Author of the week: amanda hocking
- Select a language for the TTS:
- UK English Female
- UK English Male
- US English Female
- US English Male
- Australian Female
- Australian Male
- Language selected: (auto detect) - EN
Play all audios:

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.” A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com SUBSCRIBE TO THE WEEK Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news,
plus analysis from multiple perspectives. SUBSCRIBE & SAVE SIGN UP FOR THE WEEK'S FREE NEWSLETTERS From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of
The Week delivered directly to your inbox. From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.