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.
Don’t forget Arthur Schopenhauer. His mother, who was a well published scholar, used to mock her son asking him how his book (published through the 18th century equivalent of a vanity press), The World as Will and Idea was doing. Today it’s considered one of the classics of philosophy!
I believe Vince Flynn began his Mitch Rapp series as a self published book
As I said when I shared the post, we are in very good company.