The Word Cloud

I’ve just been reading Jenny’s post about self publishing.

Tony - That's a very interesting success story, Jenny. There are some others here who have self-published, but I don't think - I may be wrong - that any have told us of subsequently being picked up by a publisher;

Amanda Hocking sprang to mind. I think she was recently featured in the Guardian.

From Wiki:

In April 2010, she began self-publishing [her books] as e-books. As of March 2011, she had sold about a million copies of nine books and earned two million dollars from sales, something previously unheard of for self-published authors.

On March 24, 2011 Hocking received a 2 million dollar, 4-book deal with St. Martin's Press for a young-adult paranormal series to be called "Watersong." Explaining her decision to use traditional publishing after having become an icon for self-publishing, Hocking said, “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.”

I was just wondering whether people felt that was the right thing to do - to switch to a publisher? I can't help wondering, after reading Jenny's posts, whether Amanda could have made more money from self-publishing. Cutting out the middle-man. I'm sure she'd still have made more than enough to pay a PA ;)

Not that any of this is a new thing. D. H. Lawrence couldn't get a work published, so he self published and made a fortune. Perhaps the first mass-master of the self-publishing age?

From the last thread:

Emma D - It is much more problematic for fiction, because it's so much harder to persuade people to try it.

The 99p fiction deals with Kindle seem to be opening up a whole new market. And with no publishers taking a cut, you only have to sell a couple of hundred and you're doing okay.

I think the thing most people struggle with is self-promotion. Social networking is becoming huge business nowadays, for charities, commerce and artists. How to make money without spending it - the eternal magic trick :)

As for self-publishing and how difficult it is to get a publisher:

You always retain the right to prove others wrong, and never before has the opportunity been affordably available to so many.

It's an interesting point. Personally I'd most like to know what she was doing in those 40 hour weeks, aside from cover design and editing, that helped to procure millions of fans? Particularly if her work was riddled with typos and grammatical errors. She most have been a potent force as a sales-and-promotions-woman! Maybe she should write a book on that - and self publish it! Now that, I would love to read, typos and all.

A lot of people have tried to break down the Hocking method, but there was no magic to it, just a lot of hard work. She had a blog for quite a while before she self-published and always shared all her rejections and sample chapters of her stuff. She was very active on Twitter and all the writing forums in the US, plus all the forums for her genre. She made an effort to get to know all the people running all the different book review blogs and then sent them all free copies of her book for review. I'm just starting that and it's a hell of a lot of work. They all have different submission requirements, different information that they require in a different format - it's very time consuming.

That lot really does sound like a forty hour week! Something I'll be trying to replicate really soon. I guess a starting point would be to identify all the key players in indie book reviewing, the most well-populated forums etc. and begin creating a presence through comments and posts. I'm taken the first steps whilst reading the MS... now it's all go!

There aren't enough hours in the day, even if you spent them all on this stuff.

My book Vampires Rule has sold 86 copies as of today and it's only been three weeks, but I'm not sure if those are good numbers or not. I wish I had something to compare it with. Amanda Hocking hasn't given any details on how fast her books sold. I do know that I have been marketing my butt off and I can understand why Amanda would want to publish with a publishing house. It's hard to promote your own work 24/7 without any help. I put my book on Amazon and Smashwords, then went to work letting people know, but it's hard and stressful and I don't know how much longer I can keep it up.