Amanda Hocking

Amanda Hocking

Twenty-six-year-old self-publishing sensation Amanda Hocking made headlines earlier in 2011, when it was revealed that the then-unsigned author (she now has a contract with St. Martin’s Press) had managed to sell more than a million copies of her paranormal novels, which were once rejected by publishers — as e-books.

Starting her first book in 2009, Amanda went into overdrive and the start of 2010, she had a grand total of 17 unpublished novels, all gathering digital dust on the desktop of her laptop.

After receiving rejection letter after rejection letter on April 15 2010, Hocking made her book available to Kindle readers on Amazon's website in her bid to raise the cash for the Muppets trip, she desperately wanted to go on. Following tips, she'd gleaned from the blog of JA Konrath, an internet self-publishing pioneer, she also uploaded to Smashwords which allowed her to gain access to the Nook, Sony eReader and iBook markets. 

It wasn't that difficult. 

A couple of hours of formatting, and it was done.

Within a few days, she was selling nine copies a day of My Blood Approves, a vampire novel set in Minneapolis. 

By May, she had posted two further books in the series, Fate and Flutter, and sold 624 copies. 

June saw sales rise to more than 4,000 and in July she posted 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 profit that month alone, and in August 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, to attract the  readers, and then increase the cover price to $2.99 for 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% of all royalties for the 99-cent books, rising to 70% for the $2.99 editions – a much greater proportion 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 attraction of those figures: 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 sold – and you are talking rolling in the money!

Although, Hocking is a self publishing success, in the end she became so burned out by the stress of solo publishing (having to do all the editing, formating, designing the book covers, keeping up with the constant marketing and making sure she replied to her fans emails) that she has turned for help to the same traditional book world that previously rejected her and which she was seen as attacking. 

For $2.1m, she has signed up with St Martin's Press in the US and Pan Macmillan in the UK to publish her next array of books. The deal kicks off this month with a paperback version of Switched.