Gage Skidmore · CC BY-SA 2.0

A young adult novelist who built The Mortal Instruments, beginning with City of Bones in 2007, into a bestselling six-book series and a wider Shadowhunters universe spanning multiple spin-off series, a film, and a television adaptation. Early in her career, before publishing under her own name, she was banned from a fan-fiction site over unattributed borrowing from another author's novel — a matter of record she has since moved well past through original, commercially successful work.