It was the worst of books it was the best of books. It was also a “published” book, thus it just may have been the best of books. Really. Be careful. If you think a traditional publisher is the key to credibility and the only road to reputable distribution of your content, think again. Indie applies to both content and music.
The 58 famous authors listed in the link at the bottom of this post self published at various points in their career. Furthermore, the chart below illustrates a mature, flat traditional book sales trend versus the exploding self-pushing growth. Could it now be self-publish or perish? Some are afraid to even think this.
(Chart above from: http://wordsofeverytype.com/tag/total-number-of-books-published-by-year)
Below are 24 famous self-published authors:
- Margaret Atwood
- William Blake
- Ken Blanchard
- Robert Bly
- Lord Byron
- Julia Cameron
- Stephen Crane
- e.e. cummings
- Charles Dickens
- Roddy Doyle
- Alexander Dumas
- T.S. Eliot
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
- Benjamin Franklin
- Zane Grey
- Thomas Hardy
- E. Lynn Harris
- Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Ernest Hemingway
- Stephen King
- Rudyard Kipling
- Louis L’Amour
- James Patterson
- Tom Peters*
* List from www.selfpublishingadvice.org
If you have published through a traditional publisher, fantastic. Congrats. Also, if you have published via self-publishing, congrats are also in order. In the end one thing matters: The Reader.
Go be your own Gutenberg. Publish that book–yourself or through traditional channels. The point is to write for your reader, not for your publicist or editor. It’s called customer versus book marketing. In no way am I advocating poorly written material devoid of depth and value. Write well and hire a professional editor to aggressively examine your self-published material. Also, make sure your book is filtered and read by a jury of your category peers before you get close to a final draft. The key to good content marketing is indeed, good content.
And, if self-publishing was not valid, would Google, social media, and the internet even exist? Would this post exist?
Your thoughts on this self published blog post and the full list below are welcome. Note that this list may surprise you:
http://selfpublishingadvice.org/blog/famous-self-publishers/#more-116
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