If you're considering subsidy publishing, you're in elite company. Literary luminaries who gained renown after publishing their work at their own expense comprise a veritable "Who's Who" — novelists, poets, playwrights, scholars and writers spanning many different fields, epochs and nations. For example: Thomas Gray, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alexander Pope, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Stephen Crane, Edward Arlington Robinson, Thomas Hardy, James M. Barrie, Walt Whitman, Willa Cather, Vachel Lindsay, François Mauriac, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Henry Thoreau, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Rice Burroughs, James Joyce, Mark Twain and Zane Grey.

Passionate, dedicated and determined (though not necessarily affluent), these entrepreneurial authors were forced to take matters into their own hands, digging into their pocketbooks to bring their work to the public.

For example, the comfortable English squire, Edward Fitzgerald, who paid to publish his masterpiece The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. He placed 100 copies in the window of a local bookstore. There it attracted the attention of the noted painter, poet and leader of the pre-Raphaelites, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was so impressed with The Rubaiyat he bought all of the dealer's copies to send to his friends. Thus started the groundswell of acclaim for this international best-seller which has sold in the millions and is still going strong!

Edgar Allan Poe was unknown in the United States in 1827 when he published, at his own expense, Tamerlane and Other Poems, "By A Bostonian." Very few copies were sold, and few copies now exist. Yet a first edition of Poe's book is now worth thousands of dollars!

At the age of 24 in 1828, Nathaniel Hawthorne — author of the soon-to-be-classic The Scarlet Letter — had to pay the sizeable sum of $100 to publish his first novel, Fanshawe, possibly the earliest novel of college life written in America.

Leo Tolstoy invested 4500 rubles ($12,700) to publish what critics have called one of the world's greatest novels, War and Peace — a huge sum and a huge gamble, even by an author who was already known!

Marcel Proust looked in vain for a publisher for his classic Remembrance of Things Past, before paying French publisher Bernard Grasset to bring out the first 1500 pages.

And did you know that Rod McKuen, the best-selling poet, paid to publish his first book? The writer's talent was then recognized by Random House who later sold more than 900,000 copies of Listen to the Warm...

Not only literary works have come to the attention of the public in this manner — but renowned works in many other fields, including Science & Health with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, and Robert's Rules of Order, by Henry Martyn Robert, repeatedly rejected by commercial publishers, which has sold over a million and a half copies in its various editions!

John Bartlett's Familiar Quotations would never have seen the light of day had its author not financed its first three editions in l855. Once it proved its popularity, however, the book was published by Little Brown & Co.

The Elements of Style, one of the most delightful books ever written on the art of writing, was published privately in 1918 by a Cornell professor, William Strunk, Jr. Years later, E.B. White, Strunk's former student, rediscovered it and wrote a piece about it in The New Yorker.

The Macmillan Co. then republished the book, today an undisputed classic and required reading in schools and colleges.