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What is "self-publishing"? Who are some famous writers who self-published? What is a small press? What is Rock Island Press and what does it have to offer me? History of Rock Island Press |
My favorite poet, E(dwin) E(stlin) Cummings, is a self-published poet. In 1935, he had already published five volumes of poetry, a play, a collection of art works, and two prose narratives, but when he began looking for a publisher for his sixth book of poetry, all he got was No Thanks. So he titled it No Thanks and his mother paid $300 to have it published. In the front of the book, Cummings listed, in the shape of a funeral urn, the publishers who had turned him down: Farrar & Rinehart; Simon & Schuster; Harcourt, Brace; Random House; Viking Press; Knopf; Harpers; Scribners; and more. Here are other famous self-published authors: A Time to Kill was self published by John Grisham. He sold his first work out of the trunk of his car. Self publishing Life's Little Instruction Book brought H. Jackson Brown to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List where it sold over 5 million copies. Twelve Golden Threads by Aliske Webb was rejected by 150 publishers. After self publishing and selling 25,000 copies, she signed a four-book contract with HarperCollins. After deciding to self publish The Beanie Baby Handbook, Lee and Sue Fox sold three million copies in two years and made #2 on the New York Time Bestseller list. L. Ron Hubbard chose to self publish Dianetics and has been in print more than 45 years. 20 million copies are in print and it has been translated into 22 languages. The book started a movement and later a church. In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters. He chose to self publish and sold over 25,000 copies the first year. Then Warner picked it up and sold 10 million more. The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. (and his student E. B. White) was originally self-published for his classes at Cornell University in 1918. The Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer was self-published in 1931. Today Scribners sells more than 100,000 copies each year. The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield. His manuscript made the rounds of the mainstream houses and then he decided to self publish. He sold over 100,000 copies out of the trunk of his Honda before Warner Books paid him $800,000. The number-one bestseller in 1996, it spent 165 weeks on The New York Times Bestseller list. Over 5.5 million copies have been sold. After publishing The One-Minute Manager, Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson sold over 20,000 copies locally before they sold out to William Morrow. It has now sold over 12 million copies since 1982 and is in 25 languages. Embraced by the Light published by Betty J. Eadie spent 76 weeks on the New York Times Hardcover Bestseller List and was sold to Bantam Books for $1.5 million. The 87-page book, The Christmas Box, took Rick Evans six weeks to write. After getting it published himself, it did so well he sold out to Simon & Schuster for $4.2 million. What Color is Your Parachute by clergymen Richard Nelson Bolles. 22 editions, 5 million copies and 288 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Other well-known self-publishers include: Edgar Rice Burroughs Deepak Chopra William E.B. DuBois Alexandre Dumas Benjamin Franklin James Joyce Rudyard Kipling D.H. Lawrence Edgar Allan Poe Carl Sandburg George Bernard Shaw Upton Sinclair Gertrude Stein Henry David Thoreau Mark Twain Virginia Woolf Walt Whitman (source: http://www.llumina.com/self_publishing.htm) and Margaret Atwood L. Frank Baum William Blake Ken Blanchard Robert Bly Elizabeth Barrett Browning Lord Byron Willa Cather Pat Conroy Stephen Crane T.S. Eliot Lawrence Ferlinghetti Zane Grey Thomas Hardy E. Lynn Harris Nathaniel Hawthorne Ernest Hemingway Robinson Jeffers Spencer Johnson Stephen King Louis L'Amour Rod McKuen Beatrix Potter Ezra Pound Marcel Proust Carl Sandburg George Bernard Shaw Percy Bysshe Shelley Upton Sinclair Gertrude Stein Alfred Lord Tennyson Leo Tolstoi (source: http://www.selfpublishinghalloffame.com/) Use this link to contact Rock Island Press. |