Amanda Hocking

Hey, let’s not talk about me for a minute.

I’m reading Land of Ash right now. It’s an anthology of short stories by David Dalglish, David McAfee, Daniel Arenson, John Fitch V, Michael Crane, and Robert Duperre. The premise is simple: The Yellowstone Caldera erupts, covering the world in ash, and that’s the unifying theme between the eleven different stories. It’s all about survivors, and how they deal with total devastation in a land covered in ash.

I read Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King a few weeks back, and I like Land of Ash better. Not that I didn’t like Full Dark, No Stars – because I really did. King is a master of the underrated medium of short stories and novellas. But I still enjoy Land of Ash more.

So far, my favorite is “Shelter” by David Dalglish. It’s about a father and his small child holing themselves up in the house after the ash comes. There’s something so simple and bittersweet about it that’s perfect.

That’s not to say there’s any bad stories in it – “Beach Puppies” is somewhat lighter than most of the other stories, and “Last Words” brings it down to a more personal level and less apocalyptic, if that makes sense. To buy Land of Ash, click: here.

I also just read Lessons by Michael Crane. It’s actually because I read this that I started reading Land of Ash. I’d bout LoA right when it came out, but I hadn’t gotten around to reading it yet. Then I read a review about Lessons, and it piqued my interest.

Anyway – Lessons is another anthology, but this time with 100-word flash fiction. I know what you’re thinking – stories in under a 100-words? That sounds ridiculous and unenjoyable. But you’re wrong. Dead wrong.

They are morbid, but they’re fun and quick and perfect. If they were longer, they wouldn’t be as good. If you enjoy, Edward Gorey or Tim Burton, you need to check this book out. It’s that kitzchey fun thing that becomes as cult classic, because it doesn’t really have a genre or a niche.

It stands alone, and for $.99, its completely worth it. I could see this as a paperback with fun illustrations being sold at Hot Topic and making an excellent holiday stocking stuffer.

On the subject of that – hey, Mike, if you go to Createspace and make a paperback for Lessons, I’ll buy a bunch. I know some of my friends would like them, and I could give them away here on my ol’ blog. Because it’s awesome. So check out Lessons: here.

Here’s some other things I’ve read this year that are awesome:

Jenny Pox by J. L. Bryan – Probably my favorite book I’ve read all year. It is YA, but it has some adult situations. But it’s just really good. If you like YA paranormal, check this out. And even if you don’t, check it out. It’s that good.

Glimpse by Stacey Wallace Benefiel – I’ve only read the first one so far, but Stacey’s fun. And she writes fun. It’s like hanging out with a friend from high school, when you were in high school, but without as much angst.

Grubs by David McAfee – Still the only book that gave me nightmares. Also, he did the short story for Zombiepalooza, called “One of Four.” Which you should read: here, because I really enjoyed it. I think I’ve read it like ten times.

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. This book is not for everyone. In fact, it’s not for most people. I know that. But I love it sooo much.

The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking. From the product description: “As we promise in our opening chapter, unlike the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life given in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the answer we provide in The Grand Design is not, simply, “42.”” That’s not entirely innaccurate. Space, time, the universe boggles my mind. I love reading about it.

Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Addams. This is my second time reading it, and I’m not all the way through, but it’s a good damn book.

The Long Halloween and Hush by Jeph Loeb. Those are Batman graphic novels. I love, love, love Jeph Loeb, so much so I’m going to read Superman For All Seasons and I hate Superman. Don’t get me wrong – Alan Moore and Frank Miller are brilliant. But there’s something about Jeph Loeb that I adore. He tells great stories.

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. I read this book at least once a year for good reason. It’s incredible. Probably one of the best books of all time.

Tulips and Chimneys by e e cummings. I don’t read books of poetry that often (aside from Sylvia Plath and Dylan Thomas) but e e cummings is one of the most gifted writers I’ve ever read. Go. Read. Him.

And I do in fact use the word “awesome” too much. But trust me, when I say awesome, I mean it.

Hi. I know many people visiting my blog today were directed from Joe Konrath’s blog (thanks for the shout out, sir). A lot of people had very kind things about me and my books, and I thank them for that.

