FAMOUS SELF-PUBLISHED BOOKS: Remembrance of things Past, by Marcel Proust; Ulysses, by James Joyce; The Adventures of Peter Rabbit, by Beatrix Potter; A Time to Kill, by John Grisham; 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: 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.; Diary of Anne Frank; During his entire lifetime, Herman Melville’s timeless classic, Moby Dick, sold only 3,715 copies.

http://www.simonteakettle.com/famousauthors.htm (Thanks to Dan Poynter’s website for this info; see www.parapublishing.com)

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