How to use this Page

Much has been written about, discussed, dissected and scrutinized about self-publishing phenomenon Amanda Hocking and her reported $2 million deal with St. Martins. Before that there was the news that bestselling author Barry Eisler turned down a six-figure deal and opted to self publish. Both authors are receiving significant press and publicity. It’s hard to say if Eisler would be such a household name right now if he hadn’t chosen to self-publish or if Hocking’s books would be downloaded at such an intense rate if she hadn’t just translated her self-publishing success into a multi-book deal.

We have witnessed success in self-publishing from many different angles and seen the success an author can acquire by building their platform through self-publishing and attracting mainstream attention. In some ways, self-publishing can be a great way to get your foot in the door, show publishers what you are capable of, and build a strong and supportive readership. With the multiple outlets for social networking and exposure that we have at our fingertips, it does change the rate at which authors can get the word out about their work and build a strong buzz.

Here’s what I like about Amanda Hocking, she writes! She’s written more than 15 books. She blogs regularly, constantly recording her side of the story, her views on publishing, her life as a writer. She actively and enthusiastically self-promotes.

Self-publishing offers writers the opportunity to jump right into the thick of things, to get their feet wet and get their words published. It is a risky and dangerous jump but it can have great rewards. Amanda Hocking offers her readers good stories at a cheap price and available at the click of mouse. These are all opportunities that were not available to writers a few years ago.

The changes we are witnessing in the publishing industry are complex and constantly shifting but they are showing us one thing, writers are being given more and more opportunities to do what they love, write and have their words read. Self-publishing is not going to harm or take business away from traditional publishers. Most writers, even those who have chosen self-publishing, still have the ultimate goal of being picked up by a traditional publisher. Traditional publishers can offer greater opportunities to authors immediately, the support and reception that comes from being with a recognizable publishing house can give an author a leg up. While self-published authors can steadily build significant careers (see JA Konrath) it can feel more like an uphill battle. There are many book review websites, magazines, and newspapers who will not review a self-published title.

There tends to be a stigma attached to self-published work that it is poorly edited, was rejected by publishers and is an authors “last resort.”  However, with stories like Eisler’s and Hocking, as well as our clients Brunonia Barry and Lisa Genova, self-publishing can prove extremely fruitful and part of an authors journey towards a successful and fulfilling career. For many, self-publishing is a step towards a specific destination, the goal of being traditionally published. For others, it is a way to fulfill a simple dream, to see their words in print. Whether self-publishing is part of your journey or the culmination of a dream, it is up to the author to build their name and get exposure for their work. Traditionally published authors have the same goal, bring their work to the attention of readers.

What I love about Hocking and Eisler and Konrath and Barry and Genova is that they make people talk about publishing, about books about an industry that has been around for hundreds of years and continues to grow and change, thrive and inspire.

Today Crain’s New York published a bombshell report that Amazon had put a a bid for more than $2 million to publish a four book series by self-publishing superstar Amanda Hocking. It is not an April Fools’ joke.

Here’s an evocative passage: “To beef up its offer, Amazon brought in Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which would have published the print editions of Ms. Hocking’s books, according to insiders … St. Martin’s Press ended up winning the auction, paying $2 million for the series of four novels, but Amazon actually made the highest offer of the six bidders, according to insiders.”

The 26-year-old author (pictured, via) made headlines around the country for her dramatic sales as a self-published author. Her “Watersong” series sale to St. Martin’s rocked publishing headlines last week.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

A couple of weeks ago we talked about the phenominal success Amanda Hocking has had e-publishing her books.  Here is an update:

St. Martin’s Pays a Reported $2M For Four Books By Amanda Hocking, Self-Publishing’s Reluctant Heroine.  This year every week in publishing could be considered eventful, but this week in particular had a special kind of symmetry, as the very publishing house Barry Eisler walked away from to publish on his own brought Amanda Hocking into the fold. Despite sources indicating otherwise a few days ago, St. Martin’s emerged the victor of the auction for Hocking’s new Watersong YA paranormal series, reportedly paying more than $2 million for World English rights (which, of course, includes digital rights, too.)

“I’ve done as much with self-publishing as any person can do,” Hocking told the NYT Thursday. “People have bad things to say about publishers, but I think they still have services, and I want to see what they are. And if they end up not being any good, I don’t have to keep using them. But I do think they have something to offer.”

