Een jonge Amerikaanse schrijfster die op één jaar van ongepubliceerd naar miljoenenverkoop op Amazon gaat. En dat allemaal zonder uitgever of andere professionele hulp. Zo’n succesverhaal is weer een nagel in de doodskist van de Oude Media. Of toch niet?
The Guardian brengt een portret van de 27-jarige Fantasy-auteur Amanda Hocking. Ergens naar het einde van het artikel lees je toch een nuance:
She also resents how her abrupt success has been interpreted as a sign that digital self-publishing is a new way to get rich quick. Sure, Hocking has got rich, quickly. But what about the nine years before she began posting her books when she wrote 17 novels and had every one rejected?
And what about the hours and hours that she’s spent since April 2010 dealing with technical glitches on Kindle, creating her own book covers, editing her own copy, writing a blog, going on Twitter and Facebook to spread the word, responding to emails and tweets from her army of readers?
Just the editing process alone has been a source of deep frustration, because although she has employed own freelance editors and invited her readers to alert her to spelling and grammatical errors, she thinks her ebooks are riddled with mistakes. “It drove me nuts, because I tried really hard to get things right and I just couldn’t. It’s exhausting, and hard to do. And it starts to wear on you emotionally. I know that sounds weird and whiny, but it’s true.”
In the end, Hocking became so burned out by the stress of solo publishing that she has turned for help to the same traditional book world that previously rejected her and which she was seen as attacking. For $2.1m, she has signed up with St Martin’s Press in the US and Pan Macmillan in the UK to publish her next tranche of books.
Het hele artikel vind je hier.