What is not to love about this story? The levers of power in the world of popular culture are mostly held by the very few elite Watchmen who control the bottle neck of distribution. They are The Man and politically they are mostly not on America’s side or ours. Take that power away and they are nothing. I’d tell you to look at the music business as an example but no one can find it.
Here you have a young woman who used all the tools the Digital Revolution has to offer and created her very own success. You mix in some hard work with a genuine talent and no one can stop you. It’s like Twitter, this amazing digital forum that allows us to have a conversation amongst ourselves, to exchange ideas and information, without the malicious filter of the mainstream media telling us what is and isn’t important, proper, or worthy. Power to the People used to be a slogan shouted by socialists who meant just the opposite, but now it’s something coming truer every day in this amazing age we’re privileged to live in.
Fed up with attempts to find a traditional publisher for her young-adult paranormal novels, Hocking self-published last March and began selling her novels on online bookstores like Amazon and Barnesandnoble.com.
By May she was selling hundreds; by June, thousands. She sold 164,000 books in 2010. Most were low-priced (99 cents to $2.99) digital downloads.
More astounding: This January she sold more than 450,000 copies of her nine titles. More than 99% were e-books. …
In fact, Hocking is selling so well that on Thursday, the three titles in her Trylle Trilogy (Switched, Torn and Ascend, the latest) will make their debuts in the top 50 of USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list.
A recent survey shows 20 million people read e-books last year, and more self-published authors are taking advantage of the trend.
(Self-publishing is done without the involvement or vetting of an established publisher and uses a publishing system such as Lulu, Smashwords, Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing or Barnes & Noble’s PubIt! Many traditional media outlets do not review self-published books.) …
Hocking credits her success to aggressive self-promotion on her blog, Facebook and Twitter, word of mouth and writing in a popular genre — her books star trolls, vampires and zombies.
And she’s making money.
Stories like this, Twitter, Netflix Streaming, blogs — this stuff terrorizes our Pop Culture and Media Overlords. And for my money, you just can’t stick it to The Man enough.