Self-published Authors! We are in Good Company!

It was just a few short years ago that  being self published was a dirty word.  People would call your work a ‘vanity book’ or a ‘one book wonder’.  You would have to warehouse 10’s of thousands of inventory for your book and then schlep it around as far as you could.  All of that is in the past!  We can hold our heads up high, write our work and get it in the hands of our readers for, sometimes, as little as a few hundred bucks.  If you don’t hire a graphic designer for the cover, then publishing is literally FREE.

Now here’s the “Good Company” I claimed………….

How Beatrix Potter self-published Peter Rabbit
The aspiring children’s writer was fed up of receiving rejection letters – so on this day in 1901 she self-published a certain book about a naughty rabbit

So you think self-publishing is a 21st-century phenomenon? Think again. On December 16, 1901, a 35-year-old writer and illustrator printed 250 copies of her first book, featuring a naughty rabbit. Beatrix Potter decided to take control of her own future after getting fed up of receiving rejection letters from publishers for a story she had made up to entertain a sick child.  The Tale of Peter Rabbit was printed with 41 black and white woodblock engravings and a colour frontispiece, and proved so successful that, within a year, it had been picked up by one of the six publishers who had originally turned it down. By Christmas of 1902, Frederick Warne had sold 20,000 copies of the book, with Potter’s own watercolor illustrations.  

It is amazing what trivia you pick up from other authors. I found this fascinating fact in Beth Hoffman’s ‘Looking for Me’. When you are not writing, READ!

Now the circle completes itself even more…..I wrote about Dame Barbara Cartland not long ago……she purchased and lived in Beatrix Potter’s cottage where Peter Rabbit was born and grew veggies in the same garden.  
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