Darcie Chan was a thirty-something lawyer drafting environmental legislation for the US Senate when she found her novel, The Mill River Recluse turned down by a dozen publishers. She decided instead to self-publish and soon sold 400,000 copies:
She bought some ads on Web sites targeting e-book readers, paid for a review from Kirkus Reviews, and strategically priced her book at 99 cents to encourage readers to try it. She’s now attracting bids from foreign imprints, movie studios and audio-book publishers, without selling a single copy in print.
Only a handful of self-published authors have sold more than a million copies of their books on the Kindle:
While they represent a tiny minority of independent authors, the ranks of the successful are growing. Thirty authors have sold more than 100,000 copies of their books through Amazon’s Kindle self-publishing program, and a dozen have sold more than 200,000 copies, according to Amazon.
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Self-published titles have been buoyed by an explosion in digital book sales. E-book sales totaled $878 million in 2010, compared to $287 million in 2009, according to the Association of American Publishers. Some analysts project that e-book sales will pass $2 billion in 2013.
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Several successful self-published authors have gone on to cut deals with major publishers. After selling around 1.5 million digital copies of her books on her own, 27-year-old fantasy writer Amanda Hocking signed with St. Martin’s Press. She won a $2 million advance for a new four-book fantasy series called “Watersong”; St. Martin’s will also reprint her best-selling self-published “Trylle” trilogy about attractive teenage trolls.
Self-published thriller and Western writer John Locke, whose 13 books have sold more than 1.7 million digital copies, signed an unusual contract with Simon & Schuster in August. The publishing house will print and distribute his books—the first title comes out next month—while allowing Mr. Locke to remain as the publisher. Mr. Locke is paying for the printing, shipping and marketing costs himself, according to his agent. The print editions, which will sell as mass-market paperbacks for $4.99, won’t be edited. “The opportunity to get into bookstores, Targets, Wal-Marts, Costcos, airports—I can’t do that as an independent author,” Mr. Locke says.
J.A. Konrath, a mystery writer who has sold 400,000 digital copies of his self-published books, earning some $500,000 a year, signed a contract with Amazon’s new mystery imprint to publish his novel “Stirred,” co-written with Blake Crouch, digitally and in print. It recently hit No. 1 on the Kindle top-100 list. Mr. Konrath says he was won over by Amazon’s powerful marketing machinery. “They can really blow my books up,” he says.