It wasn’t too long ago that if you wanted to write a book you needed an agent to help you get a book deal, and, if you couldn’t get one of those, you had to try and obtain a book deal yourself. You queried, you sold yourself to the publishing companies, you’d send in pieces of your manuscripts and synopsis after synopsis. Sometimes you’d land a deal and become a published author. Often you’d get rejected – sometimes it could be productive and you’d get a rejected with some helpful criticism or feedback. More often as not though, you’d get rejected and that was simply that.
The most recent phenomenon in publishing is to self publish one’s ebook. This is no longer a flight of fancy, vanity only, or even quaint. In fact, it’s serious business and one that is becoming a sort of offshoot of blogging that just can’t be stopped.
Amanda Hocking is perhaps the best known of all the self published writers out there today. As a 26-year-old Minnesota native, a young woman who worked with adults with disabilities as her day job and wrote feverishly in her spare time, Hocking was convinced that she could tap into the supernatural, paranormal genre of vampires, zombies and the like which was so incredibly popular with the teen crowd. She had been writing her whole life and had diligently reworked her stories, edited them and sent them off to publishers in the traditional way, only to face rejection after rejection.
Finally fed up with the traditional route, Hocking decided to publish her books on her own and literally became a millionaire. Pricing her first books at 99 cents, Hocking was able to create an accessible product that was soon desired and avidly bought and read by thousands, and now millions of readers.
She recently signed a deal with St. Martin’s Press for a “real” book publishing contract, to the tune of two million dollars.
For a link to Hocking’s amazing blog, click here: http://amandahocking.blogspot.com/
http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2011/03/29/publishing-and-self-publishing-authors-now-call-the-shots/
For more about Hocking, click here: http://www.novelr.com/2011/02/27/rich-indie-writer
Not only is this phenomenon impacting the way people think about how they get their creative work into the public domain, it is also a reflection of our digital age and the way that people consume materials. Since the personal computer, laptop and hand-held digital devices connected to the internet are now replacing traditional books and newspapers at a rate faster than we would really care to acknowledge, it makes sense that the news, information, entertainment and fiction we would want to participate in consuming would be in this format. And for 99 cents, is this really something we can ignore?
Aimee Boyle is a regular contributor to EmpowHER. She is fascinated by recent trends in self publishing.