Indie record
We're all at least a bit jealous of JK Rowling's riches because we view her as the gifted amateur who struck lucky. But the story of Amanda Hocking feels even closer to home, because she didn't even need to get accepted by a publisher in order to sell a shed-load of books.
Hocking self-publishes, you see. She's part of the growing number of writers who simply publish their stuff online, and sell them as e-books. Amazon is probably the main retailer of her stuff, but she also publishes via Barnes & Noble, Apple, and Smashwords.
According to her blog, which she recently updated to clarify reports about her, Hocking first published a book in April of last year, has since published eight more (good effort!), and has shifted over 900,000 copies at between one and three dollars a pop. If we take an average price of two dollars, that $1.8 million.
Of course there will be some overheads - mostly to the retailer. We've read reports of Amazon charging between 30 and 70 percent for selling e-books, depending on how much control over pricing you're prepared to relinquish to them, which is consistent with a story we wrote on the matter. So we assume Hocking had to relinquish at least half a mil to retailers.
But still, that's some pretty decent wedge, especially considering Hocking didn't have to go cap-in-hand to traditional publishers, who long ago lost any entrepreneurial spirit and seem to rely entirely on celebrity biographies and established best-sellers these days.
Whether or not Hocking's books are any good we couldn't say, but if you want to make your own mind up here's her Smashwords page, which we chose because they apparently only trouser 15 percent. But regardless of what any of us think of her work, 900,000 sales don't lie. The genre seems to be supernatural teen suspense, which the TV listings would imply is a fertile market.
The real interest for us, however, is this further evidence of how much the Internet empowers the individual. The chances are Hocking would never have been accepted by a traditional publisher (she presumably tried). But by going 100 percent electronic (although she has now started publishing her own paperbacks), Hocking has been able to make it big with far less third-party assistance that used to be needed. Good for her.
