Sabrina Jeffries

In the last 11 years, New York Times bestselling author Sabrina Jeffries has penned 20 Regency romances, three novellas and three short stories — becoming a regular on both the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists and winning more than a dozen industry awards in the process.

New Orleans-born, Thailand-reared, Jeffries attributes her success to listening to what peers, her publisher and her own common sense told her she should be writing: "I write what I enjoy reading: lighter, sexier historical romances, with more dialogue and more sensuality."

Writing about 19th-century English life comes naturally for Jeffries. Not only is she a lifelong Jane Austen fan, but she has a doctorate in English lit from Tulane and a specialty in Early Modern British literature. Yet the impetus for her stories, Jeffries says, is always "what if" — not what if her hero likes this or that, but what if this happened and this happened ... what would it do to a person?

And she writes, she says, because "I can't not write . . . I have stories in my head, and I have to get them out."

Today, the novelist has more than 5 million Sabrina Jeffries books in print. She writes at her home in Cary, N.C., where she lives with husband, Rene, and their son, Nick. When not answering e-mails as she logs miles on her treadmill or doing jigsaw puzzles ("my reward for finishing a book"), Jeffries can be found championing the cause of autistic children in the name of her son.