theguardian.com-amanda hocking the writer who made millions by selfpublishing online

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theguardian.com http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jan/12/amanda-hocking-self-publishin

Ed Pilkington

Amanda Hocking, the writer who made millions by self-

publishing online

Amanda Hocking: 'I didn't have a lot of hope invested in ebooks'. Photograph: Carlos Gonzalez/Polaris

The Guardian, Thursday 12 January 2012 15.00 EST

When historians come to write about the digital transformation currently engulfing the book-publishing world,

they will almost certainly refer to Amanda Hocking, writer o f paranormal fiction who in the past 18 months has

emerged from obscurity to bestselling status entirely under her own self-published steam. What the historians

may omit t o mention is t he crucial role played in her rise by those f urry wide-mouthed f riends, the Muppets.

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To understand t he vital Muppet connection we have to go back to April 2010. We f ind Hocking sit ting in her t in

sparsely f urnished apartment in Aust in, Minneso ta. She is penniless and f rust rated, having spent years

f ruitlessly trying to interest t raditional publishers in her work. To make matters worse, she has just heard that

an exhibition about Jim Henson, the creato r of the Muppets , is coming to Chicago later t hat year and she can

af f ord t o make the t rip. As a huge Muppets f an, she is more than willing to drive eight hours but has no money

f or petro l, let alone a hotel f or the night. What is she to do?
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Then it comes to her. She can take one o f the many novels she has written over the previous nine years, all o

which have been rejected by umpteen book agents and publishing houses, and slap them up on Amazon and

other digital eboo k sites. Surely, she can sell a few copies t o her f amily and friends? All she needs f or the

ourney to Chicago is $300 (195), and with six months to go before the Muppets exhibition opens, she's

bound to make it.

"I'm going to s ell books on Amazon," she announces to her housemate, Eric.

To which Eric replies: "Yeah. OK. I'll believe that when it happens."

Let's jump to October 2010. In those s ix months, Hocking has raised not o nly the $300 she needed, but an

additional $20,000 selling 150,000 copies of her books. Over the past 20 months Hocking has so ld 1.5m book

and made $2.5m. All by her lonesome self . Not a single book agent or publishing house or sales f orce o r

marketing manager or bookshop anywhere in sight.

So let the histo rians take note: Amanda Hocking does get to Chicago to see the Muppets . And along the way

she helps to f oment a revolution in global publishing.

I've come to Austin, legendary birthplace of Spam (the canned as opposed to the digital version), to f ind out

what this self-publishing revolution looks like in the flesh. I can report that, from the outside, it's surprisinglyconventional. Hocking no longer lives in that pokey apartment, but then she's no longer a st ruggling would-be

author. She's bought herself her own detached home, the building block of the American dream, replete with

gables and extensions , its own plot of land, and a concrete ramp on which to park the car.

But step inside and convention gives way to a riot o f colour. It is just before Christmas, and Hocking has

decorated the house with several plastic trees bedecked in lights and two large Santa stockings pinned

expectant ly over the mantelpiece. The sof a is scatt ered with animals, some of the cuddly toy variety and

others alive, notably Elroy the miniature s chnauzer and Squeak the cat (apparently they get on very well).

She greets me at the door and, without preamble, we talk for the next two hours about her extraordinary rags

to-riches tale and what it means for the future of the book. At 27, and with only a few months in the limelight,she is patent ly new to t he fame game. She seems nervous at f irst, answering my questions in short bursts an

f iddling with her glasses; but gradually she relaxes as we discuss what f or her has been the central passion o

her life since an infant.

She was brought up in the Minnesota countryside on the outskirts of Blooming Prairie about 15 miles north of

Aust in. Her parents divorced when she was young, money was t ight and t here was no cable TV to wallow in.

"So I read a lot . I would go to the library, or get books at rummage sales. I got through them so quickly I starte

reading adult books because they were longer. I remember my mom giving me a box set of f ive books to last

me all summer; I devoured them all in two weeks."

By the age of seven she was reading Jaws by Peter Benchley and anything by Stephen King. Michael Crichto n,JD Salinger, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut and many others f ed an

insatiable appetite.

It was a way, she now thinks, of coping with t he depression that troubled her childhood. "I was always

depressed growing up. There wasn't a reason f or it, I just was. I was sad and moros e. I cried a lot , I wrote a lo

and I read a lot ; and that was how I dealt with it."

What went in had to come out. The child Hocking began telling her own s to ries bef ore she could walk. She wa

f orever inventing make-believe worlds, so much so that the counsellor to whom she was sent f or depression

concluded that her incessant storytelling was an aberration that had to stop. Fortunately for Hocking, and for
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her many fans, her parents took her s ide in this argument, and she was never sent back to see him.

At 12 she had already begun to describe herself as a writer and by t he end of high school she estimates she

had written 50 short stories and started countless novels. The first that she actually completed, Dreams I

Can't Remember, was written when she was 17. She was very excited by the accomplishment, and printed it ou

f or f riends and family, as well as sending it to several publishers.

"I got rejection letters back f rom all of them. I don't blame them it wasn't very good," Hocking says.

Hocking went on to develop an intimate relationship with rejection let ters . She has somewhere in her newhouse a shoebox f ull of them.

Yet she would not give up. She wrote unpublished book af ter unpublished book. "Sometimes I'd say: 'I'm done,

I'm never going to write another book,' but then a couple of months later I'd have another idea and I'd start

again. This t ime it was bound to work."

