Congrats Amanda Hocking!

According to HuffPost Books:

"For more than five years, Amanda Hocking spent her days tending to disabled adults, making their meals and cleaning up after them. When she got home, she would crack open a can of Red Bull and start typing away at her novels.

Her effort to make it as a writer was at least as grinding as her day job, with countless rejections from book agents before Hocking stumbled across a promising new business model for aspiring authors: self-publishing and marketing through e-booksellers.

A little more than a year later, Hocking's novel "Switched" sits at No. 41 on USA Today's list of top 150 best-selling books – just a few notches below such major juggernauts as James Patterson and Maeve Binchy. Hocking's books also occupy slots 54, 57, 114 and 149 on the list, and on Thursday, the publishing world finally caught up when the 26-year-old college dropout signed a four-book deal with St. Martin's Press.

Hocking said the first book in a new "Watersong" series was slated for release in fall 2012. She declined to release details of the deal. St. Martin's Press confirmed the deal but would not comment further. But executives from two publishing houses who were interested in the books said bidding had reached seven figures. The executives asked not to be identified, citing confidentiality of negotiations.

During an interview, the author was coy about discussing publishing deals before finally coming clean about her relationship with St. Martin's. She's only written one of the four books in the 'Watersong' series, and won't say what it's about yet, although it's in the same paranormal romance vein as her other books.

Aimed at young adults, Hocking's books occupy the same territory as the enormously popular "Twilight" books by Stephenie Meyer. Hocking has written about vampires, zombies and trolls – a strategic decision that she says she made after scanning the shelves at Wal-Mart.

"I like vampires and they're popular," Hocking said. "So I thought, 'Why not write about them?'"

She has sold her books on such sites as Amazon's Kindle Store and Barnes & Noble's NOOKbooks at prices ranging from 99 cents to $2.99. Hocking keeps up to 70 percent of the sales.

She sold a few hundred books last May, and the numbers slowly grew to a few thousand before spiking to more than 100,000 in December. Monthly sales reports Hocking provided to The Associated Press showed more than 333,000 sold in January and another 300,000 in February, enough to back her claim to have sold between $1.4 million to $2 million in e-books."


See what a self-published author was able to accomplish... all on her own!!  Woo hoo Ms. Hocking!!

(for those of you that know me, Amanda Hocking became a favorite over Christmas... I've bought her My Blood Approves series and her Trylle Trilogy as soon as I opened my iPad on Christmas, and I've been enjoying her books since!)