Self-publishing didn't start with Amazon
There's a common assumption that self-publishing was invented around 2010, by Amazon, primarily for retired solicitors who've decided to write a thriller. The phrase "indie author" conjures up an image of someone hunched over a laptop in a Premier Inn, formatting an EPUB at two in the morning while their tea goes cold.
Which is fair enough — that is a lot of us, frankly. But the idea that authors taking matters into their own hands is some recent aberration is rubbish. Some of the most celebrated writers in the English language self-published. Some did it because they had to. Some did it because they wanted to. And some did it because they took one look at the publishing industry and decided they could do a better job themselves.
Here are a few of them. The next time someone tells you self-publishing is a fad, you have my permission to point at this list and walk away.
Walt Whitman, who set his own type
In 1855, Walt Whitman walked into a print shop in Brooklyn, paid for the production of Leaves of Grass out of his own pocket, and reportedly set some of the type himself. The first edition ran to about 795 copies. His name didn't even appear on the title page — just an engraving of him in a workman's shirt, looking like he'd wandered in off the docks.
The book was largely ignored at first. Some reviewers were appalled. One called it "a mass of stupid filth," which is the kind of review that any self-publishing author can take a strange comfort in receiving. But Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most important American man of letters at the time, sent Whitman a private letter calling it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed."
Whitman, never one to undersell himself, promptly published Emerson's letter without permission and printed the most flattering line on the spine of the second edition. Emerson was reportedly furious. Whitman went on revising and republishing Leaves of Grass for the rest of his life. It is now considered the foundational work of American poetry.
The lesson here, if you want one: self-promotion is older than you think, and so is mildly questionable marketing.
Beatrix Potter and the rabbit nobody wanted
Beatrix Potter wrote The Tale of Peter Rabbit as an illustrated letter to a sick child. When she expanded it into a book and submitted it to publishers, they all said no. Repeatedly. The reasons varied — too short, too odd, the illustrations weren't quite right — but the answer was the same.
So in December 1901, Potter paid to have 250 copies privately printed for friends and family. She designed it herself, set the trim size she wanted, and made it the small, square format that's still associated with her books today.
It sold out almost immediately. She printed another 200. Frederick Warne & Co, one of the publishers who had originally rejected her, watched all this with growing interest and finally agreed to publish a commercial edition in 1902, on the condition that she include colour illustrations. The book has since sold over 45 million copies and spawned an entire franchise of merchandise that, frankly, we are all still buying.
Beatrix Potter was, by any reasonable definition, an indie author who proved her concept in the marketplace before signing a deal. There is something deeply modern about that.
Mark Twain, who started his own publishing house
By the mid-1880s, Mark Twain was tired of being underpaid by his publishers. So he did what any sensible person would do, which is to say he started his own publishing company.
Charles L. Webster and Company, founded in 1884, was named after Twain's nephew-in-law, who he installed as the public face of the operation. The company's first major release was Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1885 and now considered one of the great American novels.
The second release was the personal memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, the former American president, who was dying of throat cancer and worried about leaving his family in poverty. Twain offered Grant a 70% royalty — an absurd figure by the standards of the day, and still a generous one by the standards of ours. Grant finished the manuscript days before he died. The book sold 300,000 two-volume sets and earned his widow over $400,000.
Twain's company eventually went bankrupt — partly because he kept investing in a typesetting machine that didn't work — but the principle stands. He understood, more than a century before Amazon launched KDP, that authors who run their own publishing tend to do rather better out of it.
Virginia Woolf, who literally set type in her basement
In 1917, Virginia and Leonard Woolf bought a small printing press, installed it in the dining room of their house in Richmond, and started teaching themselves how to use it. The Hogarth Press, as they called it, began as something between a hobby and a therapy — Virginia was recovering from a mental breakdown and the physical work of typesetting was meant to be calming.
It quickly became something rather more important. The Woolfs published Virginia's own novels, including Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse. They also published T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, work by Sigmund Freud, and the first English translations of Chekhov.
One of the most influential literary publishing operations of the twentieth century was, fundamentally, two people in their dining room. Virginia Woolf wasn't just self-published — she was self-published in a way that ran rings around the entire London literary establishment, and she did it while writing some of the most important novels in the language.
Edgar Allan Poe, who paid for his own first book
In 1827, an eighteen-year-old Edgar Allan Poe paid a Boston printer to produce a slim volume of poetry called Tamerlane and Other Poems. The author was credited simply as "A Bostonian." The print run was around 50 copies. It sold approximately none of them.
Original copies are now considered the holy grail of American literary collecting. One sold at auction in 2009 for $662,500. There are only twelve known to exist. If you ever stumble across one in a charity shop, the correct response is to buy it without saying a word, walk slowly to your car, and then drive directly to a Sotheby's representative.
Poe self-published two more poetry collections before any traditional publisher would touch him. He died broke, but the book that bombed in 1827 now sits in glass cases in the world's great libraries. Self-publishing has always been a long game.
Andy Weir, who put a novel on his blog for free
For a more modern example: in 2011, a software engineer called Andy Weir started serialising a hard science-fiction novel on his personal website, one chapter at a time. It was about an astronaut stranded on Mars, and he posted it for free because he didn't think anyone would buy it.
Readers eventually asked for a Kindle version, so Weir put the whole thing on Amazon for 99 pence, the lowest price KDP allowed. It sold 35,000 copies in three months. Crown Publishing then bought the rights for a six-figure advance. Twentieth Century Fox bought the film rights two days later. The Martian, starring Matt Damon, came out in 2015 and made over $630 million at the box office.
Weir wrote, posted and self-published it as a hobby. The traditional publishing world only got involved once it was already a hit. That is the indie author dream as concentrated essence, and it happened less than fifteen years ago.
So what does this lot have in common?
None of these people set out to be indie authors in the modern sense. Most of them did it because the alternative was getting nowhere. Whitman couldn't find a publisher who shared his vision. Potter was rejected. Twain was sick of being ripped off. Woolf wanted full creative control. Poe was eighteen and unknown. Weir was a software engineer who didn't think he'd find a publisher at all.
What they shared was the willingness to do the thing themselves — to put up the money, do the work, and put the book in front of readers without waiting for permission. They understood, each in their own way, that the gatekeepers don't always know best, and that the readers will tell you the truth.
If you're sitting on a manuscript right now, weighing up whether to query agents or just publish the bloody thing yourself, you're in better company than the publishing industry would like you to believe. Indie publishing isn't a trend. It's a tradition. And the people who built it set their own type by hand, in their own dining rooms, paid for their own first print runs, and kept going until the readers caught up.
You're allowed to do the same.