AUSTIN, Minn. — For the fifth time in a year, Amanda Hocking was finishing a book.
It was late 2009, and in a binge of Red Bull and Sweet Tarts — and intermittent cold cans of ravioli and SpaghettiOs — she continued to chase a dream that had eluded her for years.
“I didn’t want to have time to cook,” she said.
She spent eight to 12 hours a day typing on the couch of the Austin home she rented for $250 a month — all she could afford on earnings of $12,000 to $15,000 a year. Five times in 2009 and three more in 2010, she had written young adult fiction — all in excess of 300 pages — at a breakneck pace: somewhere between two to four weeks apiece. All had been rejected by agents and publishers.
“Hundreds. Maybe thousands” of rejections, she said. “All my other friends had either gone to school or they had decent jobs or they were getting married or they were doing something. And I was still just sending off query letters.
“At least once or twice a year, I would say that I was not going to write anymore, or at least wasn’t going to try to get published. … It’s a waste of my time. I need to move on and find a realistic goal.”
If you told Hocking that in just over a year she would sell hundreds of thousands of books in a month through e-book devices like Barnes & Noble’s Nook and Amazon’s Kindle — without the help of a single industry professional — she would probably have told you the same thing she told her roommate more than once: “You’re an idiot.”
But he, and you, would prove to be right.
February 2011 sales for Hocking, as evidenced by online proprietary accounts shown to the Pioneer Press: Amazon (via its e-book portal, the Kindle) 227,515 units for all nine of her works, including about 60,000 for her best-selling novel, “Switched.” Barnes & Noble (the Nook): 55,135 units. CreateSpace, an online “print on demand” service: 2,948 units.
For one month.
That’s what she can prove with online transaction data. Hocking said that’s about 100,000 units shy of the real total, as sales from e-book vendors such as Apple’s iBook, Kobo and Sony’s eReader — as well as three books published in a different format via Barnes & Noble — have yet to be tallied.
Sure, she charges only between 99 cents and $2.99 apiece for the books. But she keeps a huge amount — including 70 percent for the $2.99 domestic titles. On average, according to the transaction data offered by Amazon, she makes a little more than a buck a book.
In January, as evidenced by those proprietary accounts, she sold even more: $417,152 from the Amazon and Barnes & Noble e-book trade alone. Again, she says, that’s likely leaving out somewhere between 100,000 and 120,000 units. Since the beginning, she’s sold at least 900,000 copies of her nine titles, and likely more.
Lifelong earnings for the 26-year-old: Somewhere between $1.4 million and just shy of $2 million, she says. Most of it in the last four months. As of Friday, the book she believes to be her best, “Switched,” was the fifth-best-selling book on Kindle, behind mainstream authors John Locke, Lisa Gardner and Laura Hillenbrand. She had seven titles on the USA Today 150 best-sellers list this week, including “Switched,” at No. 28 after peaking at No. 16.
It is a book that has yet to make an appearance in any bookstore.
MONEY TO LIVE
Now, instead of rent, she has to worry about things like expectation and image.
“People have really kind of latched on to me as being part of the indie movement, and that wasn’t something that I actually wanted. I just wanted to write books, get them to readers, and make enough money on it that I could live.”
She found hints of the “movement” while researching online blogs about self-publishing: a field frowned if not spat-upon by mainstream reviewers. Some authors, she noticed, were actually selling thousands of copies in the e-book trade. And offering no cut to editors, agents or publishing houses.
Sounded good, and she really wanted to go to Chicago. A lifelong fan of Muppets creator Jim Henson, she saw that an exhibit of his was coming to the Windy City in October 2010. If she could scrimp and save $500, she could go — a distant dream for a woman who sometimes couldn’t pay the rent, working two jobs in group homes for people with disabilities.
“I couldn’t get a job and they were hiring,” she said of those jobs. “I didn’t think I would enjoy it, but I definitely did. When I started it I was really depressed, and that really helped get me out of it because the focus stopped being on myself. … And they gave back.”
She had settled on writing paranormal romance — vampires, trolls and, lately, zombies — after a trip to the local Walmart to browse the “Young Adult” section.
“Ninety percent of it was vampires,” she said. “I did kind of pursue it because it was popular. I mean, I like vampires and I’ve always like vampires … but I guess I played to what I liked that was also popular.”
OVERWHELMED
After getting rejected time and again, she started reading authors’ blogs like that by J.A. Konrath, who was selling 200 to 300 e-books a day at the time. His advice: Write a good book, purchase a professional cover, polish, post and repeat. Oh, and try to keep the price under 4 bucks.
She did all that. At first, sales came in at a trickle: two or three a day (many times that was the typical amount). Then, in May 2010, she sold 624 books for the month, and made $362.
Sure, she talked up her books on her blog, Facebook and Twitter account — but she credits the big burst to submitting her work to book bloggers — many of whom, ironically, don’t like reading e-books. She would send them a print copy from her online “print-on-demand” service.
Following the word of mouth generated from 20 to 30 blog reviews, the next month, she sold 4,258 copies, and made $3,180.
“I had a little freak-out because I was overwhelmed,” she said. “Somebody went on maternity leave, so I was working 40-plus hours, and then I started getting tons of e-mails and stuff. … My friend had a baby and she wanted me to do stuff with her. …”
She gave notice at her job the following month. Then received some solace: She sold 3,532 books in July, and made $6,527.
“I think we’re going to be able to go to Chicago,” she told her roommate and best friend, Eric Goldman.
Konrath — the e-book author whom Hocking cited as an inspiration — responded to a Pioneer Press interview request with an e-mail that said, in part:
“I’m thrilled for Amanda’s success, but I’ve stopped giving interviews and just focus on writing these days. I’m currently selling 1,500 ebooks a day and don’t need the publicity.”
