You must have heard about her by now right? Well surely. If not check her out at www.amandahocking.blogspot.com. She's the JK Rowling of the e-publishing world. What the heck do I mean by that? Well, Harry Potter was an amazing success... more successful than any series has ever been much less a series geared at children. I strongly believe it was a one off thing. Or, if it is going to happen again, it won't be anytime in the near future. And this is precisely how I feel about what happened with Amanda Hocking and her kindle books.
I found out that it was possible to by-pass publishers and publish an electronic copy of your book on amazon quite randomly. I was going through a Kindle phase and was quite surprised that so many copies of the books were cheap. I literally had a three dollar budget unless it was something by Richelle Mead, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Janet Evanovich or James Patterson. When you finish a novel in a matter of hours, it is really sucky spending $7 on every book. I remember reading this one particular book that got really bad reviews and while I was browsing through the reviews someone exclaimed "This is why persons should go through publishers."Needless to say there was a discussion about the merits and demerits of what Amazon was doing. I wasn't paying much attention to the debates. My mind was buzzing. I thought, so I can write a ton of books and sell them for under two dollars, or ninety-nine cents or FREE and see what persons really think of my writing. If I have any sort of talent at all maybe these books might cause a publishing house to have a look at me. I was unaware at that time, and was to be unaware for about two more weeks (when I stumbled across Trylle) that Amanda had had the same epiphany with overwhelming success. After getting into reading her blog, she is definitely my role model (and it has nothing to do with the money she's made - it has everything to do with the fact that she had a dream, suffered through the rejections (with more grace that I would've) and found an alternative way to make her dream a reality. AND SHE DID!!!
I can't get it across how much I think her success is a one off thing, a lovely mix of various factors that meshed amazingly well together. Sitting here writing because I want to write the next Harry Potter or sell as many Kindle books as Amanda is just as pointless as sitting here hoping my ex would take me back :). Besides, I'm not sure any writer genuinely writes to be uber successful... there's this innate drive. Maybe I am just naive, but I believe most of us really write because this path in life chose us and we can't do without it.
So while I think her success is akin to JK Rowling's and isn't about to happen twice or anytime in the near future, I'm willing to see if the e-book route give me a leg up in this writing world. If not, I can say this much. That validation I was looking for? I will finally have hundreds of people telling me just what they think about my novels. That's almost enough to have me running for the hills. But this time I am going all the way.
Tschüss!!
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