A health crisis enabled Anita Claire to start writing; book sales allowed her to keep going.

And in both regards, she knows how fortunate she is.

In 2012, her husband found her not breathing and without a pulse at 1:30 a.m.

He performed CPR on her and got her to the hospital alive — something that only 1 in 70,000 Americans who suffer cardiac arrest in the middle of the night manage to do.

Her luck held from there. Instead of dying at the hospital or coming out with brain damage or the need for a heart transplant, she went home to make a full recovery.

During that recovery, though, she wasn’t working, and her cardiac function was fairly limited. What better way to pass the time than to read?

The authors she read — Liane Moriarty, Charles Sheehan-Miles, Karina Halle, Kristen Proby, and many more — inspired her to give writing a try.

Anita was lucky to survive her cardiac arrest; she’s lucky that her books (six out now, with a seventh coming soon) took off; and she’s lucky that she and her husband can live a quality life with her book sales and his job, rather than requiring her to return to her previous tech job.

What we realized from her story is that perhaps the most important reason to pay for books is that it means you’ll get more books.

If readers weren’t buying Anita's work, she might’ve tried to juggle her old job with this new one. And while many authors do that successfully, not all can — or want — to do so.

You’re on this site because you love books. There’s an easy way to guarantee you’ll get more of what you love: Purchase it.

At The Fussy Librarian, we deliver ebook recommendations in forty different genres. Our daily email is sent to you at no charge. All we ask is that you buy an ebook, which can cost as little as 99 cents, once a month. If you’re willing to support authors by purchasing their books, we want you as a subscriber.

Click here to join The Fussy Librarian.

(And click here to read Anita's ebooks on Kindle.)