Like the enigmatic characters in her books, Kate Evangelista lives a secret life. To the people she encounters every day, she seems to be living anonymously—just another woman in a car. But the 30-year-old is actually an international best-selling author—one that most Filipinos have never heard of.

 

That’s because Evangelista’s novels are not available in the Philippines; they’re published by small boutique American publishers.

 

But all that is about to change. Kate Evangelista may not be so obscure for much longer. How she got to be where she is, in fact, almost as supernatural as the romances she likes to write about.

 

Kathleen Muñoz Evangelista was born in 1983 in Angeles City, the eldest of two children born to businessman Domingo Evangelista Jr. and homemaker Marilyn Evangelista. At the age of 4, Evangelista moved to Manila with her family—and contrary to what you’d expect, was not into books as a kid.

 

“I struggled a bit with dyslexia when I was younger,” she says. “So when I took English, they put me in remedial classes.” Her mother Marilyn says Kate was a quiet child. “She was independent,” the older Evangelista recalls. “She was serious all the time.”

 

It was during high school at Southville International School in Las Piñas that she learned to love books. A friend lent her a copy of Raymond E. Feist’s 1987 fantasy novel, “Daughter of the Empire,” and Evangelista loved it. “That started me on a whole fantasy bent,” she remembers. “Imagine, this whole world out of nothing.”

 

That dovetailed nicely with another discovery in class. In her sophomore year, her English teacher assigned the class to write a short story. Evangelista plunked herself down in front of her father’s electric typewriter and produced her first story.

 

“I think you have something here,” her teacher said.

 

Evangelista looks back at the experience as being life-changing. “That sort of started it for me,” she says. “When an adult in authority gives you a compliment about something you’re excited about, that launches you in that direction.”

 

She wrote poems and got published in the school publication. She also began writing more short stories, binding them together and bringing them to school. “Every time my friends would see these bound pieces of paper, they would read them and pass them around,” Evangelista recalls.

 

Yet towards the end of high school, Evangelista decided she wanted to be a doctor instead of a writer, something that surprised friends who had known her as a pretty good writer.  She had always wanted to be a doctor though she can’t quite put her finger on why, she confesses. “It was in my mind for some reason,” she says. So she applied and got into De La Salle University’s BS Human Biology program—though her parents apparently had no idea about it.

 

Her mother remembers that one day after bringing her daughter to school, a teacher approached and congratulated her because the younger Evangelista had gotten into Human Biology.

 

Her mother’s response? “What human biology? I did not know she had taken the exam.” Nonetheless, her parents were happy with the result, says Evangelista.

 

But she would soon have a change of heart.

 

“I really felt lost,” she says. “That really made me feel pathetic. Why am I studying just to pass? I thought to myself, ‘I would rather be something great than be a mediocre doctor.’” So she literally walked into DLSU’s Department of Literature and shifted to a Literature program.

 

Interestingly enough, she didn’t set out to be a writer, though class assignments enabled her to write short stories every now and then. “I never thought of writing as a career path,” Evangelista says. “Actually, when I shifted to Literature, I thought I was going to be a teacher.”

 

True enough, after graduating in 2005, she began teaching English at St. Scholastica’s College Westgrove in Silang, Cavite, followed by a teaching stint at De La Salle University-Canlubang.  But she shifted gears soon enough.

 

“I realized teaching wasn’t my thing,” she explains. “I loved teaching and the students but I hated the paperwork.” She then took up a consultant’s job at the online tutoring company Smarthinking, Inc., where she checked American students’ essays before they were submitted.  But there was a story awakening inside her.

 

In the (American) summer break of 2009, Evangelista begged off the consultant job to write her first novel. The story had been in her head a long time, back in St. Scholastica’s Westgrove, when she noticed that a bell in the afternoon rang to let the students know they were to proceed to the guardhouse to be fetched. That scene led to the setting of Barinkoff Academy, where a girl named Phoenix McKay met a mysterious young man named Demitri—who turned out to be not quite human (he’s a slow-aging, paranormal creature known as a Zhamvy). Naturally, Phoenix feels an attraction for the straightlaced Demitri. And then she meets the mischievous Zhamvy named Luka. Hello, supernatural love triangle.

