Good romance writers can earn a living without anyone in New York publishing knowing their names, because they publish and promote their work themselves. A traditional publishing house might give an author 25 percent of the net price on an e-book (meaning that if an outlet marks down your title, you get 25 percent of the discounted price). The e-book distributor Smashwords, by contrast, forbids outlets from discounting and returns 60 to 75 percent of the cover price to the author. The Amazon, Kobo, and Sony e-book stores offer similarly good rates.

Romance titles are priced low, usually around four or five dollars, which makes it easier to sell a lot of them. A known author, rolling with Facebook and Goodreads promotion, can move more than a thousand units daily on Smashwords alone. A 60 percent cut of two thousand $5 e-books is $6,000. If your book sells well for a week, you’ve made $42,000. Publish two books a year, a not-unusual pace for an e-book author, and you’ve earned $84,000 before taxes. And that’s just from Smashwords — because contracts with most e-book distributors are nonexclusive, you can sell through other distributors, too, so you may have comparable revenue coming from Kobo, Amazon, and others. And this is assuming you’re not a top-tier author. The writers in the winner’s circle, which in romance is big, can easily pull six or seven figures.