“As a librarian, I would read new books every day because my young readers were coming in and demanding new stories, and so I would go to the bookstore and try and figure out what they wanted,” she continued. “So I think that’s [an] important part of my job now as a showrunner.”
Han released the first The Summer I Turned Pretty novel in 2009, quickly gaining success as a young-adult genre author. More than one decade later in 2021, she snagged a deal with Amazon Studios to turn the romantic drama into a television series, which turbocharged sales of the books back onto the NYT Bestsellers list in 2022.
After Han’s string of streaming wins, the author has built a romance empire with millions of international followers. Now that she’s miles away from her former job as a librarian, and from her success both on-screen and in publishing, the world-builder sees herself as a writer and businesswoman.
“I’ve been writing books since I was in my early 20s, and book publishing is very different from Hollywood in that there’s not as much money. It’s a much more genteel kind of industry,” Han explained. “So you really have to—from the very beginning—be selling yourself, selling your books. And I think with social media, that has increased. But when I started out, there wasn’t even that.”
Some leaders make it to the top by rising through the ranks of their corporate companies, but others like Han had very inconspicuous careers before achieving massive success.