 

Evangelista took six months to write the Young Adult (YA) novel, now titled “Taste.” She decided she wanted to publish the book in the United States. “I realized that if you go abroad, you get a broader market, as compared to if you stay here, you get struck just here,” she explains.

 

After asking around, “Taste” found a publisher in October, 2011 in Crescent Moon Press, and came out in the US in May 2012. “The response was very good,” Evangelista says, adding that “Taste” reached number 86 on the Amazon.com Top 100 and has sold close to 10,000 copies.

 

It didn’t hurt that supernatural romances such as those of Amanda Hocking (“Switched” and “Torn”) were very much the rage at the time, but Evangelista says it was more of what her story required than jumping on a bandwagon that did it for her.

 

“I found the genre fun,” she says. “Adding a supernatural element to anything enables you to use your ability more because you can put a lot of action in. Plus the secret that these people are supernatural adds tension to the story.”

 

She also notes that vampire-heavy supernatural shows like “True Blood” (based on Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse books) and “The Vampire Diaries” (based on the LJ Smith novels) are quite sexy “and involved being bitten on the neck and living forever”).

 

She didn’t sit idle. In October 2012, she published another supernatural romance, “Reaping Me Softly,” with Omnific Publishing in Texas. When she first submitted the manuscript to Omnific, she expected to be rejected immediately. Instead, she got a three-book deal. The second book in that deal, the New Adult (NA) romance (for readers ages 18-25) “Romancing the Bookworm” came out last month. The third book in her deal, the Reaping sequel titled “Un-Reap My Heart” comes out in September.  In October, her other NA novel, “Impulse,” comes out from Entangled Publishing. It’s a dystopian tale full of drag racing.

 

It’s her forthcoming novel “Til Death,” that really changes the stakes. Evangelista describes it as a “YA urban fantasy novel,” and it will be published worldwide by publishing giant Macmillan in March. It will also be her first book available in Philippine bookstores.

 

This has created the odd situation of Evangelista selling her own books in the Philippines (visit her website to order her books), for now. Otherwise, she brings in books from the US, signs them and sends them out in a DIY bookselling operation. That’s what authors in the US do, she says.

 

“Even big authors, if you’re midlist, you still have to sell your book yourself,” she says. Her mother says she always tells people that her daughter is an international best-selling author.  So not so odd, after all.

 

You would think that’s enough to keep anyone busy for a while, but Evangelista is working on yet other things. She’s currently editing “Til Death,” but also writing “Savor,” the sequel to her first novel, “Taste,” also due to come out sometime this year.

 

Evangelista’s prodigious output is helped by the fact that she writes every day. “I write one chapter every day,” she states matter-of-factly, averaging just one month on each manuscript before they go off to editors. “It works because I really don’t worry about the story. The story comes from the characters, and I take it a chapter at a time, going where the characters take me.” She’s often caught unaware about where her creations lead her.

 

When she’s not writing, the Sta. Rosa, Laguna-based Evangelista likes to watch movies. “I like reading within my genre, supernatural romance or otherwise,” she says, adding that she wants to get back into reading fantasy by starting with George R.R. Martin’s “Game of Thrones” (shocker: she has not read any of the six titles which make up the Song of Fire and Ice books).

 

“Sometimes when I’m stressed, I like to bake,” she admits, noting that she must have cooked a hundred cupcakes while waiting for the response to one of her books. “A lot of people are afraid of the rejection, but I think the worst part is waiting,” she says. “It’s what culls the herd.” Her mother says she has observed that Evangelista is happiest when she is writing.

 

As always, this young writer is very mindful of where her stories are taking her and the transformations she undergoes. “I never felt I fit in the YA category,” she says, though supernatural romances are admittedly what she’s best known for. That’s why she’s writing the older-bracket NA books. “When I stepped into that category, I felt finally, I’m home,” Evangelista says. “My twisted-ness can fit here without disturbing the younger readers.”

 

That won’t completely change her output, though. It’s all about what the characters and the stories require, she says. “Even if I find my comfort zone in NA, I will still write YA,” she declares, no doubt provoking a sigh of relief among fans and readers of her supernatural romances.

