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March 24, 2011
A Successful Self-Publishing Author Decides to Try the Traditional RouteBy JULIE BOSMAN
If any writer proved that modern self-publishing could be a pretty sweet deal, it was Amanda Hocking.
In the past year Ms. Hocking, a 26-year-old from Minnesota, became an indie heroine in the literary world for publishing nine books that sold a total of more than one million copies, nearly all of them in e-book form, earning almost $2 million for her efforts.
But for Ms. Hocking, self-publishing has had its limits. On Thursday she announced that she had sold a four-book series to St. Martin’s Press, ending a frenzied weeklong auction that involved nearly every major publisher in the business, including Random House, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins.
St. Martin’s, part of Macmillan, paid more than $2 million for the world English rights to the “Watersong” series, Ms. Hocking’s latest books in the young-adult paranormal genre.
“I’ve done as much with self-publishing as any person can do,” Ms. Hocking said in an interview on 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.”
Publishers, weary of hearing about their disposability in an age when writers can self-publish their work on the Internet and sell it on Amazon.com, said they were vindicated by the news.
Matthew Shear, the publisher of St. Martin’s Press, said that he wanted “pretty badly” to win the auction for Ms. Hocking’s books and that he would be able to introduce her work to a wider audience of readers. He first heard about Ms. Hocking six months ago from an editor at St. Martin’s, Rose Hilliard, who pressed him to read “Switched,” one of Ms. Hocking’s novels. (They are for sale at online retailers like Amazon and BN.com.)
“I think a lot of authors are looking at self-publishing as a way to perhaps make a certain amount of money sooner rather than later,” Mr. Shear said. “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.”
That was what made Ms. Hocking seek a traditional publisher, she said, after months of hearing from readers who were frustrated that they couldn’t find her books in stores. She was also tired of spending time formatting her books, designing covers and hiring freelance editors — all tasks that fall to the self-publishing author.
The first book in the series is scheduled for release in fall 2012, a spokeswoman for St. Martin’s said.
Ms. Hocking’s legions of fans were so shocked by the news earlier this week that she was shopping her books to traditional publishers that she felt compelled to explain herself on her blog.
“I want to be a writer,” she 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.”
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