Best-selling author Diana Gabaldon hadn’t even set foot in Scotland when she began the book that launched the popular Outlander series, according to Erika Mailman from Th Washington Post… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Diana Gabaldon made Scotland so attractive to readers — and to watchers of the Starz television program, which resumes with Season 5 on Sunday — that the Scottish government’s tourism agency gave her an honorary Thistle Award for generating a flood of visitors to the fens, glens, jagged mountains and soft jade landscapes she so alluringly describes. According to numbers from VisitScotland, Outlander has increased tourism by an average of 67 percent at the sites mentioned in the books or used in filming.

Gabaldon, who is from Phoenix, wrote the first book and part of the second before traveling to Scotland. As a research professor pre-Internet, she read exhaustively to craft indelible images of Scottish places for the “practice novel” she kept secret from her husband. When the unfinished draft sold in a three-book deal for a “staggering amount of money at the time,” Gabaldon let her professorship lapse and headed to Scotland. Despite having no Scottish heritage, she says, “I remember seeing the green land rising and thinking, ‘This feels like home.’ ” She and her husband parked at Carter Bar, where she posed for a photo in front of the England-Scotland border stone. This stone appears in Book 3, “Voyager,” where the character Jamie says of it, “Looks like the sort of stone to last a while,” according to fan Karen Henry, who blogs at Outlandish Observations.

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