While the current “Wild West” world of publishing means authors have alternate ways of finding success, many still pursue the ultimate dream of publication with one of the highly-respected traditional publishers.

Author Theresa Ragan certainly did. The six-time Golden Heart finalist pursued that dream for almost 20 years.

As she tells Joyce Lamb in her USA Today “Happily Ever After” column, “I worked with two agents and a few editors. I joined critique groups and brainstorming groups. I attended writer conferences all over the U.S. I judged contests.”

Ragan says she wrote every day and in many genres, hoping to attract the attention of an editor. But she never received that coveted offer from one of the big traditional publishers.

So, faced with having to find a real job when her youngest daughter headed off to college, Ragan decided to self-publish.

“With nothing to lose, I self-published Return of the Rose and A Knight in Central Park. Instead of selling 10 books, I sold thousands! After nearly two decades of working hard to get published, I felt like an overnight success,” she tells Lamb in the HEA interview.

According to Ragan, she’s sold more than 160,000 books in just 10 months.  

She has published six ebooks. Five of them are available in print, using templates she used through CreateSpace. 

Click here to read Theresa Ragan’s full interview with Joyce Lamb in USA Today‘s Happily Ever After column.

Author Brenda Hiatt is showing us the money again.

On her blog, Hiatt lays out her initial findings as to how much “indie” or self-published authors are earning.

So, far, she says she’s collected data from 82 books, 33 of them are backlist titles. The rest are original self-published works.

The titles have been available as ebooks an average of seven months.The average price of the titles is about $3. About one-third have been discounted or offered for free for anywhere from a few days to months.

The earnings per title ranged from a few dollars to a current maximum of nearly $140,000.

For backlist titles, the average total amount earned over a book’s “e-lifetime” (as Hiatt refers to it) is $7,915. The median earned is $4,134.

The “average” usually refers to adding up all the numbers and dividing that sum by the number of numbers. The “median” is the middle number or the average of the two middle numbers.

When it comes to original titles, which have been available an average of 6 months, the total earnings to date averaged $12,548. The median was $5,150.

Hiatt reports the single highest-earning title in her survey was an indie original by a previously unpublished writer.

For the complete results of Hiatt’s survey, click here to visit her blog.

Simon and Schuster has closed a distribution deal with author John Locke, the first self-epublished author to sell a million copies of his books through Amazon’s Kindle Store.

It’s the latest sign that the publishing world is adapting to the rapidly-changing landscape brought about by ebooks. 

Under the deal, the publisher will handle sales and distribution for the print editions of the author’s titles.The arrangement gets print editions of Locke’s books out to traditional book sellers, making them more widely available. 

Simon and Schuster will distribute eight of Locke’s Donovan Creed novels. The titles are expected to be on sale by February 2012. The publisher says more books will follow under the deal.

Locke retains the rights to edit and publish his titles.

The publisher says the arrangement is a standard distribution agreement, similar to the deals distributors regularly strike with small publishers.

The deal was negotiated by literary agent Jane Dystel.