Quotes About Publishing

My book sales make 'real writers' possible.

I can ask for a £25,000 advance, but then you spend a year writing the book, and £25,000 is a loan against sales, and you can easily spend five years earning out. So that's £25,000 for six years.

I sat down to try to write 'Edinburgh,' an autobiographical novel, and that took five years to write and two years to sell.

Whatever's good about your book should be good on page 1, or very few editors are going to get to page 2.

'First Step 2 Forever' is a hardcover, multi-colored monstrosity that clocks in at 240 pages... half of which feature full-page pictures of the 16-year-old Bieber.

In other words, DC was never harmed by the paper shortages.

The mass-market paperback, for one, is too expensive.

To understand the reception a religious outlier like Livingston received when he began publishing thoughts that strained the tolerance of more orthodox believers, it is first necessary to consider religious adherence—and the lack thereof—in the English colonies.

Next to the defeated politician, the writer is the most vocal and inventive griper on earth. He sees hardship and unfairness wherever he looks. His agent doesn't love him (enough). The blank sheet of paper is an enemy. The publisher is a cheapskate. The critic is a philistine. The public doesn't understand him. His wife doesn't understand him. The bartender doesn't understand him.

If you look at the publishers I've worked with, generally, they're a great bunch. Creation is unlike any other publishing house you can think of. The people I've worked with have integrity and intelligence and, almost always, less money than ideas.

And books that were published in much larger numbers than Selfish, Little are hard to find. And publishers who wanted to publish my last few works have them stuck in limbo while new distribution ideas and legal issues and fears are blown away.

Because most people don't know that the little dagger symbol on the New York Times bestsellers list means that retailers have reported significant bulk orders, you can buy a bunch for the devoted, then handsell them yourself. If you can swing 100,000 copies, that's usually enough to get you on the list, and from then on you're not just a prophet but a New York Times bestselling author, too!

The video game business is expected to be a $68 billion industry by the end of 2012.11 Compare this with the size of the entire U.S. publishing industry, which in 2010 had net sales revenue of $27.9 billion.

As long as I don't write about the government, religion, politics, and other institutions, I am free to print anything.

I only write books about dead people. They can't sue.

I deal with the authors I work with, agents, and other departments of the company, talking about both the books that I'm working on and everyone else's. Then there's dealing with foreign publishers: foreigners visit all the time. People want to bounce things off the publisher, and a lot of it is encouragement.

We used to get published a lot. And there was this vodka advertisement... it embarrassed me a lot afterwards.

Print-on-demand publishing is the new farm system for new voices in fiction. Authors who have compelling things to say, who can market their stories in compelling ways, will succeed.

My grandfather once ventured upon publishing a volume of hymns. I never heard anyone speak in their favour or argue that they ought to have been sung in the congregation. In that volume, he promised a second if the first should prove acceptable. We forgive him the first collection because he did not inflict another.

My idea is simply - is very simple - is that the books of poetry should be published in far greater volume and be distributed in far greater volume, in far more substantial manner. You can sell in supermarkets very cheaply. In paperbacks. You can sell in drugstores.

'The New Jedi Order' was a pure publishing project: a single massive story - virtually one huge novel spread across multiple volumes - told by a succession of authors.

It's a very 18th-century thing to have a book broken into several volumes.

Selling books is hard to engineer.

For many writers, selling a book is the ultimate dream.