Her comments echoed a blog post Tuesday where she addressed and explained the then-ongoing auction: “I want to be a writer. I do not want to spend 40 hours a week handling e-mails, formatting covers, finding editors, etc. Right now, being me is a full-time corporation.” But in a follow-up post, Hocking reiterated that the deal doesn’t mean she will stop self-publishing: “I have a few titles lined up this year [to self-publish] and I’ll have more in the future.”

SMP publisher Matthew Shear evidently wanted to win the auction “pretty badly,” having first heard of Hocking six months before from her eventual acquiring editor, Rose Hilliard. Shear looks at self-publishing as a way for authors “to perhaps make a certain amount of money sooner rather than later” but a publisher “provides an extraordinary amount of knowledge into the whole publishing process. We have the editors, we have the marketers, we have the art directors, we have the publicists, we have the sales force. And they can go out and get Amanda’s books to a much, much bigger readership than she had been able to get to before.”

The first Watersong book won’t be out until Fall 2012, by which time it may become apparent whether Hocking can continue to sell her self-published books at the same rapid clip of the last few months (monthly sales reports she provided to the AP showed more than 333,000 copies sold of her nine titles available, with another 300,000 sales in February, which roughly dovetail with her claimed total earnings of between $1.4m and $2m.) Her current readership may also use that time to adjust to the eventual price increase from the 99 cents to $2.99 her e-published titles cost to whatever higher agency price Macmillan decides upon.

And Hocking, while obviously excited by her new and parallel career direction, is bemused by the reaction: “It is crazy that we live in a time that I have to justify taking a seven-figure a publishing deal with St. Martin’s,” she wrote. “Ten years ago, nobody would question this. Now everybody is.”

Times they are a changing. 

Talk tomorrow,

Kathy

The Children’s Choice Book Awards (voting is open, with nominees from Suzanne Collins [Mockingjay] and Stephanie Meyer [The Second Short Life of Bree Tanner]. Elsewhere in YA news, Amanda Hocking, the self-publishing standout, lands a book... Read the rest of this post

The New York Times broke the news that self-publishing superstar Amanda Hocking has landed a four book deal with St. Martin’s Press. Her upcoming series will be called “Watersong.”

Here is an eye-popping excerpt: “The bidding eventually rose beyond $2 million for world English rights, said one publishing executive familiar with the negotiations. (St. Martin’s declined to comment.) Ms. Hocking was represented by the literary agent Steven Axelrod.”

The 26-year-old author (pictured, via) made headlines around the country for her dramatic sales as a self-published author. She wrote a great essay analyzing  her success: “And while I do think I will not be the only one to do this – others will be as successful as I’ve been, some even more so – I don’t think it will happen that often.” (Via Sarah Weinman)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

It's an amazing success story! An unheard of twenty-six-year-old woman sold 900,000 copies of nine different books since she first put her work for sale on April 15, 2010. There are paperback copies that sell for $8.99 and $9.99, but the ebook editions are the ones selling like wildfire at $2.99 and .99. Just check out the local news story in the video below:



Amanda Hocking tried to go the traditional publishing route for eight years but received countless rejections. She never thought of self-publishing as a viable option.

"Everything I'd heard about self-publishing is that is was impossible to make a living, reach readers, or produce a quality product. But last year, I heard about how some others like Joe Konrath and Karen McQuestion are doing well with ebooks. So I thought I had nothing to lose."

So how did she sell so many books? She worked it via social networking, of course!

"I didn't really have a strategy. I think one of the advantages I have is that stuff considered marketing is stuff that I do a lot anyway. I've been active on social networks and blogs for years.

"I also send ARCs out to book bloggers. Book bloggers are a really amazing community, and they've been tremendously supportive. They've definitely been a major force that got my books on the map.

"When I first published, I did do a bit of promoting on the Amazon forums, but they're not really open to that, so I haven't really interacted there much at all in months. I hang out at Goodreads, Kindleboards, Facebook, Twitter, and I blog. And that's about it."

She now has an agent who is working on selling the foreign rights to her books. She plans to continue self-publishing, but isn't turning her back on traditional publishing.

"As amazing as this ebook revolution has been, it's only 20-30% of the market, and I'm not going to ignore the possibilities to reach the other 70-80% of readers. However, it is hard to compete with what my books are already able to do with Kindle and PubIt."

While that may be true, rumor has it that she's been shopping a four-book series to major publishers and attracting bids well over a million.

It seems we are entering a new and inspiring age, where traditional publishing certainly isn't the last word. Being rejected by a publisher isn't the end of the line. If you have the drive to do it yourself, why not? Publishing, marketing, and creating websites is the cheapest and easiest it's ever been. And in most cases it's free. If you have any thoughts on this topic, we'd love to hear them!

