Self-Publishers Hall of Fame

Did You Know?

If you are thinking of self-publishing your book, you are in good company. You could easily stock a superb college library or an incredible bookstore just from the books written by some of the authors who have chosen to self-publish at some point in their lives.

Distinguished authors who chose the self-publishing strategy include: Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Hardy, Carl Sandburg, Oscar Wilde, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Upton Sinclair, Ezra Pound, John Grisham, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Alexander Dumas, Herman Melville, Zane Grey, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, John James Audubon, George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, e.e. cummings, Rudyard Kipling, Leo Tolstoi, Louis L’Amour, Beatrix Potter, Rod McKuen, Richard Nixon, Stephen King, and Deepak Chopra. Some decided to self-publish to have greater artistic control. Others, like James Joyce with Ulysses and D. H. Lawrence with Lady Chatterley’s Lover, did so on the rebound from censorship problems.

Other self-publishing success stories include Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White’s The Elements of Style, Irma Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking, Richard Nelson Bolles’ What Color Is Your Parachute?, Capt. Richard Hornberger’s (pen name Richard Hooker) M*A*S*H, Tom Peters’ In Search of Excellence, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Howard Fast’s Spartacus, Bishop T.C. Jakes’ Woman Thou Art Loosed, Les Kelley’s Kelley Blue Book, Arthur Naiman’s The Macintosh Bible, Jo Petty’s Apples of Gold, Dan Poynter’s Self-Publishing Manual, and Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson’s The One-Minute Manager.

(Source: Self-Publisher’s Hall of Fame by John Kremer)