Quotes About Publishing

Anybody who writes a book is an optimist. First of all, they think they're going to finish it. Second, they think somebody's going to publish it. Third, they think somebody's going to read it. Fourth, they think somebody's going to like it. How optimistic is that?

Technology and the internet have changed the world of publishing forever.

I began writing 'Matterhorn' in 1975 and for more than 30 years I kept working on my novel in my spare time, unable to get an agent or publisher to even read the manuscript.

Seventeen publishers rejected the manuscript, at which time we knew we had something pretty hot.

Some day, as soon as a book is printed it will be simultaneously put into digital form. That will be a wonderful research tool, but it will never substitute for holding the book. I feel certain that at least within my lifetime, everyone will still be going to the bookstore and buying printed books. Thank God I'll die before I have to worry about whether the printed book itself will disappear. That's something I don't want to live to see.

Mr. Bolkestein, the Cabinet Minister, speaking on the Dutch broadcast from London, said that after the war a collection would be made of diaries and letters dealing with the war. Of course, everyone pounced on my diary. Just imagine how interesting it would be if I were to publish a novel about the Secret Annex. The title alone would make people think it was a detective story.

There are a lot of us, some published, some not, who think the literary life is the loveliest one possible, this life of reading and writing and corresponding. We think this life is nearly ideal.

I tell my students that the odds of their getting published and of it bringing them financial security, peace of mind, and even joy are probably not that great. Ruin, hysteria, bad skin, unsightly tics, ugly financial problems, maybe; but probably not peace of mind. I tell them that I think they ought to write anyway.

They kind of want to write, but they really want to be published. You'll never get to where you want to be that way, I tell them.

There is no cosmic importance to your getting published, but there is in learning to be a giver.

Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up. But publishing won't do any of those things; you'll never get in that way.

You dared to publish a chronicle using the name Merrick Mayfair. You dared to do this even though a great family by the name of Mayfair lives in this city and its environs to this day. You had no care when you did that.

You can look at the New York Times Bestseller List and you can be pretty sure that the writers on that list don't know each other very well.

The thought of publishing—of the whole world reading Afterworlds—had always made Darcy feel naked and exposed, but loving had left her skinless.

that's where the money is in publishing—people who don't read.

The book publishing business is also run by people with this affliction. They love their industry, their product, their systems, and the joy it brings them. New technologies and business systems undermine that vision, and publishers often dismiss them because of simple nostalgia. The same thing happened to Kodak and to the big accounting

orr we find a typo in a book.

Less than 3% of newly published authors make enough in royalties and advances to be happy to live on.)

My wife and I are involved in writing/publishing/promotion twenty-four/seven. It isn't a day job; it's life.

WORTHY PUBLISHING

As long as I am an American citizen and American blood runs in these veins, I shall hold myself at liberty to speak, to write, and to publish whatever I please on any subject.

I am half given to think that it pays better than the novel does, in spite of everything. Not that we speak out of golden experience; alas, no! We have had not a sou from our books for a year past, the booksellers being bound of course to cover their own

So are you turning out like them? Do you still write and draw?" "yeah, but I don't do anything personnal or profound. My parents take life way to seriousely. I lke to make people laugh. I had a regular cartoon feature in the school news paper and created some for the year book. Social satire stuff. I've done a couple of political cartoons for wisteria's paper and just got one accepted in Easton's, which has a much bigger circulation. Impressed?

Writing is no dying art form in America because most published writers here accept the wisdom and the necessity of encouraging the talent that follows in their footsteps.