To find out more about Ms. Hocking's books, visit her Amazon Author's Page.

Quotes from The Huffington Post interview, Meet Mega Bestselling Indie Heroine Amanda Hocking.
--------------------

Class: Social Networking for Writers: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and More! Learn how to leverage the power of social media with this four-week e-course.

6NUEPBUWB5VX

I rarely write about the publishing industry, about eBooks and that of-the-moment stuff. Fact is, I’m not that knowledgeable about it. My writing process is pretty unique. Since I’m a major league luddite, I write all my books by nautical flag. I string them up on a schooner that I sail down the Hudson River. The editors at Random House all stand at their windows, eyes to spyglasses, and they take turns calling out what they see:

“Blue stripey one!”

“Like the Swiss flag, only with yellow instead of white.”

Meanwhile the great-great-grandson of Jack London, who interns there, jots it all down and translates.

“…and they all lived happily ever after…except for Darius…on account of the yellow fever.”

Once the book is transcribed, and my schooner finds a favorable tact, they send their edits back by morse code using a naval spotlight. And the process starts over.

It seems hard to believe, but I assure you it’s true. Which also means, of course, that this blog has not been written by me on a computer. I always whisper my thoughts into a tin can attached to a string, which travels across an alley, through a window and into another tin can that’s manned by my best pal Tommy McNulty. Tommy listens, memorizes, and then relays my blog post into his CB radio. A long-haul trucker with the handle Hokum N. Jokum, writes the words on cans of vienna sausages that he delivers to a convenience store about 45 miles south of Boise, ID.

Here’s where things get tricky. There is just one person who eats vienna sausages from this convenience store, a charming senior citizen named Beatrice who also happens to be the widow of Eugene “Porky” Lee of Little Rascals fame. Beatrice’s diet consists almost entirely of milk and vienna sausages, but her appetite is lilliputian. Hokum N. Jokum, who I’m told has the most elegant handwriting in the freight industry, can usually fit a single blog post on eleven cans of vienna sausages. Beatrice only eats one can a day, and since she’s on a fixed income, she only buys one can a day. So it’s usually a week and a half before she’s collected an entire blog post (and people say I should blog more often!). At this point, Beatrice hands the empty cans off to her milk man. He brings them home and gives them to his children to read, because he doesn’t believe in television and can’t be bothered to get a library card. These kids are major brats, not to mention eco-terrorists. The nasty little buggers invariably proceed to proclaim their love of pasteurization, which is about the worst thing you can say in front of your milk man father. Then they throw the cans out their bedroom windows.

The cans typically roll around the neighborhood for a day or two, until a boy scout named Bucky Weeks picks them up. Bucky has all the merit badges except for two. The first is the Swearing Badge, which is typically the easiest badge to procure, but Bucky’s lisp is severe and the “sh” sound is one he may never master. The second is the Vienna Sausage Badge, which no scout has ever earned. To receive the Vienna Sausage Badge, a scout must retrieve 15,000 empty cans of Vienna Sausages and mail them to 728 Garfield Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. At last count, there were only 14,327 cans of vienna sausages in distribution in the world, so this badge is basically a fool’s errand. Which makes sense, because it’s something I made up and slipped into the Boy Scout charter during a clandestine infiltration of their h

In a recent interview, novelist Barry Eisler said he turned down a $500,000 book deal and decided to self-publish his work. At the same time, self-published success story Amanda Hocking is chasing a traditional book deal–reportedly receiving bids that top $1 million.

Eisler’s revelation came in a 13,000-word interview with novelist Joe Konrath. Eisler last published with Ballantine Books, but his self-publishing experiment began with “The Lost Coast,” a $2.99 short story.

Here’s an excerpt from the interview: “My wife and daughter and I were sitting around the dinner table, talking about what kind of contract I would do next, and with what publisher. And my then eleven-year-old daughter said, ‘Daddy, why don’t you just self-publish?’ … But I realized from that one innocent comment from my daughter that the new generation was looking at self-publishing differently. And that the question–’Should I self-publish?’–was going to be asked by more and more authors going forward.” (Via Sarah Weinman)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

I was planning on writing a blog about self-publishing when I discovered Amanda Hocking, the 26-year-old paranormal romance writer from Austin, Minnesota, who has reportedly become a millionaire by self-publishing on Kindle.  She tried the traditional publishing root for eight years, before self-publishing via Kindle.  She collects 70% royalties from Kindle for $2.99 books and 35% on their . 99 cents books.  Traditional publishers pay 15% on electronic sales.

