Quotes About Authors

Some authors should be paid by the quantity NOT written.

Almost two hundred thousand books are published in the UK every year and although some of them will have the advantage of a well-known author attached, the vast majority have just two or three words on a surface measuring no more than six by nine inches to sell themselves. Titles have to be short, smart and meaningful, easy to read, easy to remember and original. That's asking a lot.

There's something about Oxford that has always appealed to authors and it seems to me that it has somehow seeped into their work. Think of Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Iris Murdoch and, more recently, Philip Pullman. It's hard to imagine them living anywhere else.

Literary festivals all over the country turn writers into performers and open doors into their private lives that, I often think, would be better left closed. In my view, it's more satisfying to learn about authors from the work they produce rather than the other way round.

As I see it, my job has always been to champion the work of the authors I publish.

I'm working with published authors and some very young undergraduates and lots of people in between. They are lovely people, and they can write.

A lot of great authors are published before their time. That's not wrong; it's just the way it works.

There's a difference between publicity and marketing. A lot of writers don't realize how much marketing goes on beyond the scenes, with sales reps and advanced reading copies, all that stuff that happens months before a book is published.

There has long been an argument in New York about what, exactly, the purpose of book awards ought to be. One model sees them as a celebration of the unquestioned best and brightest, a triumphal parade for marquee authors who have published in a given year.

If you want to be traditionally published, then you most likely want to get a literary agent. To sign with an agent, you need to send them a query letter, but agents can get up to 20,000 query letters a year. With numbers like that, it helps to get in front of agents with every opportunity you have.

A very important part of writing for children is appearing at book festivals, and in libraries and schools. An important part of becoming a writer for children is seeing what published writers do and say when they appear.

I think what's happening with book advances is something that most of the world just doesn't fully appreciate, especially when it comes to nonfiction, because writing a book of investigative journalism is an expensive endeavor, and the system works best if you have publishers making bets on authors.

Publishers were ever eager for authors to do their own publicity because nobody else was willing to do it for nothing. But then it became clear that if you want somebody to champion the story, there's nobody better than the person who made it all up.

There's so much published by so many different publishers. Most of the time, I don't have to confront that, but walking into a conference center filled with books - and people buying them or not buying them, being interested or not interested in them - that's just overwhelming to me now.

You know, it's sort of common wisdom among New York publishers that short story collections don't make money.

We are forced by the major publishers to include electronic rights in the contracts we make with publishers for new books. And there's very little we can do about that.

As for collaboration - I have done a lot, 26 books, and found publishers increasingly resistive to them. It's not that the books are bad; editors won't even read them.

When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.

Agents are deal makers, and they're really, really good at making deals. But they're also exceptionally helpful after the deal is made - agents act as a good intermediary between authors and publishers whenever disagreements come up.

Barnes & Noble is able to publish price-reduced non-copyrighted works not so much because it saves the 10 percent to 15 percent of revenue that would go to the gruel-eating authors, but because it saves the 50 percent that would go to the publishers.

Prior to 2009, when publishers scoffed at the ebook market, they offered writers contracts which gave us half of the money they made off ebook sales.

With the big publishers, they publish 50 books and promote five.

When there are fewer and fewer publishers of scale, it's just not good for authors.

My biggest concern about the market is the force that acts to drive down price, because I think that's destructive to authors as well as publishers. Our biggest battle is to underline the value of intellectual property.