Famous Self-Publishers

Though it took technology to spread it to the masses, self-publishing has a long and distinguished history, as this anecdote from Alison Baverstock’s book The Naked Author: A Guide To Self Publishing, illustrates:

“In 1797, a manuscript was submitted to a London publisher by the proud father of an unknown author. First Impressions, a three-volume novel. was offered for private publication; the writer’s family would pay… to mitigate the publisher’s financial risk. The publishing house turned it down.

Revised and renamed, it was finally published fourteen years later to good reviews… [and is] today… a cornerstone of English literature.”

She is talking, of course, of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

Here are some more famous authors who chose to self-publish at some point in their writing  life — and not always at the beginning of their careers:

• Margaret Atwood
• William Blake
• Ken Blanchard
• Robert Bly
• Lord Byron
• Willa Cather
• Julia Cameron
• Pat Conroy
• Stephen Crane
•  e.e. cummings
• Charles Dickens
• Roddy Doyle
• W.E.B. DuBois
• Alexander Dumas
• T.S. Eliot
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti
• Benjamin Franklin
• Zane Grey
• Thomas Hardy
• E. Lynn Harris
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Ernest Hemingway
• Robinson Jeffers
• Spencer Johnson
• James Joyce
• Stephen King
• Rudyard Kipling
• Louis L’Amour
• D.H. Lawrence
• Rod McKuen
• Marlo Morgan
• William Morris
• John Muir
• Anais Nin
• Thomas Pain
• James Patterson
• Tom Peters
• Edgar Allen Poe
• Alexander Pope
• Beatrix Potter
• Ezra Pound
• Marcel Proust
• Irma Rombauer
• JK Rowling
• Carl Sandburg
• Robert Service
• George Bernard Shaw
• Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Upton Sinclair
• Gertrude Stein
• William Strunk
• Alfred Lord Tennyson
• Henry David Thoreau
• Leo Tolstoy
• Mark Twain
• Walt Whitman
• Virginia Woolf
• WB Yeats

Do you know any other indie authors of old that we could add to the list? Tell their story in the comments box below.