Hocking says she’s sold 900,000 copies (mostly electronic) of nine different books since April 2010. If you give her the highest price point and royalty for each book, that would mean she’s made close to $2 million.

The majority of her sales were made since Nov. 2010, and sales exploded around Christmas, when people bought e-readers as gifts. In February, Hocking sold 420,000 copies of her books, which is more than double the amount she sold in the 10 months prior.

Amanda says, “While I do think I will not be the only one to do this –  I don’t think it will happen that often.  It may be easier to self-publish than it is to traditionally publish, but in all honesty, it’s harder to be a best seller self-publishing than it is with a house.”

“I don’t think people really grasp how much work I do. I think there is this very big misconception that I spent a weekend smashing out some words, threw it up online, and woke up the next day with a million dollars in my bank account. This is literally years of work you’re seeing. And hours and hours of work each day. The amount of time and energy I put into marketing is exhausting. I am continuously overwhelmed by the amount of work I have to do that isn’t writing a book. I hardly have time to write anymore, which sucks and terrifies me.

“I also have this tremendous sense of urgency, like if I don’t get everything out now and do everything now, while the iron is hot, everything I’ve worked for will just fall away. For the first time, I truly understand why workaholics are workaholics. You can’t stop working, because if you do, it unravels all the work you’ve already done. You have to keep going, or you’ll die.

“Or at least that’s how it feels.

“There is so much stress in doing it all yourself. The editing is never good enough. And finding an editor isn’t as easy everyone thinks. People thinking an editor is just having someone read through it a few times, checking for basic grammar and spelling, and while that is part of it, it’s also much larger than that. It’s helping tighten up sentences, watching repeated phrases, helping with flow, etc. My books have all been edited – several times, by dozens of people with varying backgrounds – and people still find errors.

“And just so we’re clear – ebooks make up at best 20% of the market. Print books make up the other 80%. Traditional publishers still control the largest part of the market, and they will – for a long time, maybe forever. Ebooks will continue to gain ground, but I would say that we have at least 5-10 years before ebooks make up the majority.  Traditional publishing is not dead.  And all ebooks aren’t self-published. Even if ebooks end up being 80% of the market, at least half of those sales will probably come from traditionally published ebooks. So publishers will still control the majority of the market.

“Nobody knows what makes one book a bestseller. Publishers and agents like to pretend they do, but if they did, they would only publish best sellers, and they don’t.

“Self-publishing and

Going into the Austin SCBWI chapter’s annual conference this weekend — it was great, by the way — I was curious to find out how middle-grade novels are selling in ebooks, as that’s what I write. I’ve seen lots of articles in the Publishers Lunch enewsletter saying that ebook sales are rocketing in adult books and even taking off in young adult, but I suspected that middle-grade was behind. According to Egmont‘s Elizabeth Law, I was right. She said they’re not seeing noticeable ebook sales in middle grade.

Megg Jensen's self-published YA novel Anathema

Even though MG is slower to this technology, it’s great to see ebooks being embraced so quickly. As I wrote in January, sales of ereaders were stellar for the Christmas season, with many places selling out. Although I still love — LOVE — physical books, whether a book is printed on paper or eink, it’s still a story. And if this new technology is enticing more readers to stories, that can only be good.

The new technology also is changing the publishing landscape. With ebooks, it’s easier than ever — and less expensive — to self-publish books. Author J.A. Konrath has written about this extensively on his A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing blog. He had gone the traditional route before he started publishing his books on his own as ebooks, but he gives good arguments of why that doesn’t matter. YA author Amanda Hocking is an example, selling more than 185,000 ebook copies of her self-published novels.

Now, I’m not saying all writers should stop submitting to agents and editors of traditional publishing houses and go it alone. There are definite advantages to being signed by an agent and getting your work published by someone else. Let’s face it, most writers are not so great at the business end. And throwing an ebook on Amazon or Barnes & Noble or wherever doesn’t automatically mean it will sell; there’s marketing, publicity … oh, and the book should be good (editors are invaluable) or repeat sales won’t be much.

But the advent of ebooks has made it easier for writers to take the publishing of their work into their own hands, and blogs and social networking make it easier to build publicity.

YA author Megg Jensen is trying just that with her novel Anathema. And so far, it looks like she’s off to a great start. The book launched on Tuesday, and as of Wednesday, she had already sold 50 copies. She’s hosting a contest right now where people can guess how many books she will have sold by March 11, and the main prize? An ereader. Now that’s what I call promoting future business.

What do you think? Would you be willing to read a book if it’s se