Michael Winkler’s novel Grimmish has become the first self-published book to be shortlisted for Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award. The phrase “self-published novel” has a certain tang of delusion to it, but a look at the best (or at least most successful) self-published efforts shows this isn’t (always) the case.
The Tale of Peter Rabbit
Beatrix Potter’s winsome illustrated tale of a mischievous rabbit and his family was initially turned down by publishers in 1901, partly due to Potter’s initial opposition to colouring her figures. A revised version, featuring apparently “dreadful didactic verse” from the wonderfully named Hardwicke Rawnsley (he would find fame for, among other things, co-founding the UK’s national trust) fared little better. She privately published a run of 250 copies, which sold out — one copy finding its way into the home of Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame.
Eventually she reneged on her conviction the book should be black and white, and it was published commercially. It sold tens of thousands of copies in its first run and was a pioneer in the tying of merchandising to a character. Potter was resistant to the idea of a Disney adaptation: “They propose to use cartoons; it seems that a succession of figures can be joggled together to give an impression of motion. I don’t think the pictures would be satisfactory … I am not troubling myself about it!” We’re sure she would have been much happier with the 2018 adaptation featuring a CGI Peter voiced by James Corden.
50 Shades of Grey
We’re yet to hear of an origin story less promising than “self-published ebook based on Twilight fan fiction that was removed from the website for being too horny” but here we are. Originally published as Master of the Universe under the pen name Snowqueen’s Icedragon, Erika Leonard (E.L. James) re-wrote “Edward” and “Bella” as “Christian Grey” and “Anastasia Steele” and published it through the Writer’s Coffee Shop, a tiny Australian e-publisher and social media community.
The book’s prose inspired dozens of articles dedicated to its worst passages (“Desire pools dark and deadly in my groin”) and its morality seemed to confuse BDSM practices with straight-up abuse (“He’s said such loving things today … But how long will he want to do this without wanting to beat the crap out of me”). Neither of these stopped it taking off, spreading via word of mouth and selling more than 100 million copies. Vintage Books eventually shelled out seven figures for a trilogy, which was adapted into a film series with the same ratio of critical repulsion and huge financial success.
Swann’s Way
If you have an unread copy of Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust sitting accusingly on your bookshelf, take heart — you’re not being any less cultured than most French publishers in the early 20th century. Despite being home to the madeleine scene, one of the famous and evocative passages in literature, Proust was unable to get Swann’s Way, the first volume of the seven published, and had to arrange to pay for the cost of his own publication.
Emily Dickinson
While Dickinson would posthumously come to be thought of as one of the most influential and important American poets of all time, Dickinson only had 10 of her 1800 or so poems published in her lifetime, all anonymously and quite possibly without her knowledge. This has raised the question as to whether she actually had any desire to see her work in print, but as The New Yorker notes, she did engage in a “form of self-publishing“:
… from around 1858 until roughly 1864, she gathered her poems into forty homemade books, known as ‘fascicles,’ by folding single sheets of blank paper in half to form four consecutive pages, which she then wrote on and, later, bound, one folded sheet on another, with red-and-white thread strung through crudely punched holes.
Still with influential poets, e e cummings 1935 collection No Thanks was published only with the financial support of his mother, and dedicated to the publishers who refused it.