HARD WORK AND LUCK
But there’s a gigantic grain of salt that Hocking, Konrath and others in the e-book trade want everyone to choke down amid all the enthusiasm.
The numbers paint a dazzling picture. Yes, there’s money and success — for those who craft a good book and polish it and put it out there and then get back to work. And then you still have a worse chance of writing a best-seller than if you tried the mainstream route, Hocking says. Her first book to garner notable sales happened to be the eighth one she wrote. There are 10 others yet unpublished — because she didn’t think they were good enough.
Most everyone — even those who do everything right — still meet with frustration and tepid sales. And one author’s wild success is hardly evidence of a magic bullet.
“I blogged back in January 2008 about a Japanese girl that wrote a novel on her phone and ended up with a print deal and 400,000 sales. Did Japanese girls everywhere start making fortunes with mobile phone novels? No,” author Alan Baxter said in a blog post about Hocking this month.
The lack of a copy editor created online complaints about grammar and missing words in Hocking’s novels — complaints that have led her to shop around for an editor.
And as much as some would like to portray Hocking as an in-your-face middle finger to mainstream publishing, she said she bears no grudges.
“Everybody complains that houses don’t do marketing — but at least there is a marketing department,” she said. “When you’re on your own, you’re on your own, and there is still a stigma attached to self-publishing. And in a lot of cases, there’s good reason.”
The amount of work she has now makes her wonder if she will ever be able to actually get back to writing.
“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,” she posted on her blog last week.
In an interview, she added, “It’s the hard work that took me 90 percent of the way, but it’s the last 10 percent that’s the luck, that we don’t know why it happens.”
SO MANY WORDS A DAY
The daughter of a truck driver and a work-at-home medical record transcriptionist, Hocking was born and raised in rural Blooming Prairie — 15 miles north of Austin by way of the “lonely 218” highway immortalized by the Austin band The Gear Daddies.
Driving south toward Blooming Prairie’s center, it’s hard not to notice the bustling Arkema plant — an industrial chemical manufacturer. A half-mile down, you hit the Dairy Queen and Casey’s General Store, and soon find farmland again.
“The first time I remember her telling a story, she was 3,” said Lorraine Felt, Hocking’s mother.
Hocking devoured Dr. Seuss, learned to type in elementary school, “Then it just really went kind of crazy,” her mother said. “Poems and short stories … I was never good at English in school, but she was. She counted it as words a day. A good author should do so many words a day.”
Hocking split her time between Blooming Prairie and Austin just after her parents split when she was in the seventh grade.
One of her high school teachers once accused her of plagiarism, calling home. Hocking’s stepmother tersely informed the teacher that young Amanda wrote daily, and at length.
Hocking graduated from Austin High School in 2002, and tried the local Riverland Community College a couple of times.
The second time, in 2006, was the deal-breaker. She was interested only in writing classes, and her GPA was bad enough to put her on academic probation. Denied student loans, she couldn’t go back.
Goldman, the best friend whom she met in high school, told her she should write “fluffier stuff.” Her first book, “Dreams I Can’t Remember” — which she wrote at 17 and doesn’t believe she’ll ever publish — was about a person with amnesia in a mental institution. It was dark, and Hocking isn’t. She was “light and frivolous,” in Goldman’s eyes.
“You’re an idiot,” she told Goldman. But she privately acknowledged he might have a point.
In the end of 2008, she set a personal goal: publish in a year. “I changed it from being something I just kind of did, to ‘I want this to be my career.’ ”
For monthlong chunks at a time, she ingested countless cans of Red Bull to maintain 12-hour writing shifts.
Her mom was “freaking out” — sending her an e-mail listing the things that would happen to her liver from the caffeinated beverage.
Hocking didn’t make her 2009 deadline — but she kept at it, and the following June, the first of her vampire-teen romances, “My Blood Approves,” started selling thousands.
“It’s how I’ve always saw her. I don’t think it’s really sunk in for either of us,” Goldman said. Last Friday, Goldman quit his job doing data entry for Hormel Foods’ research division to become her personal assistant.
STAYING IN AUSTIN
On Monday, Hocking went house hunting — in Austin.
“When I was younger I always thought I would move to the Cities or something, far away. But I don’t do that much. I make myself sound like a hermit, but I spend most of the time in my house. And it doesn’t really matter where my house is. … I would rather go to Chicago once a month or year than have to only see my mom once a month or a year,” she said.
In August, Hocking retained an agent to negotiate foreign rights with a Hungarian publisher. Earlier this year, her Trylle Trilogy was optioned for film rights by “District 9” co-screenwriter Terri Tatchell.
She hesitates to talk about negotiations with publishing houses that have cropped up in the past month.
“There’s quite a bit of interest,” she said. “I don’t know how much I’m supposed to say.”
And no small part of her worries that some fans — those that see her as an indie icon, the “big, self-published leader” — will accuse her of selling out if she signs with a publishing house.
“But I write paranormal romance. I mean, not to knock what I do, or other authors, but it’s not known for its literary integrity,” she says with a laugh.
Publishing houses “can put books in stores,” she says. “Online, I compete equally — or better — with traditionally published books because I can price my books lower. But it’s in the stores I’ve got nothing.”
For now, though, she’s still trying to absorb what’s happened.
“I thought that when you were a published author you would feel different, that stuff would be different … that it would be, ‘Now I did all the work — now I can relax and reap the benefits.’ But it’s like now I have to keep going even faster to keep up.”
Tad Vezner can be reached at 651-228-5461.
