Thanks where it's due

I remember growing up, at the end of the night when there wasn't anything better to do, we’d ask each other who our heroes were. Eddie Vedder, Gandhi, heck I was an 80’s child. But a year ago I met a new one.

I read about Amanda Hocking on a website somewhere, but no large American newspaper had done a story on her. It was like she didn’t exist, as far as the U.S. media was concerned. Papers in Germany and the U.K. were writing all sorts of things about her, but as for us… barely a peep. Despite the fact that she’d made over a million, at the age of 26, all on her own, publishing books online. Kinda sounded like a story.

I was warned to be skeptical: our book reviewer, who’d been in the industry for decades, had told her editors -- who then told me -- to be wary of the numbers. She’d heard all kinds of claims from self-published authors, and she was pretty much jaded for life. I didn’t blame her, in a way.

Anyway, I asked the editor of my paper if I could drive down to Austin to do a story on this girl. And she was a girl, to me. She was young – 26. Living in a house her parents owned, half-finished, with bare wood and holes in the staircase so you could see the ground. You could see the struggles, just looking around.

She was open, honest, and talking to her, a strange thing happened: I didn’t get jealous. She so deserved it. Our competing paper, also a large metropolitan daily, hadn't treated her so well. Which didn’t surprise me. But she didn’t seem bitter.

She became a hero to me. If this girl, working as an assistant to the disabled making $15,000 a year while every friend of hers was getting married and moving on to real jobs and real careers, could push out five books a year on faith and Red Bull and Spaghettios, what the hell was I doing?

I never did read any of her books, but she’ll probably remain a hero of mine forever.

Anyway, here's the first big story published about Amanda Hocking in an American paper.