Amanda Hocking has made a fortune with e-books - at 27, she’s a millionaire. A trained nurse, Hocking comes from the town of Austin in the US state of Minnesota. She’s been writing since she was sixteen. Her recipe for success is finding topics that appeal to niche audiences, rather than what interests her. Then she puts them on paper. Her works are predominantly romance novels with vampire or zombie twists. When she couldn’t interest publishers in her works, she simply put them out on the internet in March 2010 - including on Amazon’s e-book platform. Her works can be downloaded from there directly on to an e-reader. At the moment, some 100 thousand readers do that each month. E-books cost less than five euros. And her success has not gone unnoticed at conventional publishing houses. Since last year, Amanda Hocking has had a book contract with St. Martin’s Press (Macmillan), in New York, for four of her works.