Amanda Hocking: 17 Rejected Novels, 99 Cents, and a $2M Deal She Earned Before Publishers Noticed

Introduction

Amanda Hocking did not become a bestselling author because a publisher discovered her. She became one because publishers kept not discovering her, and she eventually stopped waiting. By the time she self-published her first e-book in April 2010, she had spent nine years writing novels in her spare time — 17 of them — and had collected rejections from agents and publishers for every one. She was 25, working in a group home for people with disabilities in Austin, Minnesota, and her first goal for self-publishing was not fame or fortune. It was $300, enough for a trip to Chicago to see an exhibition about Jim Henson, the creator of the Muppets.

Eleven months later, she had sold more than a million copies of her first nine books and earned about $2 million from sales — figures previously unheard of for a self-published author. In early 2011 she was averaging 9,000 book sales a day. In March 2011 she signed a four-book deal reportedly worth $2 million with St. Martin's Press, the very industry that had turned her away. Hocking's story is often told as an overnight success. It was the opposite: nine years of unpaid inventory, then eleven months in which the market finally got to judge work the gatekeepers had already dismissed.

The Story

Hocking grew up in Austin, Minnesota, a small town she liked to point out invented Spam — the food, not the email. Her father drove trucks; her mother waited tables. She has said she had been writing stories since she could write, and she started writing novels at 17. After high school she studied human services for two semesters at a local community college while working in a group home. In her early twenties she wrote at night, after her shifts, and sent manuscripts to agents. The replies were form-letter rejections, one after another — more than 50 agents, by one account.

In 2008 she quit her group-home job to focus on writing, with almost a dozen novels already on her computer. Still, nothing sold. She began to wonder whether the problem was the kind of fiction she was writing — too dark, too intense — so she went to a Walmart, looked at what was actually selling, and re-evaluated her strengths. She could not write thrillers like James Patterson, she decided, but paranormal romance was a genre she thought she could handle. That decision matters more than it looks: Hocking did not just keep writing what she loved in a vacuum. She matched what she could write well to a category with proven readers, and then she wrote into it, fast.

In April 2010 she uploaded her books to Amazon's Kindle store. The first was priced at 99 cents; others followed at up to $2.99. She was not launching a career strategy. She wanted the $300 for Chicago, and she hoped sales to friends might cover it. Within six months she had not only raised the trip money but earned over $20,000, and some accounts put her six-month sales above 150,000 copies. Her breakout series were My Blood Approves, a vampire romance, and the Trylle Trilogy — Switched, Torn and Ascend — about a teenage girl who discovers she is a changeling troll princess. The Trylle books alone eventually sold more than 1.5 million copies as self-published e-books.

The mechanics of the rise were unglamorous and entirely hers. She did everything a publisher would normally do: she hired freelance editors, commissioned covers, formatted the books, fixed Kindle glitches, ran a blog, posted on Twitter and Facebook, and answered emails and messages from readers. She invited readers to flag spelling and grammar mistakes, and she was frank that the books still contained errors despite her efforts — a frustration she described as exhausting and emotionally wearing. But the low price removed the risk for a new reader, and the series format did the rest: a reader who liked a 99-cent first book could immediately buy the next one, and the next, at $2.99. By less than a year after her debut, seven of her books had appeared on USA Today's bestseller lists, and in November 2011 Amazon admitted her to its Kindle Million Club for selling over a million paid Kindle copies.

Then came the twist that makes Hocking's story more useful than a simple self-publishing fairy tale. She got burned out — not by writing, but by being her own publisher. She has said she did not want to spend her working life on administration, in her words: "I want to be a writer. I do not want to spend 40 hours a week handling emails, formatting covers, finding editors, etc. Right now, being me is a full-time corporation." So she did something that surprised people who had cast her as the woman who defeated traditional publishing: she signed with it. In March 2011 she agreed a four-book, $2 million deal with St. Martin's Press for a new young-adult paranormal series, Watersong, whose first book, Wake, appeared in August 2012. St. Martin's also bought the Trylle Trilogy and re-released it from January to April 2012. The Trylle books were later optioned for film, with screenwriter Terri Tatchell attached to adapt them in 2014.

That is the part most retellings skip, and it is the most honest part. Hocking did not prove that publishers are useless. She proved that a writer with a proven audience can negotiate with publishers on completely different terms — not as a supplicant hoping to be chosen, but as a business with a million customers, foreign-language rights already negotiated in at least one market, and a track record no debut author could match. Self-publishing was not her destination. It was her leverage. She has since published more than twenty novels, several of which have made The New York Times Best Seller list, and she has kept writing in the same genres — young-adult paranormal romance and fantasy — that the market first rewarded.

Lessons

Amanda Hocking's run offers three mechanics worth stealing:

1. Build the inventory before you chase the platform: Hocking did not self-publish one book and hope. She arrived at Kindle with 17 finished novels behind her and published nine of them in quick succession. The mechanism: a single book gives a new reader one chance to buy and then nothing to do next; a backlist turns one discovery into a binge. Price the entry point at almost nothing — 99 cents — and let the sequels, priced higher, do the earning. The practical version for any creator is to finish three to five pieces in a series before publishing the first, so that every new reader lands in a catalogue rather than at a dead end. Hocking's nine years of rejection were, without her knowing it, inventory accumulation. The lesson is not to wait nine years; it is to never launch with one item when the business model depends on the second, third and fourth sale.

2. Be present instead of broadcasting: Hocking's own advice for online marketing was blunt and short: be present, be funny, and be kind, and do not turn every post into an infomercial. The mechanism: she spent time on Twitter, Facebook and her blog talking about things she found interesting, mentioned a book when one was coming out, and let readers spread the word to their friends. That is why her rise looks like word of mouth rather than advertising — because it was. Readers who feel talked with, rather than sold to, recommend a book to someone else; readers who feel pitched, tune out. For a solo creator, the executable version is a ratio: most of your public presence should be conversation and taste — what you like, what you noticed, what made you laugh — with the product appearing only when there is genuine news. Hocking also treated readers as collaborators, inviting them to report typos, which turned the audience into a quality-control team and deepened their investment in the next book.

3. Professionalise the DIY stack, then buy back your own time: Hocking's self-publishing was never amateur hour dressed up as independence. She hired freelance editors, paid for professional covers, and held her books to the standard she stated herself: the product should be indistinguishable from a traditionally published one. The mechanism has two stages, and both matter. First, spend on the two things readers judge before they read a word — the cover and the editing — because a cheap-looking book confirms every prejudice against self-publishing. Second, recognise the moment when doing everything yourself stops being freedom and starts being a job you never applied for. Hocking's $2 million deal was not a surrender; it was a purchase. She traded a share of future upside for editors, cover designers, formatting and distribution handled by someone else, so she could return to the one task only she could do: writing the next book. The test is simple — if the admin around your work has become a full-time corporation, you are not independent any more. You are just an unpaid staff of one, and buying help is the independent move.

Closing

Amanda Hocking's story is not really about 99 cents, and it is not really about two million dollars. It is about a writer who spent nine years being told no, quietly building the one thing no rejection letter could take away: a shelf of finished books. When the Kindle store finally let readers judge that shelf directly, they bought a million copies in eleven months — and the industry that had ignored her paid $2 million for the privilege of publishing her next. The gatekeepers did not disappear. They just stopped being the only door. Hocking walked through a door she built herself, priced the first step at almost nothing, let readers carry her the rest of the way, and then — clear-eyed about what the work was costing her — hired the old system back on her own terms. That is the real lesson: independence is not doing everything yourself forever. It is having something good enough that you get to choose who helps you, and on what terms.