Switch on your Kindle or iPad and a vast, unregulated bookstore is at your fingertips—the Wild West of the publishing industry. Traditional publishing houses dominate the realm of printed books, but online venues allow savvy, independent authors to work outside the system and self-publish e-books. Amanda Hocking is perhaps the most successful of these authors. After several publishers rejected her paranormal romance novels, she decided to sell them herself. Melodrama and hunky vampires are a winning combination—19 novels later, she’s made nearly two million dollars.

Last week, though, this badass, anti-establishment figure made a surprising decision. She signed a deal with St. Martin’s Press, thus joining the system. Her controversial move raises questions about the viability of self-publishing and the role of publishing houses in this radically altered literary landscape. Outraged readers have accused Hocking of selling out. She defended her decision on her blog, writing, “It is crazy that we live in a time that I have to justify taking a seven-figure publishing deal with St. Martin’s. 10 years ago, nobody would question this. Now everybody is.” While this is true, her point is irrelevant. Stretch your mind back to the technological wasteland that existed a decade ago. Amazon had yet to introduce the Kindle, and the iPad wasn’t even a gleam in Steve Jobs’s eye. These gadgets have altered self-publishing so dramatically that a comparison to the world of 10 years ago is essentially meaningless.

The system used to be much more clear-cut. You toiled over a book for a few years, then brought it to a literary agent. If the work had sufficient promise, he would secure a contract with a publishing house for you, and that publishing house would then manage editing and marketing. Your job was to fill plot holes and rewrite inelegant sentences, maybe do some book readings in local stores, and wait for your 10 percent of the royalties. Self-publishing was a losing game. After paying the overhead costs of printing your book, you faced the considerable challenge of marketing it and finding a readership. It’s still not an easy road to success, but the increased popularity of e-readers—and thus e-books—has made self-publishing a practicable proposition. Programs such as Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing allow writers to sell their books in the Amazon Kindle Store, which is accessible to a wide variety of devices. The program is free and offers authors 70 percent of royalties. Suddenly, self-publishing looks a lot less pathetic.

There are limitations to self-publishing, though, a fact that Hocking recognizes. “People have bad things to say about publishers,” she told The New York Times, “but I think they still have services, and I want to see what they are. And if they end up not being any good, I don’t have to keep using them.” That kind of take-it-or-leave-it attitude about the titans of publishing is jarring, but appropriate in these circumstances. As a self-made success, Hocking is in a unique position to reimagine the power dynamic between author and publishing house. She will not be tied exclusively to St. Martin’s, nor will she depend on it for her livelihood. Rather, she has stated emphatically and repeatedly that she will continue to self-publish, and that she may actually lose money on the books she allows St. Martin’s to publish. “But,” she reassures readers on her blog, “I’m making enough money on my other books—and I will continue to make enough on my self-published books—that I can afford to take this risk.”

But why take such a risk? Hocking’s alliance with St. Martin’s Press is like a marriage between a nouveau riche American industrialist and the daughter of a British lord. Crude earning power meets tradition and refinement—ultimately, polish results. Hocking has admitted that her novels will benefit from the more intensive editing that they’ll receive—her freelance editors just aren’t cutting it. And, with the marketing team of a prestigious publishing house pushing her books, Hocking has the potential to become a household name, a status that she equates with career stability. “I want to be the impulse buy that people make when they’re waiting in an airport because they know my name,” she wrote on her blog.

At this point, you’re probably wondering what Ms. Hocking’s books are actually like. In possession of a Kindle and time to kill, I launched an investigation. 99 cents bought me a 332-page tome entitled My Blood Approves. While I respect the author as a businesswoman, her jejune prose made me wince. (Painful moment: the 17-year-old heroine asks her cryptic suitor, “What’s your angle?” His response: “Isosceles.”) It was like the diary of a teenage girl without exceptional wit or perception, plus some stuff about blood. Literary merit has never been a requirement for an author to become a bestseller, so perhaps Hocking’s move into print will win her the status that she craves. At the very least, let’s hope for a better editor.