Romance Writers of America's RITA Awards, the highest honor given in the romance genre.