Self-Publishing Ideas

I get the  Brisbane Times' The Booklist (and think it a great newsletter - even for an American living in our Midwest). This came in this morning and think it a great idea for those wishing to self-publish (albeit not so great for me here in Muncie, Indiana):

There’s a big history of self-published books and their authors going on to bigger things. Matthew Reilly is a classic Australian example, having self-published 1000 copies of Contest in 1996 and flogged it round Sydney bookshops trying to get them to stock it. His idea? A publisher might spot it. Lo and behold, in walked Cate Paterson, then a commissioning editor at Pan Macmillan, who bought it, loved it and snapped up his next novel, Ice Station.

Around the same time as Reilly was self-publishing Contest, Abraham Biderman was publishing his memoir, The World of My Past, detailing his experiences in the Lodz ghetto until 1944 and then at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dora, and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps. The memoir went on to share, with Henry Reynolds, the now-defunct National Book Council’s Banjo award for non-fiction.

The same week, Random House signed a deal with him to republish the book. As Reilly told The Age at the time, “I have surrendered my books to Random House. I am not a distributor any more. I was the packing boy and the delivery boy, but I’m 71 years old. Don’t tell anybody.”

sch 3/25/22