Famous Authors Who Have Self Published

If you listen to the conventional wisdom, you would believe that no real author self publishes; that all self published books are doomed to obscurity. Following is a list of authors who did it anyway.

For some of these people, when their books were turned away from the established publishing houses, they persevered. For others, the "experts" told them they had to modify their books, or drop their prices, or that it couldn't be marketed the way they wanted.

It's a good thing these Self published authors didn't listen to the conventional wisdom:

Scott Adams - Creator of Dilbert
Arthur Agatston - The South Beach Diet
Julie Clark - The Baby Einstein Company
John Audubon - The Birds of America
John Bartlett - Familiar Quotations
L. Frank Baum - Author of the Wizard of Oz
Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson - Co-authors of The One-Minute Manager
Marshall Brain - How Stuff Works
Amanda Brown - Legally Blonde
Edgar Rice Burroughs - Creator of Tarzan
E.E. Cummings - No Thanks
William E.B. DuBois - Founder of the NAACP
Alexandre Dumas - Author of The Three Musketeers
Arlene Eisenberg - What to Do When You're Expecting
T.S. Eliot - Nobel Prize Winning Poet
Howard Fast - Spartacus
Edward Fitzgerald - The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Benjamin Franklin - Poor Richard's Almanack, One of the Founders of the United States
Galileo Galilei - The Starry Messenger
Zane Grey - Author of over 60 Western Novels
Nathaniel Hawthorne - Author of The House of the Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter
Hugh Hefner - Self-published the first edition of Playboy
Ernest Hemmingway - Paid for his first novel to be printed
L. Ron Hubbard - Self-published Dianetics
James Joyce - Self-published Ulysses
Stephen King - Self published "The Plant" on his website in 2000
Robert Kiyosaki - Rich Dad, Poor Dad
Louis L'Amour - Smoke from This Alter
Herman Melville - Author of Moby Dick self-published several books of poetry
Richard Nixon - President of the United States, Self-published Real Peace
Thomas Paine - Self-published "Common Sense" to recruit soldiers for the American Revolution
Edgar Allen Poe - Author of "The Raven", "The Tell-Tale Heart", "The Fall of the House of Usher"
Beatrix Potter - The Tale of Peter Rabbit
Irma Rombauer - The Joy of Cooking
Henry David Thoreau - Self-published Walden
Mark Twain - Self-published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Noah Webster - Author of the First American Dictionary
Walt Whitman - Self-published "Leaves of Grass"
Virginia Woolf - Author of Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, and Orlando
Tim and Nina Zagat - Self-published the Zagat Survey

And there are countless others. Many of the people on this list self published to jump-start their careers, then ended up with lucrative deals with major publishers.

You can learn more about self publishing books at http://www.wwaow.com/.