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Here are two cases of very big news for the two most successful “direct to Kindle” indie authors to date.

First, Amazon announced moments ago that John Locke has become the first indie author to sell a million Kindle books, with the following titles:

“As of yesterday, John Locke has sold 1,010,370 Kindle books using Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP),” said Amazon’s release.

Locke said he studied the ebook market, looked at pricing of ebooks, and decided to become the bestselling author of 99 Cent books bar none.

He did it.

His 10th book, a tell-all about how he marketed his way to success, breaks the pattern. How I Sold 1 Million eBooks In 5 Months costs $4.99.

Congratulations, John! See the entire Amazon release at the end of this post.

Meanwhile, the author who could become the next “Kindle Million Club” member, Amanda Hocking, is the subject of a pretty interesting full-length article in yesterday’s New York Times Sunday Magazine. It’s a good read whether you are a Hocking fan or simply someone interested in what’s going on in publishing and the Kindlesphere.

Hocking was outselling Locke in the Kindle store until around the time she signed a $2 million four-book contract with agency model publisher, St. Martin’s Press (MacMillan). She’s still selling 9,000 books a day, which is nothing to sneeze at.

Does Hocking’s contract mean she is no longer an indie author?

Not to me. For one thing, one important characteristic that Hocking and Locke share is that each of them writes very fast. Very, very fast. Like it takes them a month or two to complete a novel.

So even if Hocking has four books tied up with a traditional publisher, that need not keep her from bringing beaucoup other books direct to Kindle. And when she looks back on the decade as a millionaire 35-year-old in 2020 or so, I’ll be surprised if she doesn’t find that she made a lot more money with direct publishing than she did with a traditional publisher. But we’ll see.

Here’s Amazon’s release today:

John Locke Becomes the First Independently Published Author to Join the “Kindle Million Club”

Locke passes 1 million Kindle books sold using Kindle Direct Publishing

SEATTLE, Jun 20, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) –(NASDAQ: AMZN) – Amazon.com today announced that John Locke has become the eighth author to sell over 1 million Kindle books, becoming the newest member of the “Kindle Million Club,” and the first independently published author to receive this distinction. As of yesterday, John Locke has sold 1,010,370 Kindle books using Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). Kindle Direct Publishing is a fast and easy way for publishers and authors to start selling to Kindle customers worldwide via Kindle, Kindle 3G, Kindle with Special Offers, Kindle 3G with Special Offers, Kindle DX, iPad, iPod touch, iPhone, PC, Mac and Android-based devices. The Kindle Million Club recognizes authors whose books have sold over 1 million paid copies in the Kindle Store. Locke joins Stieg Larsson, James Patterson, Nora Roberts, Charlaine Harris, Lee Child, Suzanne Collins and Michael Connelly in the Kindle Million Club.

“It’s so exciting that self-publishing has allowed John Locke to achieve a milestone like this,” said Russ Grandinetti, Vice President of Kindle Content. “We’re happy to see Kindle Direct Publishing succeeding for both authors and customers and are proud to welcome him to the Kindle Million Club.”

“Kindle Direct Publishing has provided an opportunity for independent authors to compete on a level playing field with the giants of the book selling industry,” said John Locke. “Not only did KDP give me a chance, they helped at every turn. Quite simply, KDP is the greatest friend an author can have.”

John Locke, of Louisville, KY., is the internationally bestselling author of nine novels including “Vegas Moon,” “Wish List,” “A Girl Like You,” “Follow the Stone,” “Don’t Poke the Bear!” and the New York Times bestselling eBook, “Saving Rachel.” Locke’s latest book, “How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months,” is a how-to marketing guide for self-published authors.

Like all Kindle books, Locke’s books are “Buy Once, Read Everywhere”– customers can purchase these books and read them on the third-generation Kindles that start at $114 with the new high-contrast Pearl e-ink display, as well on iPads, iPod touches, iPhones, Macs, PCs, BlackBerrys, Windows Phones and Android-based devices. Amazon’s Whispersync technology syncs your place across devices, so you can pick up where you left off. With Kindle Worry-Free Archive, books you purchase from the Kindle Store are automatically backed up online in your Kindle library on Amazon, where they can be re-downloaded wirelessly for free, anytime.

By Steve Windwalker

Editor of Kindle Nation Daily

Call it the “Paper Curtain,” if you like.

But like the Berlin Wall, it’s coming down.

As a result of the Publishing Perestroika that has been unleashed by readers and writers connecting primarily around Kindle content in the short span of just 39 months, the walls that have kept self-published and ebook authors from being included in prestigious newspaper bestseller lists will come crashing down this week.

Tomorrow, USA TODAY will roll out its weekly list of the top 150 bestselling books in the U.S., just as it does every Thursday.

Amanda Hocking

But for the very first time, USA Today announced today, its list for the week ending February 6 will include bestselling self-published direct-to-Kindle authors like Amanda Hocking. Hocking’s books currently rank #3, #11, #12, #27, #37, #41, and #46 on the Kindle Store top 50 bestsellers, and “the three titles in her Trylle Trilogy (Switched, Torn and Ascend, the latest) will make their debuts in the top 50 of USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list,” wrote USA Today’s Carol Memmott in an article entitled “Authors catch fire with self-published ebooks.”

Whether it happens this week or within a few more weeks, it’s also a good bet that Hocking will soon be accompanied by bestselling Kindle indie authors like John Locke, Victorine Lieske, and others.

And other, equally dramatic developments will follow:

One way or another, the fact that USA Today has opened its “bestseller list” gates to the great unwashed population of ebook and self-published authors will force the New York Times to do the same, lest its bestseller list be rendered irrelevant.
Once the Times and other rags allow self-published books on their bestseller lists, they will have to start publishing reviews of self-published books.
The prediction made here just a few weeks ago, that an indie author would be inducted by early 2012 into the “Kindle Million Club” alongside James Patterson, Stieg Larsson, and Nora Roberts, will prove to have been ridiculously conservative. Regardless of when Amazon makes the announcement, Hocking will pass the million-copy mark in Kindle books sold by the first day of Spring this year, and she will be joined by another dozen indie authors before the arrival of Spring in 2012.

All of these changes probably became inevitable, even though we didn’t know it then, when Amazon launched the Kindle on November 19, 2007.

But the barons of the book industry and the big New York publishers should make no mistake about the fact that these events have been hastened dramatically by their own tragically misguided launch of the agency model price-fixing plan early in 2010. Their tone-deaf move to try to protect their print publishing business model by insisting upon increases of 30 to 50 percent in ebook prices opened the doors wide to indie authors to lure readers with lower prices for what, in many cases, are better books.

During the last week before the agency model launch, in March 2010, there was not a single fiction title by an indie author along the top 50 bestselling titles in the Kindle Store.

This week, indie fiction authors have 18 of the top 50 spots. Those are 18 of the top 50 bestselling ebook spots in the land, worth well over a million copies sold during the month of February, and the agency model publishers might just as well have said “Here, come and take these, we don’t need them.”

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