Amanda Hocking Books

Amanda Hocking is a name every indie author knows, whether they realize it or not. Working days at a group home in Minnesota, she wrote seventeen novels in her spare time and collected rejections from traditional publishers for years. In April 2010 she started self-publishing her backlog as ebooks. By March 2011, she had sold over a million copies and earned roughly two million dollars, moving around nine thousand books a day at her peak. The publishing industry, which had passed on her repeatedly, promptly turned around and handed her a two million dollar deal with St. Martin's Press for the Watersong series. It remains one of the defining self-publishing success stories ever told. News outlets from the Christian Science Monitor to every publishing trade covered her as the face of the ebook gold rush, and for a while she was the most famous self-published author on the planet.

The books that fueled the phenomenon were the My Blood Approves vampire series and, above all, the Trylle trilogy: Switched, Torn, and Ascend. Trylle follows Wendy Everly, a prickly, out-of-place girl who discovers she is a changeling, swapped at birth, and actually a princess of the Trylle, a hidden society of trolls who are closer to beautiful, brooding fae than anything from under a bridge. St. Martin's re-released the trilogy in 2012 and it hit the New York Times bestseller list. Hocking later returned to that world with the Kanin Chronicles, and tried zombies with the Hollows series along the way. Frostfire and its sequels gave the Kanin books their own arc, proof the world had more stories in it than one changeling's rise.

What defines her writing is pure readability. Short chapters, fast hooks, heroines caught between duty and desire, love triangles with real pull. Her secret-royalty premise, the ordinary girl who turns out to be a hidden princess with powers, is one of the oldest engines in the genre, and Hocking ran it earlier and more successfully than almost anyone in the ebook era. The chosen one energy is strong, unapologetic, and exactly what her readers came for. She has described binge-writing novels in a matter of weeks fueled by energy drinks and horror movies, and that headlong momentum is baked into the books themselves; they read the way she wrote them, fast.

Heat, honestly: minimal. These are YA books, a 0 to 1 on our spice scale. Expect longing, kisses, and romantic agony, not open doors. Readers who came up through modern spicy romantasy may find the restraint quaint; readers who want a fast, sweet, angsty binge will be perfectly served. The love triangle between Wendy, loyal Finn, and charming Loki carried a generation of readers through the same arguments Team Edward and Team Jacob once did.

Why does she matter to a romantasy audience? Ancestry, plainly. The entire self-published romantasy economy, the direct-to-reader model, the binge-priced series, the author-as-brand playbook that powers today's BookTok stars, was proven viable in large part by Hocking in 2010 and 2011. And Trylle's hidden-fae-princess DNA is visible in half the changeling and secret-heir books published since. Reading her now is like visiting the genre's baby photos: simpler, softer, and recognizably the same face. Her story is also a useful corrective to survivorship bias: she succeeded through volume, pricing experiments, and relentless output, not luck, and she had seventeen finished manuscripts before the market ever noticed her.

Where to start: Switched, no question, and ride the Trylle trilogy through Torn and Ascend. If Wendy's world works for you, the Kanin Chronicles picks it back up with a new heroine. And if you are unsure whether vintage YA paranormal suits your current taste, take our reader quiz first, then come back for Wendy anyway.