If you haven’t read Joe’s blog, you can check it out: here. And if you’re interested at all in writing or publishing in the near future, I suggest you check his blog in general. He does a much better job of explaining things than I do. I like to pretend that it’s all magic, and leave it at that.

But somebody asked for proof. Even though I know I don’t have to give proof, I don’t like insinuations that I’m a liar. I’m many things, but I’m not a liar. So I’m posting what proof I have.

I didn’t take screen shots on the sixth or seventh, when I actually reached the 10,000 mark. But I did take them just now.

Here’s a screen shot for Amazon: (I think you can click on it to enlarge it – or I hope you can)

Here’s a screen shot for Createspace:

And here’s a screen shot for Barnes & Noble:

The Barnes & Noble is tricky because it’s a cumulative of all the books I’d sold through them since the beginning. So, I have to subtract the amount of books I sold through them prior to Dec 1st, which was 10,605. So, at the time of the screen shot, I’d sold 5,387 books through them in the month of December.

If you add up those three totals, you get a grand total of 12,598. Since today is the eighth, I think you can agree it’s a safe to say I’d sold 10,000 books as of two days ago.

But something else that I haven’t mentioned – I’m selling 4 of my books directly on Barnes & Noble. Three of them – My Blood Approves, Fate, and Wisdom – are being sold through Smashwords. And Smashwords is horrible at reporting how many books I’ve sold through them.

I can roughly estimate, and you can see how many books I’m selling of Flutter (the third book in the series) through Barnes & Noble, so I imagine that Fate and Wisdom are selling comparably well, and My Blood Approves, being the first book and the cheapest, is probably selling a bit better. I’m not going to speculate on sales, but I’m fairly certain that my actual sales for December (thus far) are higher than 12,598.

For those of you asking how I did it, it’s all fairly simple – I wrote a lot of books.

As of today, I’ve written sixteen novels, four novellas, at least fifty short stories, a screenplay, hundreds of poems, a one-act play, and I have two works in progress, plus the outlines for an additional six or seven novels. And that says nothing for the incomplete works I’ve started and for the trunk of notebooks filled with half-finished ideas in my bedroom.

Of all that stuff I’ve written, most of it will never be fit for publication because it’s just not very good. I stand by most of it being good when I wrote it – meaning I wrote a really great short story for a twelve-year-old or a pretty good novel for a seventeen-year-old. But that doesn’t mean they’re good enough to be published and read. Just because you write something, doesn’t mean other people should read it.

If you want more in depth information, I covered most of it in a previous blog I wrote, which you can check out: here.

And as I’ve said before, a lot of this has seemed easy to me and it appears that it’s come easy for me and happened suddenly. But I have been writing continuously pretty much entire life. That’s not even an exaggeration. I wrote my first short story by the time I was five. And I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words since then.

And I haven’t just been writing. After I turned eighteen, and I got really serious about being published, I spent a lot of time researching the publishing world and learning and getting critiqued and critiquing others.

What I’m saying is that I’ve been working my whole life for this. I’ve spent twenty-six years writing, and eight years studying what it takes to make writing my career. I write commercial fiction, with nice covers and good prices. And I happened to publish during an ebook revolution. So if you want to know the secret to my success – it’s all that right there.

I still have signed paperbacks for sale (no boxsets yet). My Blood Approves has sold out for now, but I’ll be getting more in soon. Check out the paperbacks: here.

My dog is almost three years old. When he was a puppy, I bought a pair of pink gel headphones. They were $9, and I spent almost a half debating whether or not I should buy them. I had hardly any money – as in I lived on ramen because I could afford it. But I wanted my headphones so I could listen to the radio on my phone.

I liked to listen to Back Track USA on Saturday mornings when they play 80’s and 90’s music, but the only way I could that was on my phone, and my phone requires headphones to listen to the radio.

So I finally caved and bought these headphones, because I really, really like music from the 80’s and 90’s. I came home,  used them once. Then I left my dog (then a puppy) alone in my room with my headphones while I went to the bathroom. When I returned, the headphones were destroyed.

I was so upset because I couldn’t afford another pair. I literally did not have another $9 to spend.

Two weeks ago, I was at the store, looking at headphones. I have gone without headphones for the past two and half years, but since getting my laptop, I wanted to be able to listen to music on not crappy laptop speakers. So I was looking at headphones, thinking about how I didn’t really need them, and blah blah… when I realized that I could afford headphones. I could just buy a pair. And I’d still have money to eat. In fact, I’d already paid all my bills for the month.

