Quotes About Publishing

In 2011, I interviewed a skilful young manga artist who asked me not to reveal his name because he still needs to defer to his seniors in the industry. He has had some considerable publishing success, and explained that, although the competitions are in theory open, in practice he now feels he needs to work first for the company that has supported him, and this also influences his choice of subject matter.

You do know, don't you, Allen, that God is a bookseller? He publishes one book-the text of suffering - over and over again. He disguises it between new boards, in different shapes and sizes, prints on varying papers, in many fonts, adds prefaces and postscripts to deceive the buyer, but it's always the same book.

I have often wondered at the extreme fecundity of the press, and how it comes to pass that so many heads on which nature seemed to have inflicted the curse of barrenness should teem with voluminous productions.

I'm at the mercy of Editors, who are hidden behind panels and are never seen by mortal eyes.

A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. . . . If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him. —EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

The rest of their authors were thrown out there, much like shit flung at a wall, while the publisher waited to see who "stuck," or so it seemed to Kendall.

She wrote for years, one book after another, just trying to get somewhere. At one point, despite all the roadblocks her publisher put in her way, she hit the New York Times list and got a multimillion dollar contract with another publisher.

McSweeney's as a publishing company is built on a business model that only works when we sell physical books. So we try to put a lot of effort into the design and production of the book-as-object.

New Zealand HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited P.O.

Church attempted to suppress the printing press, most of the new volumes were published in those areas of Europe where the writ of established authority was the weakest. This may prove to be a close analogy with attempts by the U.S. government today to suppress encryption technology.

I sent a lot of publishing ideas to my publisher, about 30 of them. Each time except 3, i got a "rejection letter". This is basically what a rejection letter is like: Hello Pathetic Moron, We read your book. It sucked. Don't send us another one. If you do, we will run over your grandmother with a bus. Don't Do It. From, Your Publisher

They kill good trees to put out bad newspapers.

If the book's bad enough, they'll publish it, and if it's bad bad enough, the daily reviewers will love it, and it'll sell.

persuaded editors and publishers at a dozen leading

So, you're the man who can't spell 'fuck.' Dorothy Parker to Norman Mailer after publishers had convinced Mailer to replace the word with a euphemism, 'fug,' in his 1948 book, The Naked and the Dead.

Like many a better one before me, I have gone down under the force of numbers, under the books and books and books that keep coming out and coming out and coming out, shoals of them, spates of them, flash floods of them, too blame many books, and no sign of an end.

The hotel shop only had two decent books, and I'd written both of them

It's guff. It doesn't advance the action. It makes for nice fat books such as the American market thrives on, but it doesn't actually get you anywhere.

I've been talking about how electronic books will come, and how important they will be, and all of a sudden Stephen King publishes one. I feel a complete idiot, as it should have been me.

the editors, having to meet a publishing deadline, copied the information off the back of a packet of breakfast cereal, hastily embroidering it with a few footnotes in order to avoid prosecution under the incomprehensibly tortuous Galactic Copyright laws. It is interesting to note that a later and wilier editor sent the book backward in time through a temporal warp, and then successfully sued the breakfast cereal company for infringement of the same laws.

It began to falter not when the book publishers who loved books gave way to those who preferred profits to reading. It happened when publishers and editors cut back on their drinking. If there is one national flower in book publishing, it is the martini.

the golden age had to be the years from 1946, as the harrowing savagery of World War II was washing away, to the late 1970s and early 1980s, before the era of publishing ossification had fully set in. Ossification had begun in the 1960s when the great old-line book people began to be replaced by bottom-line businessmen.

The patron saint of Viking could not stand editors who claimed to have discovered an author. "The author is not a discovery," Huebsch always insisted. "The author is the discoverer." Maybe so, but I still maintain that it is the editor who has to dig out the pearl in the sand pile and clean it up.)

ONE THING I almost forgot about the rise and fall of the golden age described here. It began to falter not when the book publishers who loved books gave way to those who preferred profits to reading. It happened when publishers and editors began cutting back on their drinking.