On March 31, 2010, 21-year-old Veronica Roth wrote a blog post titled “You + $$$ = ?” Two weeks later, Roth sold her first book, a dystopian YA novel about a society segregated by moral virtues and a girl who doesn’t fit in. “I was in Psych learning about exposure therapy,” she recalls. She started writing about those people instead of doing her college homework, and within 40 days she had a completed draft. Divergent sold quickly—after four days, to the first editor who finished reading it. Divergent was published in May 2011 and spent eleven consecutive weeks on the New York Times’ children’s best-seller list; the sequel, Insurgent, debuted at No. 1 a year later. The series has remained there ever since. Since no popular YA series is without a movie franchise, Summit Entertainment—the studio behind Twilight—will release Divergent early next year, and its cast (Kate Winslet, Next Big Thing Shailene Woodley) suggests similar expectations for the film version. Meanwhile, the contents of the trilogy’s upcoming final book, Allegiant (coming out October 22), are being guarded like Katniss Everdeen in the first half of Mockingjay.
http://www.vulture.com/2013/10/divergent-author-veronica-roth-builds-empire.html