When last week Self-Published Authors named me their “Top Contributor” I just attributed it to the proliferation of books I recently had published and so treated it as just that knowing that most writers might have a single book published in a year or two (or sometimes in an entire lifetime) but having five published in five months and seven in less than two years perhaps warrants some kind of recognition as in this case.
I know of some famous writers and books that came through the self-published assembly line and while one should be inspired by that knowledge, I feel in no way less of a writer that this is my own publishing modus operandi.
So here are some celebrities who chose this way of being published: Canada’s best-selling writer and Booker Prize winner, Margaret Atwood; EL. James, author of Fifty Shades of Grey (which has sold over 100,000,000 copies); Wayne Dyer; Mark Twain and Stephen King among many others.
Mark Twain left his traditional publishers because of the hassle of getting published that way and went on to self-publish The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses Grant. We all know how beloved is Huckleberry Finn and how profoundly it is etched in the pages of Literature.
Andy Weir self-published the Martian, got a lucrative film deal and a movie starring Matt Damon, was made and which has so far grossed $630,000,000 worldwide.
When VS Naipaul ordered his publishers to not interfere with a single semi-colon of his he was echoing Twain’s indignation of the hassle one has to go through with traditional publishers who sit in their ivory towers as the definition of omniscience.
Having said all that, I am trying to appreciate the acknowledgement bestowed upon me by Self-Published Authors United knowing also that EL James, for instance, could not sit in a writing class of mine (if I had one) although her book sold over a hundred million copies.
But then again, life isn’t fair.
L. Siddhartha Orie (author)