In an effort to attract customers, vanity publishers frequently provide lists of authors who published their own books (often before getting contracts from traditional publishers). Some people on the lists probably should not be there, and few if any of the celebs used vanity publishers

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The first list below comes from marketing maven's Jon Kremer's Self-Publishing Hall of Fame.  The Alliance can't guarantee that the list is accurate, but it is interesting and may inspire you.

Margaret Atwood, L. Frank Baum, William Blake, Ken Blanchard, Robert Bly, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lord Byron, Willa Cather, Pat Conroy, Stephen Crane, e.e. cummings, W.E.B. DuBois, Alexander Dumas, T.S. Eliot, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Benjamin Franklin, Zane Grey, Thomas Hardy, E. Lynn Harris, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, Robinson Jeffers, Spencer Johnson, Stephen King, Rudyard Kipling, Louis L'Amour, D.H. Lawrence, Rod McKuen, Marlo Morgan, John Muir, Anais Nin, Thomas Paine, Tom Peters, Edgar Allen Poe, Alexander Pope, Beatrix Potter, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, Irma Rombauer, Carl Sandburg, Robert Service, George Bernard Shaw, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Upton Sinclair, Gertrude Stein, William Strunk, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoi, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Virginia Woolf.

• Ernest Hemmingway - Paid for his first novel to be printed
• L. Ron Hubbard - Self-published Dianetics
• James Joyce - Self-published Ulysses
• Stephen King - Self published "The Plant" on his website in 2000
• Robert Kiyosaki - Rich Dad, Poor Dad
• Scott Adams - Creator of Dilbert
• Louis L'Amour - Smoke from This Alter
• Herman Melville - Author of Moby Dick self-published several books of poetry
• Richard Nixon - President of the United States, Self-published Real Peace
• Thomas Paine - Self-published "Common Sense" to recruit soldiers for the American Revolution
• Edgar Allen Poe - Author of "The Raven", "The Tell-Tale Heart", "The Fall of the House of Usher"
• Arthur Agatston - The South Beach Diet
• Julie Clark - The Baby Einstein Company
• John Audubon - The Birds of America
• John Bartlett - Familiar Quotations
• L. Frank Baum - Author of the Wizard of Oz
• Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson - Co-authors of The One-Minute Manager
• Marshall Brain - How Stuff Works
• Amanda Brown - Legally Blonde
• Edgar Rice Burroughs - Creator of Tarzan
• E.E. Cummings - No Thanks
• William E.B. DuBois - Founder of the NAACP
• Alexandre Dumas - Author of The Three Musketeers
• Arlene Eisenberg - What to Do When You're Expecting
• T.S. Eliot - Nobel Prize Winning Poet
• Howard Fast - Spartacus
• Edward Fitzgerald - The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
• Benjamin Franklin - Poor Richard's Almanac, One of the Founders of the United States
• Galileo Galilei - The Starry Messenger
• Zane Grey - Author of over 60 Western Novels
• Nathaniel Hawthorne - Author of The House of the Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter
• Hugh Hefner - Self-published the first edition of Playboy
• Beatrix Potter - The Tale of Peter Rabbit
• Irma Rombauer - The Joy of Cooking
• Henry David Thoreau - Self-published Walden
• Mark Twain - Self-published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Noah Webster - Author of the First American Dictionary
• Walt Whitman - Self-published "Leaves of Grass"
• Virginia Woolf - Author of Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, and Orlando
• Tim and Nina Zagat - Self-published the Zagat Survey
• Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen – Authors of "Chicken Soup for the Soul" and sold over 108,000,000 copies