In light of the official announcement of her seven-figure publishing contract, Amanda Hocking wrote a longer blog post going into complete detail about why she wanted the deal. She notes with more than a little irony:
[It] is crazy that we live in a time that I have to justify taking a seven-figure a publishing deal with St. Martin’s. Ten years ago, nobody would question this. Now everybody is.
Her reasons boil down to getting her work out to readers who want to get her works from bookstores, readers have complained about the quality control in some of her works, and she writes fast enough that she’ll still have plenty of works she can self-publish even in light of this deal.
She explains that she’s not really taking the deal for the money—given her past record, she expects that if she kept working as hard as she has been, she could match that $2 million on her own. But she doesn’t want to have to keep working as hard as she has been, and she wants the additional exposure that comes from traditional publishing—bringing up the example of James Patterson, whose books sell like hotcakes even when they’re demonstrably awful.
She also notes that she has a knowledgeable staff including lawyers, accountants, and financial advisors who will help her look over the contract, and that she was not pushed or coerced into the deal. And she has no plans to stop self-publishing. And her decision to sign a contract is one that is made not out of desperation but from a position of financial strength.
What happens if they screw you over in a contract, steal all your money, and keep your erights forever? Then they do. I like the books St. Martin’s bought. And I believe in them. But if I lose money on them, I lose money on them. That’s the risk I’m taking. And I do know this is a risk. But it’s a calculated risk, and if it works out, the payoff could be enormous. But I’m making enough money on my other books – and I will continue to make enough on my self-published books – that I can afford to take this risk.
From these blog posts, Amanda Hocking impresses me as the sort of person who puts a lot of thought and attention into her career, and is not one to jump into anything this big without putting a lot of thought into it. And since she already has a good career as a self-publishing writer, this is not a case of “jumping ship”—it’s more a case of not putting all her eggs in one basket. It will be interesting to see how her career as a published writer goes.
(Found via another self-published-to-traditional-published discovery, John Scalzi.)
I didn’t think Amanda needed to justify herself to anyone. The question posed above to her sounds like something a thirteen-year-old would ask. She was offered a good money deal that would allow her to do what she wants for a living, and she took it. She’s not “selling out to The Man,” she’s making money off The Man!
Good for Amanda. She absolutely doesn’t have to justify her decision to anyone other than herself. She also recongizes that young adult readers tend to be fad-oriented and I think she’s wise to get the power of a big publisher behind her. Then again, I believe in publishers, large and small.
Rob Preece
Publisher
All perfectly fair questions. No one is asking her to justify anything and the over defensive responses are ridiculous.
Howard: That’s a bit of a switch from when you said “She is very young and I suspect this together with her new wealth has contributed largely to this decision. Her characterisation of the self publishing process seems suddenly and suspiciously deeply prejudicial.”