Meet Amanda Hocking. A 26-year-old assisted living worker from Minnesota, Amanda wanted to be a writer. Correction: a published writer. And so, fed up with hopelessly blind submissions, too-choosy editors, and impersonal rejections, Amanda self-published her three paranormal-romance-thriller books—delicious mash-ups of vampires, zombies, and utopian fantasy—as e-books online. By March 2011, she racked up two million dollars in sales. She sold 45,000 books in the month of January alone,  all thanks to this explosive self-publishing craze. Small-town Amanda Hocking is now a millionaire.