ONLINE MONEY-MAKER #23: Amanda Hocking has made $1.5 million from writing Kindle ebooks and Amazon Create Space print titles

Amanda Hocking has been buzzing up the internet lately, having become the poster-child for Kindle ebook sale success, without needing those pesky middle-man publishers and lit agents that like to send you negative bong letters to your thousands upon thousands of hopeful query letters.

I can relate to the 26-year-old’s plight of receiving “hundreds” but not the “maybe thousands” of rejection letters from the old establishment that used to hold guard over whose words were deemed worthy enough to be read by other folk.

Back in the day, before the surge of this blessed online world, we writers diligently sent our ideas out snail mail to lists of big wigs we’d find in the latest edition of Writer’s Market and pray.

In fact, that’s one of the only reasons I ever turned to blogging back in 2005, when many still hadn’t heard of the venture: just to give editors who accepted email queries an easy link to my writing.

How Amazon’s Kindle ebooks changed the game, and is bringing Hocking millions…

Enter ebook readers, and the Amazon Kindle, which Oprah introduced to the masses of book lovers back in October 2008.

She took the device out of the hands of techie geeks and put it in the average, non-technical, everyday reader’s hands — and left the hordes of them needing stuff to read.

I personally just purchased my own Kindle finally mere weeks ago, and only as an investment to not only read other writers’ Kindle books, but also my own, ensuring they are formatted in a correct and pleasing manner for my readers — human, not electronic readers, that is.

How writers like Hocking make money writing Kindle books

After all that rejection and plenty of 12-hour days banging out her novels more single-mindedly than that “telepathic typewriter” that I used to secretly covet in Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers, Amanda turned to Amazon.com’s Create Space to publish her own print novels, sans agent.

But according to the Pioneer Press, which gives further breakdown of her income and book sales, Hocking is making a lot more sales via the Kindle version of her books, published via the newly-renamed Kindle Direct Publishing.

This all makes sense and lines up with what those of us have witnessed in recent months:

According to online retail giant Amazon.com, Kindle ebook sales have surpassed those of traditional hard-cover and mass-market print book sales.

Predictions of $966 million in e-book sales in 2011; about $3 billion in 2015

With the trend of ebook sales continuing to skyrocket throughout 2011 and beyond, it’s the perfect time to get in on the cusp of this changeover.

I was delighted to write and complete a Kindle ebook and publish it in February 2011, working like a crazed woman because I’d given myself a deadline of 1/30/2011 — the “date submitted” date that my Kindle Direct Publishing account says I turned in the tome I’d written under a pseudonym so I could write with complete honesty.

“Finish something!” were the Lord’s words to me, or me to myself — so adamant was I in giving myself a command to complete a new skill, and not get lost in perfectionism or boredom with a task.

And writing the Kindle book was arduous but rewarding. I wrote it in Microsoft Word, then saved it as an HTML webpage unfiltered, but spent hours upon bleary-eyed hours getting the thing to look right on the Kindle.

It’s very similar to the basic HTML code that I’m so familiar and in love with that I’m writing this article now with inside Notepad, before I drop it into my WordPress.org-backed site, the content management system that Google loves more than its own Blogger.

$2.45 in Kindle ebook sales so far, but the sky is the limit

Comparing my Kindle ebook sales to those of Amanda Hocking’s, I am still inspired.

With no paid advertisements and only a Worpress.org Google-lovin’ blog that contains excerpts, my Kindle ebook has made 7 sales thus far.

This is not counting the one or two I purchased myself, in hopes of jacking up my Amazon sales rank to #1 the way Thomas Hertog explains he did in The Day the Kindle Died, by buying 173 copies of his own Kindle book and writing “numerous five-star customer reviews.”

I abandoned that pursuit — it seems as though Amazon has changed their Kindle book-buying policy perhaps — but I didn’t give up on my Kindle book writing projects.

And seeing Amanda’s story hit the Alexa.com Hot URLS list once again spurs me forward to turn some of these Kindle book ideas hanging out on my Excel spreadsheet into more solid gold.

After all, not only are lots of folks rushing and impulsively buying the cheaply-priced Kindle editions (I sold my first Kindle book for $0.99 per copy, and I get to keep $0.35 of each one sold), but no doubt lots of folks will need instructions on how to get their own words (and their kids’ words, pics, etc.) onto Kindle ebooks themselves as their popularity continues to explode into the stratosphere.

With a well-priced, well-written, helpful and timely topic, one could probably make great Kindle ebook sales by just the search-engine juju alone — if enough folks find the search-engine optimized title on Amazon via Google.

Hocking’s success is proving that this ability is available to plenty of us willing to put in the time and get in on the trend now.

Imagine when we put the effort behind promoting our written work like she did, by sending book bloggers Create Space editions of our work — and thinking beyond that by perhaps giving Kindle ebooks as a gift to others by email.

Kindle book sales are a money-making avenue that is only starting to crack open the treasure chest of writing millionaires that public demand for our work will create.