Beloved author LJ Smith died at the age of 66 after a battle with a rare car -immune disease.
Smith was best known as the author of the Vampire Diaries, who sold millions of copies and became a hit TV program.
The author was also known as a productive Ghostwriter who would take back her characters after she had been fired or replaced, reports the New York Times.
Smith died on 8 March in Walnut Creek, California, and her partner Julie Divola announced her death this week and said she died after fighting a car -immune disease for more than ten years.
The author sold millions of books and published more than two dozen works during her career, and reportedly had three non -published Tomes completed before she died.
She got her start in 1987 after publishing 'The Night of the Solstice', which only sold around 5,000 copies, but attracted the entertainment of the book agency.
The company would come up with ideas for books and find authors to write them and then sell them to publishers, and the company sold the concept of 'The Vampire Diaries' to Smith in a time when vampire stories flew out of the shelves.
Smith later admitted that she had written the early books for just a few thousand dollars and did not know that she would have none of the copyright or characters.
Beloved author LJ Smith died at the age of 66 after a battle with a rare car -immune disease
Smith was best known as the author of the Vampire Diaries, who sold millions of copies and became a hit TV program
Smith published the first three Vampire diaries -books in 1991 and a fourth a year later, but she told The Wall Street Journal that writing for rent and not possessing the books was far from lucrative.
The author then struggled almost a decade in the early 2000s with her career while suffering from the writer's block.
This included that her mother died of lung cancer and her brother was diagnosed with phase 4 melanoma, of which he recovered.
Smith later became known in the literary world because of her revival in Fortunes, not least when vampire books became increasingly popular in the mid-2000s due to the success of the Twilight franchise.
The Vampire Diaries saw an increase in sale at the time, and when Smith was again hired by Alloy Entertainment to continue the series, she was contracted for half of the royalties.
The series also selled with more than five million copies and was converted into an eight -seal -TV series on the CW network.
Smith died on March 8 in Walnut Creek, California, and her partner Julie Divola announced her death this week and said she died after fighting a car -immune disease for more than ten years
Smith's Vampire Diaries became an eight -season series on the CW network
She was fired by Alloy Entertainment in 2011 because of 'creative differences', but Smith did not let the looting stop her while she continued the series by writing fanfiction.
Fans went to her online works about some of the later vampire books, which were Ghostwritten but still had Smith's name on the cover, and she became a symbol for authors who recovered their work.
Her partner Divola described Smith as 'very hurt and indignant' because she was fired and see her books written by a ghostwriter.
In 2014, The Wall Street Journal described its career revival as 'one of the strangest comebacks in literary history'.
