I never refer to self-publishing because it will create many ill effects for an author. It should be “Independently Published”. Yet when I looked up Independently Published, Wikipedia offered this information, which I thought was not only helpful, but an impressive list of well known authors.
Self-published best-sellers
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Self-published works that find large audiences are extremely rare, and are usually the result of self-promotion. However, many works now considered classic were originally self-published, including the original writings of William Blake, Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, William Morris, and James Joyce.
| Title | Author | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| What Color is Your Parachute? | Bolles, Richard Nelson | |
| Chicken Soup for the Soul | Canfield, Jack | and Hansen, Mark Victor |
| Golden Handcuffs | Courtney, Polly | [11]
|
| The Christmas Box | Evans, Richard Paul | |
| Spartacus | Fast, Howard | During the McCarthy era when he was rejected by previous large scale publishers |
| Invisible Life | Harris, E. Lynn | |
| Eragon | Paolini, Christopher | [12] (The book was later published by Knopf) |
| In Search of Excellence | Peters, Tom | |
| Elfquest | Pini, Wendy and Richard | [13] |
| The Celestine Prophecy | Redfield, James | |
| Contest | Reilly, Matthew | |
| The Joy of Cooking | Rombauer, Irma S. | |
| No Time for Work | Ryan, George | [14] |
| A Choice, Not An Echo | Schlafly, Phyllis | [15] |
| Shadowmancer | Taylor, G. P. | Later published by Faber & Faber |
| The Visual Display of Quantitative Information | Tufte, Edward | |
| Poems in Prose | Wilde, Oscar |
Other well-known self-publishers include: Stephen Crane, E. E. Cummings, Deepak Chopra, Benjamin Franklin, Zane Grey, Pat Ingoldsby,Rudyard Kipling, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Paine, Edgar Allan Poe, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, George Bernard Shaw, Upton Sinclair,Gertrude Stein, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman and Mark Twain.