So I bought the $14 headphones. Yep. I’m living large now.

It’s so weird to just be able to buy stuff. I mean, I can’t buy anything I want – like a big screen TV or a Delorean. But I can buy new headphones. Or Inception on Bluray/DVD combo pack.

I actually had to save up to buy The Dark Knight when it came out. I’m not even kidding. And to this day, I don’t own Star Trek the new movie because when it came out on DVD, I had no money, and now for some reason, I keep forgetting that I don’t own it.

When people make an argument for raising books prices, saying we should sell ebooks for $6.99 or even sometimes $9.99, this is what I think of. It’s not that I don’t work hard on my books. It’s not that I don’t think my books are equal to traditional published books.

It’s that I had to wait three months until after Claudia Gray’s Hourglass came out because I had to save up for the ten or twelve bucks at Walmart. It’s that when I ordered a used copy of J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey from Amazon for $2 I felt guilty because I didn’t know how I was going to pay my car payment that month.

I write books, fun romance books with vampires and zombies and trolls and witches. I’m not curing cancer. I’m entertaining people. And when people are struggling to make ends meat, I can’t in good conscience charge more than I already am.

And I am so grateful to you all, and to everything that’s happened this year. Thank you!!!!

Alright. So the boxsets aren’t ready yet. But I do have some paperbacks laying around the house, so I’m selling signed paperbacks through PayPal. I have another shipment of books coming (hopefully this week), so I’ll be able to add more, and then the boxsets should go up later this week.

But anyway – here’s some books. There’s a limited supply on all of them, but I’ll be getting more up soon. They’re all $9.99, and I priced that shipping at $4.95 because that’s how much it costs me to mail stuff in a flat rate priority mail envelope. Which is how I roll.

Okay. Here’s what I’ve got so far:

I have a confession to make: I’m a workaholic. I never thought of myself that way. In fact, I always assumed I was lazy. Most people could probably attest to this.

But when it comes to things I love, I am downright obsessive. I’m addicted. I have no idea how moderation works. I understand the concept, and that apparently everything is better that way, but I’m an all or nothing kind of gal.

And I love love my work. I love writing. People have asked me, “Are you afraid that you’ll run out of ideas for books?” The answer is, “Heck no. I’m afraid I won’t have time to work on all the ideas I already have.”

Writing to me has always felt very… immediate. If I have something, I have to get it all out right now, before I lose it. And if I don’t get it out right now, sometime I do lose it. And that’s sad. For me, anyway.

But the moral of this story is that I have more things coming up than I know how to deal with. I have two books coming out this month (God willing), the final book in the Trylle Trilogy in January, plus I have stuff for two anthologies, and in January, I’m going to start writing a book with another author.

I’m theoretically taking time off from writing projects full time in January and February, and I plan to edit and get Virtue and Clandestine ready and maybe outline a few other ideas, get some other balls rolling.

I’ve been wanting to work on this sirens book for almost a year now, but there’s always something else to work on. And I’m trying to clear my calendar so I can just work on it. So I think once I come back from vacation in January, I’m just going to dive into it.

Plus, I was thinking of working on Life Without Lila, which is something I started about two years ago, but really didn’t see a market for it. (i.e. an agent would never able to sell it). So I let the idea die and worked on other things.

But now, I’d like to pick it up again. It’s not YA and it’s not paranormal or romance. So we’ll see how it goes, or if I even pick it up again. Maybe it doesn’t want to be picked up.

And I have this other novella that I wrote like nine years ago that I really wanted to work on. I reworked a few years back, and I actually sorta like it. Again, that’s more literary fiction, and it’s a novella. So I don’t know if anybody really wants to read that either.

But I digress. Actually, I don’t know if I’m digressing or not. I’m just thinking of all the things I want to get done, and how there isn’t enough time to get them all done.

And I decided to ramble about it in a blog.

Also, I know I start a lot of my sentences with conjunctions. I do this in real life a lot to, especially to unrelated things. We’ll be eating chicken and talking about the weather, and I’ll say, “But I don’t understand why Cosby wore those sweaters.” It’s my idiosyncrasy, and now you know.