Going It Alone Is Not A New Concept

It is easy to believe that writing has always been a process that involved agents and publishers. A golden chain of command in place to protect the sanctity of the written word.

Well guess again.

I was bored at work curious as to the real history behind self-publishing. Who really started this movement? I know it wasn't John Locke or Amanda Hocking. While these two are arguably the biggest success stories in the Indie world, they were not the pioneers of it.

Did you know that people have been self publishing their work since the 1800′s and I am more than confident to say that there are many writers before this date who also decided to forgo publishers and agents.

Many Authors who we now consider to be invaluable literary icons were forced to travel the Indie route, including all of the following:

Remembrance of things Past – Marcel Proust

Ulysses – James Joyce

The Adventures of Peter Rabbit – Beatrix Potter

A Time to Kill – John Grisham

The Wealthy Barber – David Chilton

The Bridges of Madison County- Robert James Waller

What Color is Your Parachute – Richard Nelson Bolles

In Search of Excellence – Tom Peters

The Celestine Prophecy – James Redfield

The Elements of Style – William Strunk, Jr. (and his student E. B. White)

The Joy of Cooking – Irma S Rombauer (and Marion Rombauer Becker)

Robert's Rules of Order - Brig. Gen. Henry Martyn Robert

(Thanks to http://www.simonteakettle.com/famousa... for this info)

With a list of such great names all being part of the Indie family, there is no reason for a writer not to stand on their own two feet and meet the literary world head on.  They are a living (in the literary sense) testament that you can succeed by going alone. Who are we to assume that every agent and publisher knows what it is they are reading, or gives our submissions the recognition and thought that they deserve? I mean these people are inundated with submissions and requests from all ranges of literary ability. Sure this means they develop a feel for a writer's abilities from a quick peruse through their work. Yet, this does not make them infallible. There are a great many writers out there who have suffered the heartbreak and humiliation of rejection, and I am talking repeated rejections like the geeky kid in any teen high-school drama.

J K Rowling – I am sure everybody is aware of the struggle she went through to get Harry Potter on the shelves. It is only thanks to the 8-year-old daughter of the Bloomsbury CEO that she got the chance she did.

Jack London - It is believed that Mr. London suffered the indignity of over 600 rejections before his first story was published.

Frank Herber – Dune was rejected over 20 times before someone finally saw the potential in this Science Fiction masterpiece.

event he master himself Mr. Stephen King received a plethora of rejections before Carrie was finally picked up.  According to research I have done, one publisher even offered the following advice to King.

"We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell."

If these great names and so many others like them can be rejected, then come one, surely we can take the odd put down on the chin. Read the rejection, file it away and plough onwards, and then maybe in a few years time our names will be the ones certain publishers and agents cannot hear without a shudder of regret.

I will end this post with two more entertaining examples of rejection.

The first being an interesting fact that Joseph Heller's novel Catch 22 was rejected …. (you guessed it) 22 times before finally being accepted. Now there is a symmetry that you don't normally see in life,

The second I think should qualify as the *facepalm* moment of lifetime. When a young Author by the name of John Le Carré submitted his manuscript for The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, one nameless publisher cast it aside with a comment to his competitors of  "You're welcome to le Carré – he hasn't got any future."