Amanda Hocking and Wanda Shipiro

http://www.kycraft.com/detail_pages/wildwood-dancing.html

http://amandahocking.blogspot.com/2010/08/epic-tale-of-how-it-all-happened.html

So here I was. February 2010. I’d been determined to make 2009 the year I would get published. And I hadn’t. I said to my roommate, “I don’t think it’s going to happen. I don’t think I’m ever going to get published. I don’t know what more I can do. I’ve worked like a factory putting out the best books I possibly can. I’ve studied trends, the industry, business models.”

…

So I had no money, and I said to my roommate, “I’m going to sell books on Amazon through Kindle, and I bet I can make at least a couple hundred bucks by the end of the summer to go to Chicago.” My roommate (who has heard my make lots of plans that I never follow-through with) said, “Yeah. Okay. I’ll see that when it happens. Have you finished the Carrie book yet?”

In March, I made My Blood Approves available in paperback on Amazon through Lulu. In April, I published it to Kindle. About a week or so later, I published the second book in the series Fate.

Here’s where the story picks up. The two books combined, I sold 45 books in about 2 weeks. I thought to myself, “Not too shabby. Let’s add another book to the mix.”

I put out Flutter at the end of May. I distinctly remember one day in May before it came out, I sold 38 books in one day. I took a screen shot. I emailed my mom and my roommate, and I knew there was no way I was ever gonna do that. I mean, I was just a me, publishing books on the internet. There’s no way I could ever really be successful with this.

In May, I sold 624 books and made $362.

Then in June, something truly magical happened. I discovered book bloggers. I had no idea such people existed. They just read books and write about them. And I don’t mean “just.” These people take times out of their busy lives to talk about books and have contests and connect with followers and writers and other readers.

These guys are honestly my heroes. I’m a little in love with all of them.

I asked several if they would be interested in reviewing my books, and most of them said yes, even if they didn’t generally review self-published work.

Then something surreal started happening. My books were selling. Like, really selling.

So, thanks in large part to book bloggers, June turned into a very good month. I sold 4258 copes of all three books combined, and I made a total of $3180.

…Also in July, I finally found an editor and sent her my books. I contacted a cover artist about doing the covers for future books. And I put in notice at my dayjob.

For those of you reading this, you’ll realize that leaving my job seems a bit premature. Probably. I am still on-call at work, but I wanted to really focus on writing. I wanted the chance to be a full-time author for awhile, even if it only ended up being a few weeks.

In July, I sold 3532 books and made $6527.

In the beginning of August, a publishing house in Hungary approached me about foreign rights for their book. I emailed 5 agents then, telling them about my book, my sales (I’d just sold over 10,000 books at the time), and that I had people asking about foreign rights.

Two agents asked me to email them a manuscript almost right away, and I sent it out, but I haven’t heard back from them. On Monday, a third agent emailed me asking for the book, and he emailed me Thursday, asking me to call to talk about things.

Also on Monday, I released the fourth book in my vampire series. It peaked #25 in the entire Kindle store. If you”re wondering how many sales it took the book to get that high: 150 in a two hour period. Also on Monday – in one 24-hour period – I made $1200. Working at my day job full time, the most I’d ever made in a month is $1000. I just made more in a day than I used to make in a month.

Coffee Time Romance – coffeetimeromance.com

Bitten By Books – bittenbybooks.com (they only review paranormal)

Romance Junkies – romancejunkies.com

PNR ParaNormal Romance – paranormalromance.org

Romance In The Back Seat – romanceinthebackseat.com

Mrs. Giggles – mrsgiggles.com (She has a special POD/SP section – I didn’t request the review from her, it just showed up one day – but she does review self-pubbed romance.)

“The castle is burning. Prithee, let us away.”

“Your sciences could lead to a world where earthly kings, and even God Himself, is of less import than a bear.”

“My lord, I am as fond of bears as any. The castle is burning. Prithee, let us away.”

I can’t wait for this book to come out. The draft is done, so hopefully it won’t be long.

Night of the Living Trekkies – Book Trailer of the Day

Hat tip to Athena Stephenson for the link.

Okay, this is just cheating.

This is not a book trailer. This is a frickin’ full on MOVIE. And it is AWESOME.

I mean, what can I say? It is funny, has great acting, hilarious costumes, setting, special effects, a huge production cast and Cthulhu only knows what size budget… Am I jealous?

Hell yes. Also in awe.

I expect a real movie to follow shortly.

Full Disclosure: I dressed as a Green Orion Slave Dancer to a Trek convention once. I won first prize in the costume contest and was asked out on a date. A pity I was only eleven.

Rigor Amortis – Book Trailer of the Day

hat tip to Anthony Pacheco for this one!

It’s done with Animoto, and it looks pretty slick, doesn’t it! The music and the pace makes this 1:24 seconds fly by. I love the cartoons. I wonder if they are in the book? I wasn’t quite clear if this was a graphic novel, an illustrated anthology. I’m assuming its a short story collection because of the editors.

The premise of this anthology made me snarf.

Growing Up In Public

If you skim through You Tube, you’ll notice a lot of videos of kids doing cute, crazy stuff. Like this adorable French girl, who is “publishing” her first story — it happens to be Winnie the Pooh fan fic, and I dare say, it is the most awesome Winnie the Pooh fan fic ever.

