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Author Elin Hilderbrand, whose 28 novels — mainly set on Nantucket, the tiny island off Cape Cod, Massachusetts — have sold more than 10 million copies, is planning her next act. The six TV adaptations of her books that are in development, including The Hotel Nantucket, are just the beginning of what’s to come for the 53-year-old mother of three teenagers, who never had any other plan than to be a writer.
Is it true there will be only two more Nantucket books?
I’m giving it all up. I’m actually surprised more people don’t do this. I'm writing my best stuff, but I will have written 30 books when I retire, and Nantucket is 4 miles wide and 13 miles long. I’ve sort of come to the natural end of my material. I don’t want to repeat myself. I don’t want the quality to decline. At this point [interview was mid-July], The Hotel Nantucket has been number one on The New York Times Best Sellers list for four weeks — number one. That kind of success begets enormous pressure, because how do you write a book that is yet better than the one that you just finished?
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That is always my challenge. I like to say my job is to do exactly the same thing differently every year, and it’s hard. So I’m going to control it by just doing two more books on the business plan that I’m on now.
So we haven’t read the last from Elin Hilderbrand?
Will I write other books? Yes, but I will write them on my own schedule. My daughter and I want to write a novel about boarding school. I have things that I want to do, but it won't be the one Nantucket book per summer, the way it has been for 20 years.
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Do you sell the books to the studios and then move on?
I will be executive-producing on [the TV adaptations of my books]. Hollywood is such a difficult nut to crack. I have a bunch of things that will be ready to go in the next 12 months. Hopefully, we can get them on the air. My interest is really in just making sure Nantucket isn’t compromised. Nantucket is a very special place, and people feel passionately about it. The last thing I want to do is ruin it, to have it misrepresented on television. That’s not going to happen.
Will you continue to use your platform to be an advocate for other writers’ books?
I have a book group through [the] Literati [book club app], and it’s been really fun. On my Instragam, I promote other people’s books all the time. So I really am keen. Every writer is a reader first, and that's definitely true of me. Reading is my first love, and so when I think about retiring, I think about doing things that I enjoy, and one of them would be reading. I am so grateful for people like Oprah and Reese Witherspoon and Sarah Jessica Parker, but those people aren't writers. I think it would be fun and good to have a book influencer that’s a writer. It will be different and something I think is lacking.
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