In 2009 she went into overdrive. She was f rantic to get her f irst book published by the time she was 26, the ag

Stephen King was f irst in print, and t ime was running out (she's now 27). So while holding down a day job carin

f or severely disabled people, for which she earned $18,000 a year, she went into a Red Bull- f uelled f renzy of

writing at night, starting at 8pm and cont inuing until dawn. Once she got going, she could write a complete

novel in just two or three weeks. By the st art o f 2010, she had amassed a total of 17 unpublished novels, allgathering digital dust o n the desktop of her laptop.

She received her last rejection letter in February 2010. Hocking says she hasn't kept the letter, which is a cryin

shame because it would surely have been an invaluable piece of self -publishing memorabilia. As f ar as she ca

remember, the last "thanks-but-no- thanks" came f rom a literary agent in the UK. If that agent is reading this

article, please don't beat yourself up about this. We all make mistakes ...

April 15 2010 should also be no ted by historians of literature. On that day, Hocking made her book available to

Kindle readers on Amazon's website in her bid to raise the cash f or t he Muppets t rip. Following tips she'd

gleaned f rom the blog of JA Konrath, an internet self -publishing pioneer, she also uploaded to Smashwords t

gain access to the Noo k, Sony eReader and iBoo k markets. It wasn't that dif f icult. A couple of hours off ormatting, and it was done.

"I didn't have a lot of hope invested in it," she says. "I didn't think anything would come of it." How wrong she

was.

Within a f ew days, she was selling nine copies a day ofMy Blood Approves , a vampire novel set in Minneapoli

By May she had posted two f urther books in the series, Fate and Flutter, and so ld 624 copies. June saw sales

rise to more than 4,000 and in July she pos ted Switched, her personal favourite among her novels that she

wrote in barely more than a week. It brought in more than $6,000 in pure prof it that month alone, and in Augus

she quit her day job.

By January last year she was selling more than 100,000 a month. Being her own boss allowed her to set her

own pricing policy she decided to charge just 99 cents for the first book in a series, as a loss leader to

att ract readers, and then increase the cover price to $2.99 fo r each sequel. Though that 's cheap compared

with the $10 and upwards charged for printed books she gained a much greater proportion of the royalties.

Amazon would give her 30% o f all royalties f or the 99-cent books, rising to 70% f or the $2.99 editions a

much greater proport ion than the traditional 10 or 15% that publishing houses award their authors. You don't

have to be much of a mathematician to see the att raction o f thos e f igures: 70% of $2.99 is $2.09; 10% of a

paperback priced at $9.99 is 99 cents. Multiply that by a million last November Hocking entered the hallowed

halls of the Kindle Million Club, with more than 1m copies so ld and you are talking megabucks.
http://www.thebookseller.com/news/baldacci-meyer-and-hocking-join-kindle-million-club.htmlhttp://www.amazon.co.uk/Switched-Trylle-Trilogy-Adult-Cover/dp/1447205693/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1http://www.amazon.co.uk/Flutter-Blood-Approves-Book-ebook/dp/B003O2SHKG/ref=pd_sim_kinc_2http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fate-Blood-Approves-Book-ebook/dp/B003JBHP4G/ref=pd_sim_kinc_1http://www.amazon.co.uk/My-Blood-Approves-ebook/dp/B003HGGHTW/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_3http://www.smashwords.com/http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/http://www.theguardian.com/technology/kindle


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and kicking. Hocking is very aware of the paradox, which she observes with a wry writer's eye. "A lot of people

are saying publishing is dead," she says. "I never did, and I don't think it is. And they want to use me to show it

isn't."

Switched, the first in the Trylle Series by Amanda Hocking, is out now in paperback and ebook formats, featuring

previously unseen extra material. Published by Pan Macmillan in the UK and St. Martin's Griffin in the USA. For

further information, see www.worldofamandahocking.com.

Some of the other Kindle Million Club members

Stephen Leather

Widely hailed as Britain's most successf ul "independent" writer, two years ago Leather too k three novellas t ha

had been turned down by Hodder & Stoughton and issued them for the Kindle through Amazon. Last year, he

put his monthly income from ebooks at around 11,000.

Joe Konrath

The Chicago-based author is both prolific he has written seven thrillers, a horror series, and a sci-fi novel,

each under a different pseudonym and candid about the benefits of self-publishing. "One hundred grand that 's how much I've made on Amazon in the last three weeks," he boasted on his blog last month.

HP Mallory

The "urban fantasy and paranormal romance" author sold around 70,000 copies of her ebooks in two months

last year, and signed a three-book contract with t raditional publisherRandom House. She sums up her appeal

thus: "If you're all about f airies and witches and vampires (oh my!) and you like men who get a little hairy

during a f ull moo n, I got the goods ."

John LockeLast summer, the one-t ime insurance salesman f rom Kentucky became the f irst self -published author to sell

1m Kindle eboo ks. Alongs ide his lurid thrillers f ans can download an advice book entitled How I Sold 1 Million

eBooks in 5 Months!.

Oliver Ptzsch

German novelist and f ilm-maker Pt zsch has reached the highest echelons of the Kindle bestsellers list with

the English translat ion of his histo rical novel The Hangman's Daughter. It's a big success sto ry for

AmazonCross ing, which identif ies books selling well in other languages, and republishes them in English. Laur

Barnett
http://blog.booklending.com/category/amazoncrossing/http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sold-Million-eBooks-Months-ebook/dp/B0056BMK6Khttp://hpmallory.com/http://www.randomhouse.com/author/148187/h.%20p.-mallory?sort=best_13wk_3monthhttp://www.theguardian.com/books/fantasyhttp://jakonrath.blogspot.com/http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/feb/27/kindle-ebooks-amazon-stephen-leatherhttp://www.worldofamandahocking.com/

theguardian.com-amanda hocking the writer who made millions by selfpublishing online

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