The Truth of the "Amanda Hocking Method"

If I had to put it into words I'd say the Amanda Hocking method is:

1. Write tons of stuff
2. Polish it up
3. Send it to agents and publishers
4. Get some feedback
5. Take their advice
6. Send it again
7. When all else fails create ebooks (including cover, editing, and research into where you want it published)
8. Ask bloggers to review it
9. Talk about it on your blog (that DIDN'T just make the day you self-published) as well as every other place on the internet you can think of
10. Write some more

Her success is really fascinating to me, and I think hints at a potential new direction for writers to get their work out there.

Indie musicians have the technology to really get themselves out there with distribution channels like youtube, and iTunes. But I think one of the key points to the success of their distribution of wares is the fact that there's hardware like iPods which make it easy to consume their products and takes the consumption mobile.

It's exciting how ebooks are taking off, especially with Amazon's backing. I'm an early adopter of the tech, and bought an ereader specifically because I hated reading long webfics on the computer. I don't want to be tied to my laptop while getting into a story!

But yeah, the fact that she's so prolific and has that stick-to-itness seems to have played a big part in her self-publishing success. I've tried to read her novels, and they aren't really my thing, but kudos to her for achieving so much! It's encouraging that in some cases something can come out of rejection.

Once upon a time, writers with skill were able to publish pretty darned near anything they wrote. And to make ends meet, they wrote a LOT. Being a pro often meant you were spending eight or more hours a day five or more days a week pounding the keys, producing new words. Yes, they were on manual typewriters, but they were still pecking out tens of thousands of words per week.

Then publishing gradually changed, and became more limited. Bunch of reasons, but publishers gradually trimmed things back until we're at where we are today - when a writer who produces two books a year is considered "prolific" and sort of looked at funny by some folks, like two books a year made someone a shady character.

Amanda Hocking seems to be able to write about 4 books per year, more or less. By modern standards, that makes her very productive.

By the standards of the 20s and 30s, she's still slow.

But she was able to get nine books out in nine months (some of those were already written, of course). That's huge, because each of those books acted as an ad for her other books. People liked one, they bought more. And she had lots more to sell.

Part of the reason her SMP deal is *so* good is because she plans to self publish 3-4 other books for each one she publishes through SMP. And all of those books (and her older ones) will benefit from the hundreds of thousands of dollars of marketing SMP is going to do for the four books they're producing for her. A lot of people miss that part.

High productivity is not the only thing that happened for her, obviously; she had decent covers, good price, and good storytelling. And a healthy dose of luck, probably. But without the high productivity, those other elements alone would not have been enough.

And remember: by the standards of the writers who were working the last time there was "no limits" publishing, she's *slow*.

With no limit on shelf space, no limit on books publishers or writers can upload and sell, I think we're in for some interesting times.

KevinMcLaughlin said:

And remember: by the standards of the writers who were working the last time there was "no limits" publishing, she's *slow*.

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As far as I remember, Lionel Fanthorpe wrote 89 novels in three years in the 60s; of course most of them were very bad, but they did sell enough to justify writing more.

At this point I'd be thrilled to sell enough books to bring in about $3000 a month. At that point, either my husband or I could quit the day job. Fingers crossed.

I'd never even heard of her until a few weeks back when she was mentioned on AW.

And James Patterson is so prolific, you would almost think he had help

- good article JC, thanks for that

scarletpeaches said:

I'd never even heard of her until a few weeks back when she was mentioned on AW.

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I mentioned her to my sister, a prolific reader in Hocking's genre - especially ebooks - and she responded 'who?'

I believe it's only really literary circles she's famous in. The majority of readers haven't heard of her - yet.

I hadn't heard of her either, until AW - and she lives about 40 miles from me!

I've finally downloaded some Amanda Hocking samples to my Kindle.

Her writing has energy, no doubt about that. But oh boy does it need some spit and polish. The problems are legion, from simple spelling mistakes to tense problems and verb/subject disagreements.

Some of what I read was very derivative, some wasn't. All of it needs a lot of work. I don't know what conclusions to draw, other than she is a writer who badly needs an editor to polish up her work, so it's a good thing she found a publisher. She might have continued to make a lot of money self publishing, but maybe her writing would have stayed stuck at the 'promising' stage forever.

It'll be interesting to see if working with SMP's pro editors improves the quality of her writing in her future self published books, too; that is, to see if she learns lessons there which she is able to transfer.

I think Amanda Hocking is one smart businesswoman.

Just throwing this idea out there. Sorry if it sucks or if it's already been suggested or done on some other thread on AbsoluteWrite.

What about a thread, listing, etc. where Amazon Kindle writers put the supposed "Amanda Hocking Method" idea to the test? They might post actual sales / success / lack of success over the course of a year or so, or at least leading to the end of this year. I've seen writers mention Kindle sales on other threads, but thus far more in passing than anything else (unless I missed a thread, which is certainly quite possible).

