More and more self-published romances in Amazon Bestseller Lists

After a great Saturday meeting with my RWA-sisters in Berkeley (RWA stands for Romance Writers of America), where lots of them asked me again how I manage to sell my books so well on Amazon Kindle, I kind of got curious to how many other romance authors are doing well without the backing of a publisher behind them.

So, I looked through the Amazon Bestseller lists today to see which self-published authors are in there (for this purpose I'm only looking in the "paid" bestsellers, excluding all those freebies).

28 novels within the Top 100 Kindle Romances were written by Indie Authors and self-published, with one indie author (we all know her name: Amanda Hocking) having 9 titles in the top 100 romances. She's followed by Heather Killogh-Walden with four titles and H.P. Mallory with three titles.

How is this even possible?

1. I've read several of those romances, and the ones I've read are damn good books (Monique Martin & HP Mallory in particular).
2. Price: most of those 28 titles are priced extremely low: $0.99 - $2.99. Only one book out of the 28 was priced as high as $3.99 which by any stretch is still much lower than what the NY publishers price their e-books at.
3. Most book covers look intriguing and professional - in fact so much so that unless I recognized the author's name I had to look at the detail page to find if the author had a "proper" publisher or was self-published.

Will we see more indies break into the bestseller lists? I sure hope so. For one, I'd love to be in there too. Yes, you heard right, even though I sold over 27,000 books across all my titles in January alone, I haven't quite made it into the top 100 romances yet. I am, however, ranking in the paranormal romance sub-genre with five of my books.

And my first book in the Scanguards Vampires series, Samson's Lovely Mortal, is inching closer to the top 100 romances. At present, it hovers around the top 600 Kindle books. To make the top 100 romances on Amazon, I'd have to get around the 400 overall on Kindle. But I know that's a tough nut to crack: my book is priced at $4.99 - still well below what traditionally published vampire romances cost, but above what people seem to be willing to pay for an indie author at present.