Mick Jagger says on the jacket: “Very original, I loved it.” Publishing has always known the value of celebrity endorsement, but what book could possibly have summoned Jagger down from the mountain to engage in mere puffery? Last December, he went into John Sandoe, the independent Chelsea bookshop famous for its famous clientele, and idly asked the bookseller to recommend a good read. The man behind the counter brandished a small, thin paperback with a muted, dun-cardboard cover, on which the title, author and publisher were picked out in green lettering: “24 for 3. Jennie Walker. CB Editions.”

Jagger might have loved it. The agent to whom the author first submitted it, however, had not. Neither did a couple of publishers. To the rescue came CB Editions, a boutique outfit dedicated to publishing “surprising books” and run by none other than Jennie Walker. Or, to give “her” her real name, Charles Boyle. In other words, 24 for 3 — an intricately wrought self-portrait of a woman as she commutes quizzically between husband and lover while a Test match, with its unfathomable rules, rumbles on off stage — is that rarity, a polished jewel of a book that, in the face of industry indifference, the author has successfully self-published.

“I wrote the novella last summer,” Boyle explains. “I got back from holiday in late August. On the doormat, a polite rejection from an agent and another envelope with a cheque for £2,000 left to me by an uncle. The same day, I went round to a local printer, spun him random figures. He gave me quotes. For that money, I could print and bind 250 copies each of four books. Thus was CB Editions begun.”

Why the pseudonym? “Because of the general and understandable suspicions of booksellers regarding self-published books,” Boyle says. (He also needed a female author on his all-male list.)

Is self-published prose quite as stigmatised as it used to be? The old assumptions that attach themselves to books written, designed, printed and sold by one and the same person are ruthlessly one-tracked: nobody else wanted it; there must be something wrong with it; it’s that lower-caste untouchable, a vanity project. Increasingly, however, it seems that self-published novels can create elbow room for themselves in a market dominated by Tesco, Amazon, the three-for-two table and Richard & Judy.

Boyle’s 24 for 3 has just won the 2008 McKitterick prize, awarded to first-time novelists over the age of 40, and is being brought out in a more ostentatiously jacketed hardback by Bloomsbury. And Sade Adeniran’s Imagine This, a self-published novel about an Anglo-Nigerian girl uprooted from London to the old country, recently won the best-first-book category for the Africa region of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. “I did the usual thing that most writers do when they first start out — sent it to agents and publishers,” Adeniran says. “I didn’t get the greatest response, but the response from friends and acquaintances was really positive, so I decided to do something about it.”

She joins a long and surprisingly stellar continuum. The Urtext for self-publishers is Areopagitica, subtitled “A speech of Mr John Milton for the liberty of unlicens’d printing to the parliament of England”. Naturally, Milton printed his 1644 polemical defence of free speech without the help of a publisher. William Blake went it alone. So did Virginia Woolf (with a little help from Leonard). Let’s not even get started on all those poets who have paid for slender print runs of slim volumes, and still do.

The contemporary climate has also yielded successful self-publishers. Jill Paton Walsh’s Knowledge of Angels was nominated for the Booker in 1994. Alexander McCall Smith initially published Portuguese Irregular Verbs, his stories about a petulant German philologist, in a privately circulated print run of 500. GP Taylor defiantly brought out Shadowmancer, the first in a hugely successful children’s fantasy tetralogy, when nobody else would. William P Young’s religious parable The Shack, self-published in America, has to date sold 1.7m and is on its 14th print run.

There will undoubtedly be more of this. While technology has made it much easier to produce books, the industry has made everything else harder. The death of the net book agreement, which had prevented retailers from discounting titles, means that fewer titles are being sold more widely, at lower prices, resulting in huge advances for some authors and correspondingly shrinking ones for everyone else. There is also a growing insistence that books adhere to generic guidelines.

“If I had been willing to turn my book into a misery memoir, I would have had more success,” says Sarah Anderson, who first tried hawking the idea for a book about her experience of living with one arm four years ago. The problem with her idea was that it intriguingly embraced a cultural history of one-handedness. Nobody wanted to know. “Conventional publishers said it was uncategorisable. They said, ‘There has never been a book like this.’ ” Which, nowadays, seems to be a bad thing. So, this year, to uniformly good reviews, she published Halfway to Venus herself. As is the case with many self-published books, readers are falling over themselves to express bafflement at its failure to find a more conventional route to the market.

The goal of most self-published authors is for a hit to pave the way into the mainstream, as has happened with 24 for 3. Adeniran is keeping her last box of the 1,000copies of Imagine This under her bed as a souvenir while working on her next novel. This time, she has a respected agent. Yet there is a cautionary example in the shape of John de Falbe. He brought out his first novel, The Glass Night, in 1995, after the usual set of rejections. It garnered enough attention, including a nomination for the John Llewellyn Rhys prize, for Harvill to sign him up for his second, The Bequest, in 2003. That didn’t do as well as his first — so, for Dreaming Iris, a gripping memory novel about a country-house tragedy, he is back to self-publishing.

“It went to 10, 12 publishers two years ago,” de Falbe says. “I was thinking, even if somebody does take it up, they’re going to give so little money, they’re not going to market it and nothing will happen to it.

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