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.