Self-Publishing and the Black American Narrative
“When contemporary scholars think about publishing in the nineteenth-century United States,” Bryan Sinche writes in Published by the Author: Self-Publication in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature, “they probably imagine a professional practice in which a manuscript is typeset, printed, bound, distributed, and sold.” While that was the case for white authors of that period, it was decidedly not so for their Black counterparts, whose works were printed with the letters “s.n.,” or sine nominee. No name, no publisher.
Out from the University of North Carolina Press, Published by the Author is one of hundreds of titles included in the Path to Open program, a JSTOR initiative that supports university presses and makes their books widely available (read Chapter Five: “That This Book May Speak for Me: Preachers as Publishers” on JSTOR). A professor of English at the University of Hartford, Sinche sheds light on the Black literary ecosystem, of which self-publication was an integral part; the American Antiquarian Society counts as many as 575 self-published texts released between the antebellum period and the Harlem Renaissance, many of which received no scholarly attention.
Black authors didn’t self-publish because it was cheap or easy but because, in the words of Black Print Unbound author Eric Gardner, the “exclusionary practices of ‘mainstream’ white print culture” left them no other choice. While publishing houses covered production and distribution, self-published writers had to pay for these themselves. At a time when the average book sold for almost the equivalent of a daily wage—50 cents—each literary endeavor came with a built-in risk of financial ruin.
But self-publishing also had advantages. For one, writes Sinche, “authors did not need to gain the approval of editors” and therefore enjoyed a degree of creative freedom their publisher-bound peers did not. As a result, self-published texts varied wildly in form and content, combining fiction, non-fiction, poems, songs, public documents, and religious scriptures into a single manuscript. One author, Edmund Kelly, used letters from slaveowners to piece together the story of his own family, while another, Thomas Smallwood, included excerpts from newspaper columns he had previously written for the Albany Weekly Patriot.
By taking “advantage of the control self-publishing offers,” Sinche argues, these authors moved beyond the confines of the dominant and most-studied genre of their demographic, the slave narrative. Aside from condemning racism and injustice, self-published authors celebrated personal achievements in the hope of securing social status. As Reverend Robert Anderson said of his 1845 self-published autobiography, Life: The Young Men’s Guide, “My book, in fact, has made me happy, because I feel that if the white people will read it they will discover that a colored man can write a book, too, just as well as anybody else.”
To what extent was self-publishing a rejection of and challenge to traditional publishing models, and to what extent was it an alternative when no other options were available?
In the earliest period (pre-1840), self-publishing was practically the only option available to Black authors: Olaudah Equiano published by subscription; Phillis Wheatley had a patron; William Grimes, Boyrereau Brinch, George White, David Walker, and Venture Smith all self-published.
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[contact-form-7]By the late nineteenth century, it was once again difficult to find a publisher for a Black-authored book, so self-publishing became the norm. This was true for autobiographers and for belletristic authors. In general, self-publishing was less a rejection of a mainstream option than it was a creative way to access the public sphere without the support of a publisher.
Are there examples of authors publishing work of a social or political nature that a traditional publisher would not have accepted?
The clearest example of this would be David Walker’s Appeal (1829), which never could have found a commercial publisher even if it were marketable since the political arguments in the pamphlet were too incendiary and radical. Ditto for someone like Norvel Blair, who had to leave his hometown to publish his narrative because he believed that no one would have even printed the pamphlet (let alone published it). Blair claimed that Republican politicians in his hometown paid off the newspapers so that they would not let him share his story.
Self-publishers produced texts that would never have been acceptable to publishers for other reasons, too, especially with regards to quality and audience. Though many self-published books sold well within limited geographic or temporal spaces, they were not the kinds of publications that would have been good bets for a publisher seeking a national or even a regional readership.
Were self-published authors also mindful of readers’ demands and tastes while writing?
There are cases of self-publishers deliberately shaping their texts for their readers, and some even narrate the ways that they have modified the texts to find an audience. Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon is the work of Jacob Stroyer, who first published his narrative in 1879 and then expanded it in 1885 by adding many new stories related to the period of his enslavement. Stroyer notes that his readers have asked him several specific questions about slavery, and he writes new sections of the narrative to answer those questions.
What about readers—did they have specific thoughts, feelings or attitudes about self-published work as opposed to books released through publishers?
I have little data on readership for these books; only a few of the 130+ copies I examined have notes from readers or inscriptions indicating who owned the book. One exception is an inscription in James Mars’s Life (by a man named Floyd Hamblin) that notes the purchaser met Mars in person when he bought the book. This is a key feature of self-publishing: the interaction between author and buyer. Because of that interaction, which was commonplace, the text became a memento rather than just a piece of paper.
Are there any common traits shared by self-published authors who ended up finding considerable literary and commercial success?
None of the self-publishing autobiographers I study achieved what might be called literary success in the sense that they launched a career as an author, though there are self-publishers whose works have come to be regarded as classics of African American literature, including David Walker, Harriet Jacobs, and Harriet Wilson.
Success is a tricky subject because so many different authors would have defined success in different ways. For Blair, success was political: he was trying to convince other Black residents of Illinois to reject the Republican party; for Anderson, success was purely commercial; for Smallwood, it was probably about entering his name into a historical record.
