Quotes About Publishing

At one time if you were a black writer you had to be one of the best writers in the world to be published. You had to be great. Now you can be good. Mediocre. And that's good.

Every time one of my books sells a million copies in paperback, Pan Macmillan gives me a gold statuette of Pan. I have about 20 of them.

Probably not needing to be published would give me more time to think about a book.

Books are slow. They require time; they are written slowly, published slowly, and read slowly.

Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.

She's a writer. The kind of writer who wouldn't be published outside. She believes that when one deals with words, one deals with the mind.

Eventually the receptionist went to lunch, leaving him alone. An hour after the agreed-upon meeting time he wandered back to where he assumed Gallimard's office to be; the publisher too had left for lunch. Twenty years later—after Gallimard had published Despair but rejected Invitation to a Beheading, Bend Sinister, and Speak, Memory—the firm again became Nabokov's publisher. The reception would be dramatically different.

By contrast, there are about 50,000 new books published in the English language each year, containing of the order of a hundred billion bits of information. Of course, the great majority of this information is garbage and no use to any form of life. But, even so, the rate at which useful information can be added is millions, if not billions, higher than with DNA.

As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me.

Publishers are businesses and I don't blame them for that. If they didn't make money by publishing books, there wouldn't be any books.

I like reading Ball Tongue lyrics and all that stuff. And they published a book, and I wouldn't give my lyrics, and it's all wrong in the book, and I giggle. It's funny.

Nathaniel, who has failed as a writer, decides to commit suicide. He loads his revolver, places it at his side on his desk, and starts to write his letter of farewell. The letter lengthens, brightens, breathes, lives. It is the Masterpiece, the yearned-for Masterpiece! In order to publish it, Nathaniel does not commit suicide.

between 1995 and 2000 more than 12,000 new works on the Third Reich were published,

I asked my publisher what would happen if he sold all the copies of my book he'd printed. He said "I'll just print another ten.

scientists rush to publish in order to gain the benefits associated with being the first to have made a particular advancement.

his business. On Denman's death he returned to his former trade, and shortly set up a printing house of his own from which he published "The Pennsylvania Gazette," to which he contributed many essays, and which he made a medium for agitating a variety of local reforms. In 1732 he began to issue his famous "Poor Richard's Almanac" for the enrichment of which he borrowed or composed those pithy utterances of worldly wisdom which are the basis of a large part of his popular reputation.

I first started writing historical fiction in the late '70s and kept pictures of Kathleen Woodiwiss and Rosemary Rogers on my refrigerator until my first book was published by Avon in 1982. The biggest advantage of this genre for me is that it allows me to blend fact and fiction.

I'm a reader of Chinese literature, I like their films, but also: I've had great difficulty getting my work published in China; very little of it has been published there. The first two attempts to have all of my work published, for instance, were refused without any reason ever being given.

On the whole, infinity is a fairly palpable aspect of this business of publishing, if only because it extends a dead author's existence beyond the limits he envisioned, or provides a living author with a future he cannot measure. In other words, this business deals with the future which we all prefer to regard as unending.

All writing and publishing is very difficult, regardless of genre. There are going to be obstacles no matter what.

I know people think that having a regular publisher is more prestigious, there is even this idea that self-publishing is a result of being snubbed. But self-publishing really appeals to me.

We have a massive system to regulate creativity. A massive system of lawyers regulating creativity as copyright law has expanded in unrecognizable forms, going from a regulation of publishing to a regulation of copying.

I left my job as a feature writer on a newspaper to write a book, then sent it off to a number of agents thinking they would all reject me. Within a week, most had come back to say they loved what they had read, which then led to a bidding war for my first two novels.

It is important to send your work to as many publishers as possible. For every one publisher who may show interest in your work, there will be at least five who will reject you.