FAMOUS SELF PUBLISHED BOOKS AND AUTHORS
Thursday, November 8, 2012 @ 9:06 PM
This list of famous self published authors and books will be useful for those who think self-publishing is vanity publishing. It is not; it is an investment in your talent. Those who have heard that offensive remark need to have enough ammunition to flame such idiots who haven't the ability or courage to write for money. The list is also a reminder that you do not have to be famous or published, to make the big time. It is a lesson also that reminds us that conventional publishers aren’t the brightest tools in the box when it comes to spotting a winner. Look at the fortunes they miss out on.
- · Remembrance of things Past, by Marcel Proust
- · Ulysses, by James Joyce
- · The Adventures of Peter Rabbit, by Beatrix Potter
- · The Wealthy Barber, by David Chilton
- · The Bridges of Madison County
- · What Color is Your Parachute
- · In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters
- · The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield
- · The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. (and his student E. B. White)
- · The Joy of Cooking
- · When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple
- · Life’s Little Instruction Book
- · Robert’s Rules of Order
OTHER FAMOUS AUTHORS WHO SELF-PUBLISHED
Deepak Chopra, Gertrude Stein, Zane Grey, Upton Sinclair, Carl Sandburg, Ezra Pound, Mark Twain, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Stephen Crane, Bernard Shaw, Anais Nin, Thomas Paine, Virginia Wolff, e.e. Cummings, Edgar Allen Poe, Rudyard Kipling, Henry David Thoreau, Benjamin Franklin, Walt Whitman, Alexandre Dumas, William E.B. DuBois, Beatrix Potter
REJECTED BY PUBLISHERS
- Kathryn Sockett - The Help - 60 times
- Pearl S. Buck - The Good Earth - 14 times
- Norman Mailer - The Naked and the Dead - 12 times
- Patrick Dennis- Auntie Mame - 15 times
- George Orwell - Animal Farm
- Richard Bach - Jonathan Livingston Seagull - 20 times
- Joseph Heller - Catch-22 - 22 times (!)
- Mary Higgins Clark - first short story - 40 times
- Alex Haley - before Roots - 200 rejections
- Robert Persig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - 121 times
- John Grisham - A Time to Kill - 15 publishers and 30 agents (he ended up publishing it himself)
- Chicken Soup for the Soul - 33 times
- Dr. Seuss - 24 times
- Louis L'Amour - 200 rejections
- Jack London - 600 before his first story
- John Creasy - 774 rejections before selling his first story. He went on to write 564 books, using fourteen names.
- Jerzy Kosinski - 13 agents and 14 publishers rejected his best-selling novel when he submitted it under a different name, including Random House, which had originally published it.
THE LAST WORD: During his entire lifetime, Herman Melville's timeless classic, Moby Dick, sold only 3,715 copies.