Those who were focused on profit had a few habits in common: a relentless commitment to selling (always in person) and a willingness to accommodate buyers (in terms of pricing, telling them what they wanted to hear). Salesmanship was a crucial piece of the puzzle, and authors like Anderson, James Mars, and Sojourner Truth were among those who could always make a sale, achieving sustained economic success through bookselling.
Did self-published works face any risk of censorship or restriction from political authorities?
Walker’s Appeal was censored in many places in the American South. Authors were sometimes removed from a town where they were selling if they did not acquire permission from local authorities. William J. Anderson was arrested because he was carrying pamphlets that were “inimical to slavery.” Blair, London Ferebee, and Christopher McPherson were arrested before they even wrote their pamphlets and subsequently used their publications to share their side of a story that had been muted by a racist justice system. And, of course, men or women who were still enslaved faced the possibility of recapture or re-enslavement after they published their books. In general, however, self-publishing operated outside of any censorship regime.
You write that many self-published works have been “completely ignored by critics or imagined as lesser versions of canonical slave narratives.” Why?
Because they don’t fit into regnant critical paradigms (e.g., texts that don’t criticize slavery or that focus on things besides the enslavement of the subject). Since most critics of African American autobiographies are English professors, many have also ignored texts that are less sophisticated in terms of style or structure. On top of this, many critics tend to ignore texts authored by figures who are difficult to trace in the historical record outside of their narrative.
The biggest issue is the first one: Texts that don’t fit within the structures that shape classroom syllabi, exam reading lists, and book chapters are hard to work with and confusing to think about. What do we do with a Black author who is also a white supremacist (like Robert Anderson) or is perhaps a fabulist (like James Roberts)? The answer: pretend they don’t exist!
You mention most nineteenth-century Americans couldn’t afford books, and that counts double for Black Americans. What kind of challenge did this pose in the search for customers?
Most authors were not focused on selling: many self-publishers were using their books to stimulate charitable giving, and others were publishing to share a message that they deemed important even if they had to give away the book that they had printed.
Another story sheds more light on this very problem: David Smith, a longtime African Methodist Episcopal (AME) minister, self-published his autobiography in 1881. He (or someone close to him) placed advertisements in the Christian Recorder (the newspaper of the AME church which was read almost exclusively by Black Americans) for more than half of a year that invited customers to purchase his book for one dollar. The fact that the ads appeared over such a long time suggests Smith never sold all the books he printed.
Are there any meaningful similarities between self-publishing then and self-publication today?
Yes and no. Self-publishing is analogous to modern communication, but more in relation to social media and blogging than self-publishing on Amazon or through a vanity press. What most self-publishers seemed to want to do back then was share their own stories to prove a point about politics, law, or religion. This seems to be the very reason that most people are drawn to social media in the contemporary era: they believe that their stories are important and help people better understand the world we inhabit.
Robert Anderson backpedaled on his earlier, abolitionist beliefs and came out in support for lynching—unsurprising, considering his books sold well in the South, especially among wealthy white readers. Why does this illustrate the dark side of self-publication specifically? Would things have been different had Anderson had an actual publisher?
We should start with the premise that Anderson never would have found an actual publisher. His book only sold because he was selling it. As a formerly enslaved white supremacist, he could tell a very particular story that had real currency in the 1880s and 1890s, and his sales pitch (rather than the book itself) was the thing that earned him customers. The purchase of a self-published book was really an endorsement of the author as opposed to the message in the text.
How did the self-publishing ecosystem for Black authors change following the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation? Did more opportunities for releasing a book through publishers open up during Reconstruction?
The question here indicates a bias about the way publishing works; it is a bias that I shared until I worked on this book. I always imagined that, in a perfect world, books were books, and if they were good enough, they found a publisher. If they weren’t good enough, then someone might self-publish the book, and it would mostly be handed out for free to a few people known to the author.
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This is the wrong way to think about self-publishing in the nineteenth century. Most Black autobiographers never even planned to publish (or thought about publishing) their books commercially. Many responded to the calls of their friends to write down their story; some were motivated by financial or political exigency; others saw a long-term money-making opportunity. Almost none of the writers I study thought of themselves as aspiring authors or sought to cash in on a publishing boom of any kind (e.g., the post-Uncle Tom’s Cabin interest in books about slavery).
As I explain in my book, most Black authors were operating within what Leon Jackson (following Karl Polyani) calls embedded economies. This means that they were a part of the communities in which they sold their books, and their embeddedness led them to make choices about writing, publishing, and distribution.
If the authors chose to write for a general (i.e., national or regional) audience, this would have rendered many of the books useless. Robert Anderson’s books, for example, would have sold fewer copies had they been available in bookstores.
I personally think that books are for reading and pondering, and a good book is one that draws me in and keeps me thinking. Writing Published by the Author helped me understand that publications, even when no one reads them, can still accomplish lots of things in the world. They are conduits for human thought and communication, but they are also objects which spur encounters or conversations, totems that memorialize those actions, or vehicles for signaling our approval of a person or his/her message. The book is not a collection of words; it is a thing in itself that signifies independently from the words on its pages.
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