It'd be sort of an Absolutewrite.com experiment documenting the alleged Kindle revolution in progress. What marketing (or method) did writers use, what genres, and what success was or wasn't attained? Is this whole Kindle gold rush really just one big landfill or do a significant number of writers in various genres tend to have a certain number (not sure what number) of sales there or not? Self-publishers, epublishers, etc.

Don't know if the data would prove anything, really. Writers on this site have so many different levels of experience and such diverse publishing histories. Just thought it might be interesting to see what happened if enough writers did it. Maybe there's somewhere it's been done? Not sure.

How much does she need editing? In the eyes of pro writers, maybe a lot. But in the eyes of millions of readers, she's obviously offering something they want.

So again, how much does she need editing?

gothicangel said:

I mentioned her to my sister, a prolific reader in Hocking's genre - especially ebooks - and she responded 'who?'

I believe it's only really literary circles she's famous in. The majority of readers haven't heard of her - yet.

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She's also known among journalists. I hadn't heard of her before the discussions arose on this forum. Once the press started covering her, my editor at the paper, who doesn't read YA, books about vampires (sparkly or otherwise), ebooks or anything self-published, forwarded me a link to a story about her, because she got the media's attention.

From what I've learned about Ms. Hocking is that the method that I consider relevant, which is making money selling ebooks, as the whole trade publishing angle isn't relevant to me (which may not have been intentional because she was seeking trade publishing first) is:

-Develop a large amount of material that is all in the same genre before publishing it.
-Publish the first book in the series at a very low price (loss leader to hook people in)
-Get as much buzz on blogs and social media as possible
-Keep publishing new books frequently, while continuing to crank out new content

The real trick is making sure that the genre you are writing in is a hot one. YA Paranormal Romance is super hot now because of the sparkly vampires. Riding the Twilight series' coattails is a big part of her success.

That, and publishing books in series. As long as she's giving readers what they want, they'll be repeat customers, and they'll tell their friends, a form of marketing you can't buy at any cost.

jnfr asks a very interesting question regarding her editing.

So again, how much does she need editing?

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I took a brief look at the preview of "Switched", and found nothing particularly objectionable or particularly awesome about the few pages I read. Not my genre, but certainly readable. Although I did snicker over, "My jaw slacked", but more because that reminded me of an old meme on an old forum, "She bang he slackjawed", than the odd turn of phrase.

It is difficult for me to gauge how this is received by a teenager, because I havent' been one for way too long, and because I've been writing for too long as well...However, it's clear that they are buying the first and coming back for more, so they want what she's giving them.

In a way it's kind of like the difference between the movies that the critics love, that win Academy or Sundance Film Festival awards, and the Hollywood blockbusters that make the big money because people want them. The King's Speech is two hours of my life (although it seemed like much longer) that I'll never get back, but I watch Independence Day every so often because it's awesome.

I guess the bottom line on the Amanda Hocking Method from my POV is: Give your target market what they want, how they want it, when they want it, and they'll keep coming back for more.

Focus

jnfr said:

How much does she need editing? In the eyes of pro writers, maybe a lot. But in the eyes of millions of readers, she's obviously offering something they want.

So again, how much does she need editing?

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Quite a lot, if the comments left by reviewers on Amazon are any indication. People notice.

Plus it would be impossible to quantify how many readers she loses by not offering clean copy.

FocusOnEnergy said:

She's also known among journalists. I hadn't heard of her before the discussions arose on this forum. Once the press started covering her, my editor at the paper, who doesn't read YA, books about vampires (sparkly or otherwise), ebooks or anything self-published, forwarded me a link to a story about her, because she got the media's attention.

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Journalists are still in 'literary circles.'

I'm talking about the biggest group of book readers who enjoy spending a Saturday afternoon browsing the shelves of Waterstone's and B&N - the biggest purchasers of fiction. They have no idea who AH is, and won't until St Martin's start their big marketing push.

jnfr said:

How much does she need editing? In the eyes of pro writers, maybe a lot. But in the eyes of millions of readers, she's obviously offering something they want.

So again, how much does she need editing?

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Millions of readers is probably an over exaggeration. If we take the extreme estimate of her sales of 2 million, and she published about nine books, yes? So if every reader is buying all nine books that works out at about 200,000 readers.

200,000 readers is nothing to be sniffed at, but it isn't millions of people ignorant of editing standards.

gothicangel said:

Journalists are still in 'literary circles.'

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That's nice of you to say, but we are not really in literary circles at our paper. We cover local festivals, community events and church happenings.

The closest we get to literary circles is when an author comes to town to do an appearance and book signing that's arranged through the local library and usually we've never heard of them, either.

Focus

Good point! Selling millions of books doesn't equal millions of readers, definitely. But the point stands that many (not all, and I'm not claiming all) readers are more forgiving of the kind of errors that writers and editors mostly hate.

JC Miller said:

I haven't had a chance to read her books, but I've heard this was a problem for her. I'm sure she will be able to afford editing now for her existing books, and SMP will take care of the new series.

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She actually said this was one of the main reasons she wanted to with a commercial publisher. She HAS hired outside editors, and the end result still wasn't up to standards.