If you can put it down again, I'll pay you a dollar. 'I took to saying, 'Look, tell you what: Pick it up, open it anywhere. 'If it was a slightly older lady, I'd say, 'Oh, it's historical fiction - if you liked Shogun, you'll love this.' Which is totally true! If it was a young man, I'd say, 'It's fantasy, time travel, things like that: swords.' And if it was an older man, I'd say it was military history.'Įventually, rather than contort herself to describe her series, Gabaldon took a different approach. 'Depending on who I was talking to, if it was a young woman I'd say, 'Oh, historical romance, men in kilts,' ' she winks. After her talk, on the now-quiet theater's bare stage, Gabaldon says when she first made author appearances as an unknown, she'd craft a pitch for each prospective buyer. Two decades and seven big books later, Gabaldon says bookstores still don't know where to place her work, because it contains elements of several genres. The first book was so popular that it blossomed into a series.

That exercise became Outlander, the best-selling tale of Claire Randall, a young British nurse during World War II who inadvertently hurtles back two centuries to find adventure, intrigue and, yes, romance. in quantitative behavioral psychology, something she describes as 'animal behavior with lots of statistics.' She was a science professor for years, but decided in her mid-30s to write a novel, just for practice. Gabaldon - she says her Spanish name rhymes with 'bad to the bone' - has a Ph.D. 'As my first editor used to say, these have to be word-of-mouth books, because they're too weird to describe to anyone,' she laughs. And inside, Gabaldon talked about her books, including confusion over the marketing plan for the first one. Outside, a group of kilted laddies passed out swatches of tartan emblazoned 'The Kilt Drops 08.09,' a mildly risque reminder of the first episode's air date. Gabaldon appeared recently at San Diego Comic-Con to promote the series - attracting several hundred fans to a small theater about a quarter-mile away from the main frenzy of the convention. How?Īnd now Outlander has been made into a television series that starts Saturday night on the Starz channel. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.

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Outlander series in order