In preparing for this coming Saturday’s Jane Austen Tea (see the flyer on the right) I did a little reading up on Sense and Sensibility and was surprised to learn that Jane was a pioneer in self-publishing. Yes, Sense and Sensibility, Jane’s first published novel, was self-published in 1811, when she was thirty-six years old. The cost was staggering: over a third of her income. I can’t imagine the level of commitment and belief it took to proceed. And imagine if her manuscripts had been shuffled along to descendents and eventually lost!

With the advent of Amazon, Nook, Kobo, iBooks and Createspace, self-publishing is incredibly easy and much less expensive. Writing a great book? That’s just as hard as it was in Jane’s day.

Emma Thompson’s dress from the 1995 film adaptation of Sense and Sensibility

If you’re in the Southern California area on Saturday, come join me and two other authors, Anne Cleeland and Wendy Van Camp, as we read from our Regency stories. Wendy is self-published, as am I, and Anne is self-publishing after a fashion, serializing one of her books, The Bengal Bridegift, on her website.

And for more information on Jane Austen, visit JASNA, the Jane Austen Society of North America.

Images: Wikimedia Commons