A.L. Knorr had never written a novel before she left her job as a marketing director in Canmore, Alberta, and moved to Italy for love. When that relationship ended, she threw herself into writing her first book.

Born of Water, about a teenager whose mother is a mermaid, was published on Amazon’s all-you-can-read ebook service Kindle Unlimited in December 2016, kicking off a prolific two-year period during which Knorr produced another 16 contemporary fantasy YA novels and novellas. The proceeds have financed a wanderlust lifestyle – Canadian Rockies in the summer and Italy in the winter.

Knorr had aspired to find a traditional publisher but describes the multi-year path to publication as “impossible.” In comparison, digital platforms such as Kindle Direct Publishing, Apple Books, Google Play, and Kobo Writing Life generally publish within days and pay about 70 per cent royalties, compared to the industry standard of five to 10 per cent. “Amazon has almost singlehandedly eliminated distributors, wholesalers, retailers, the marketing team, publicists, the publishers, everybody between the author and the reader,” Knorr says.

At Rakuten Kobo, 25 per cent of titles sold in English-language territories are by self-published authors, a market share that has been increasing steadily each year. “It’s like having another Penguin Random House sitting in the market made up entirely of independent authors,” says Kobo CEO Michael Tamblyn.

Knorr chooses to publish on Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited – a subscription-based service that divvies up profits based on the number of pages subscribers read – because it has the largest YA following. On other platforms, readers seek more adult genre fiction such as mystery, thriller, fantasy, sci-fi, and romance. At the Toronto Public Library, about a quarter of requests for new ebooks are for self-published titles. Of those requests, 90 per cent are for romances.

One of TPL’s most in-demand independent Canadian authors is St. Catharines, Ontario, writer Eve Silver, author of several fantasy, sci-fi, paranormal, and Gothic romances. She published 18 books traditionally, but when the rights to her dystopian sci-fi romance novel Driven – about a truck driver fleeing her past by flooring it across a frozen tundra – reverted back to her from the defunct U.S. paperback publisher Dorchester Publishing in 2012, she decided to experiment with self-publishing the title. What she found was a new audience at a time when market conditions were changing dramatically. “Advances are going down,” she says. “A lot of authors are not receiving significant publisher support in terms of marketing and promotion.”

Other authors are enticed by the reach of a digital platform. When actors and childhood best friends Julie Sype and Mark Uhre pitched their children’s book, Once Upon a Story You’ve Always Been Told, an LGBTQ–themed fairy tale about a princess who doesn’t want to be rescued by a charming prince, they were gently guided toward small, specialty presses.

“We would rather share this message of self-acceptance and inclusivity and freedom on the broadest platform possible,” Sype says. “And that was when a couple of people started mentioning Apple Books.”

They uploaded the title to Apple Books’s Free Kids’ Books category on June 12, 2018. By the end of August, it had hit number one on Apple charts in 36 countries. “It was an empowering revelation,” Sype says. “We had been told by publishers, ‘the main problem we have with this book is it won’t get attention globally.’”

While publishers didn’t predict Once Upon a Story’s mass appeal, other houses are hawkishly watching the self-published market. Hachette Book Group in New York City has signed popular authors such as Jessica Sorensen, J.A. Redmerski, and Jodi Ellen Malpas off the strength of their digitally self-published work. Toronto-based social-reading platform Wattpad led HBG to Jo Watson, whose romantic comedy novels have over 5.8 million online readers.

Beth deGuzman, vice-president of digital and paperback publishing for HBG’s Grand Central Publishing imprint, says they also look at fan-fiction sites and the app Radish, which publishes serialized fiction, to get a sense of trending microgenres.

And yet it’s still rare for an author to score a hit on digital platforms that leans on contemplative prose or investigative journalism. “I think the most popular categories [in self-publishing] will always be the genre categories,” deGuzman says. “Literary fiction relies more on review coverage in traditional outlets to get the word of mouth.”

In fact, even as Silver prepares to self-publish a new supernatural Gothic series for 2019, her agent is shopping another YA manuscript to traditional publishers, which she believes are better equipped to reach younger readers. She admits that withholding a new story from her legions of online fans is a gamble. “You can never say never because you never know what is going to grab the readership by the throat,” Silver says. “And really, that is no different from traditionally published books.”