New technology shifts paradigms. One worry I have always had about self-publishing is the fear that I would publish something too soon. When I read the first books I wrote, including fan fic, back when I was 12, 16, 22, I am horrified at how juvenile it was. My first thought was, “Thank goodness it wasn’t as easy to self-publish back in those days, because I would have probably done so and this crap would be haunting me.”

But maybe that was the old paradigm speaking.

In the old paradigm, a writer toiled in secret for years, crumbling up paper from the typewriter, hiding manuscripts under the bed, slowly accumulating a million words of dreck in desk drawers and trashcans, until finally a gatekeeper, an agent or publisher, said, “This is polished enough to show to the public.”

Today’s kids grow up in public. You don’t wait until something is perfect before you put it in front of an audience. You throw it out there, saying, “This is what I’m trying to do. Tell me if it works.” And people respond. They praise, they mock. But it’s out there. You keep trying, and you do it in public, in a community that gives you ongoing feedback. You don’t hide your million words of dreck. You post it on your blog. You share it in fan fic forums. You publish it on Lulu.

There’s still a sense among established industry people that if a writer gives away one’s writing “virginity” to anything less than a major publisher, one is as tainted a Fallen Woman of Victorian England. Seriously? Does the You Tube generation care if your first book was a thinly veiled Twilight pastiche published through iUniverse? I suspect behaving like a troll on websites is far more likely to hurt you than having self-published something.

Would it have been so bad if I had self-published my early works? Maybe not. Not if it encouraged me to improve, rather than stay still. Not if it connected me to a small, but possibly growing fan base. Not if it were accepted practice to grow as a writer in print, in public.

It’s a completely different model than the publishing industry has been used to. It goes along with cloud sourcing the slush pile. Although, C.J. Cherryh pointed out (on Facebook), this model is not entirely new to the genre of sff. Science fiction fans created fanzines, filk and fanfic long before the internet. They circulated their early stories on mimeographed pages, self-published tiny magazines, passed around stories, met in people’s homes to share songs, gathered at conventions. When it works best, I think growing up in public also means growing up in a community. I think that form of sharing art is at least as old as the human race. Possibly older. (Australopithecus, I’m raising my inquiring brow at you….)

I, for one, if I could, would pre-order on Amazon now any book Miss Capucine publishes in twenty years.

Agent Beauty Contests

Power comes from having choices. When writers query an agent, the agent usually has all the choices: hundreds of other queries to choose from.

But very quickly, that situation can be reversed. If a half-dozen agents all court the same author, then the author is the one who has to make the choice, and the agent is the one who has to live with it.

I’ve been in this situation a handful times in the last six months or so. I recently saw two of the books I’d offered on announced as sales in Publisher’s Marketplace, under other agents’ names. I was happy for the authors and I love the books, obviously, but gosh darn, I sure wish I could’ve been the happy agent listing those deals. I’m not whining about losing out on these manuscripts at all, and it’s not sour grapes. The author went with the best fit for them and that, at the end of the day, is the best possible thing for everyone involved. The clients I get and the books I sell all happen for a reason. And I do genuinely mean it when I tell the authors who go elsewhere that I look forward to reading about a huge sale in PM.

But for me, there are other issues at play here, other than, “Gee, I wish I’d gotten that one!” Being the first to offer (usually) and being myself and losing makes me wonder what types of things the other agents are saying that tip the scales in their favor. The last thing I want to do is to disparage any of my brilliant and hard-working agent colleagues, at my agency and outside of it. But there are different agenting styles, and I wonder if my particular agenting style isn’t serving me in this regard….

There’s also, of course, the issue of track record. I’m a newer agent. I have six sales listed on Publisher’s Marketplace. Though that’s not a comprehensive view of my sales, that’s the only thing writers can check. The first books I sold won’t be out for another nine months or so. I don’t have years of track record or bestseller clients to woo with… yet. And I’m very conscious that in a “beauty contest” (as we call these competitive situations), these things really do weigh in. (See my pro’s and con’s of newer vs. more established agents post for more on this.)

What’s the reason for this recent trend of multiple offers, then? Or for those times when it didn’t go my way? (Luckily, I’ve offered and won many, many more times than this, and I’m thrilled for the clients I do have.) I don’t know. But I’m really curious. As the comments on Kristin’s post mention, it could be an issue of agents hopping on the bandwagon when they hear about an offer. I have to admit, when someone comes to me and says they have an offer of representation, my interest is definitely piqued and I read fast to see if I want to throw my hat into the ring. I want a chance at the fantastic manuscript, too! But it seems like every offer has competition these days. I wonder why that is and, I have to admit, I’d love to be a fly on the wall and see how other agents are offering representation.

What would you all prefer in your offer of representation (other than, you know, getting that offer in the first place)? Big, exciting promises or my preferred brand of “cautious optimism”? Is the offer phone call the time to really rip out all the stops and get the writer hyped up or is it a frank chat about the business, the market, and how this manuscript will into the big picture?

These are the questions asked by agent Mary Kole, an associate agent at the Andrea Brown Literary Agency.

I think this is a good reminder that power is a ladder. It goes both up and down, and you should be careful not to step on anyone along the way. Don’t criticize agents for being superficial, shallow, mean, etc. because one day you might be in the position to have to make a choice. And when you do have the power to make choices, be polite, be professional.

More importantly, realize that we always have the power to make choices. Nor do we ever have to compromise ourselves to win “beauty contests,” whether we are writers, agents or just human beings.