Author of the week: Amanda Hocking

last updated 8 January 2015

Amanda Hocking may be publishing’s most unlikely self-made millionaire, said Tad Vezner in the St. Paul, Minn., Pioneer Press. A year ago, the purple-haired college dropout couldn’t find a traditional publisher for any of the eight young-adult paranormal romances she’d written in her bid to keep up with the rent on her small Minnesota home. But then last spring she decided to start self-publishing the whole lot as e-books, which sell at just 99 cents to $2.99 a title. By January, the 26-year-old was moving more than 400,000 “units” a month, and pocketing roughly 70 percent of the gross. “People have really kind of latched on to me as being part of the ‘indie’ movement,” she says. “I just wanted to write books, get them to readers, and make enough money on it that I could live.”

Hocking isn’t buying into some people’s fears that her success story sounds a death knell for traditional publishing houses, said Paul Oliver in MobyLives.com. “No publisher is afraid of me. That’s just silly,” she recently wrote on her blog. “They just want to be a part of it, the same way they want to be a part of any best seller.” Hocking credits literary bloggers with spreading positive buzz about the books, thus making sales spike. But she also says she may have just gotten lucky in a way that a few authors have always gotten lucky. Her guess is that self-publishing will never be a sure route to riches. “More people will sell less than 100 copies of their books,” she says, “than will sell 10,000 books.”