 

It’s not surprising that YA books now dominate the book-selling landscape. Dr. Cyan Abad-Jugo, fictionist and literature teacher at the Ateneo de Manila University explains.

 

“My sense is that ‘YA’ was initially a ‘void’ that needed to be filled because there was no or very few books to bridge the divide between children’s books and college literature,” she says. There may have been some faddish aspects to the YA invasion, she adds. “As age groups like the preteen market aim for ‘older’ ‘more sophisticated’ books or storylines, the mid-teeners feel like they have to ‘read up’ or go outside of the (book) choices of their younger siblings. This explains the boom in the market, as we have many young people in the Philippines.

 

“Outside of ‘fads,’ however, lies the consideration of any good piece of literature: A good book is a good book regardless of market, to be enjoyed by anyone at any age who loves good books,” Abad-Jugo says.

 

By itself, the supernatural romance genre has proven quite powerful, what with the success of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight books. In the Philippines, supernatural romances sell briskly, and that’s to be expected, explains Dr. Luis Gatmaitan, a medical doctor who is also an award-winning creative writer.

 

“As a people, we are fond of stories with aswang (ghouls), diwata (fairies), ghosts, duwendes (dwarves), white lady, and other supernatural beings as characters. I grew up listening to these stories as well,” he says. “As a child, I would make time to listen to Ben David’s ‘Gabi ng Lagim’ radio program. Yes, I would get scared but would still listen, curious about the exploits of these supernatural beings. I have heard stories about mortals falling in love with a diwata, or tikbalangs falling in love with a mortal; or puting duwendes (white dwarves) courting a mortal. It’s inherent in our culture.”

 

Gwenn Galvez, marketing manager for Anvil Publishing, Inc., concurs: “The fascination for the supernatural or supra normal is universal because this genre is a hit in many countries. This fascination goes back to the time of our ancestors who felt the need to ‘personify’  good and evil. This is what mythology is all about.” She also believes the trend will continue. “Their popularity has never waned. Although there seem to be peaks in supernatural during economic booms, and this is a whole new story.”

 

Supernatural romances are also poised to keep their lofty perch in best-seller lists for a while, Gatmaitan says. “It could be a trend; Harry Potter books used to be very popular. But I could be wrong,” he adds.  “There is no formula to what will sell. A lot of our young people today are into supernatural romances, but I believe that eventually it will reach its plateau. Then it will coexist with YA titles of other themes or topics. I hope that our local writers would respond to the challenge of writing and publishing young adult novels reflective of our own culture and experiences. We should capture the ‘culture of Pinoy teen-hood’ in our future novels.”

 

Filipino elements are not something Evangelista has deliberately included in her books, though she does include a version of our beloved chicharon (pork crackling) in “Taste” as a viable other meat option for the flesh-eating Zhamvy. “I don’t know,” she admits. “I have a lot of stories that haven’t been told yet and maybe they can have Filipino references, who knows?”

 

Despite her best-seller status, Evangelista’s long-term goal includes breaking into the New York Times bestseller list and see her work adapted to the silver screen. But already, she has achieved something rare in the Philippines: Make a comfortable living as a full-time author. She dreams of owning a gleaming, gun-metal gray Ford Mustang instead of driving around in her workaday Toyota Vios.

 

In the meantime, she continues to check the boxes on her to-do list for worldwide publishing success. Last year, she received the Ken Spillman-National Book Development Council of Singapore subsidy that enabled her to attend the prestigious Asian Festival for Children’s Content. She’s also looking to attend conferences in the United States, such as the 2014 Romantic Times Booklovers Convention. And of course, there’s that little matter of finally being available in local bookstores next year. Indeed, Evangelista’s relative anonymity may be coming to an end.

 

Having proven that she can handle paranormal love stories, simple romances between normal people and a dark city full of fast cars, Evangelista looks forward to an impossibly eventful year full of arrivals and promises fulfilled. It’s everything she’s ever wanted, and yet she’s not quite ready to pigeonhole herself. “I’ll see where the stories take me. I love jumping around. Next year, I might have a sci-fi book, you never know,” she says teasingly. “I like challenging myself.” •

 

 

For more information on Kate Evangelista and how to buy her books, visit www.kateevangelista.com.