Quotes About Publishing

The piratical publishers hire them to perform such tasks as stalking around the harbor for advance sheets coming from England, to come by through bribes or even theft.

I trust that no one will tell me that men such as I write about don't exist. That this book has been written—and published—is my proof that they do.

A book deal, Christ on a bike, quote unquote.

remember Stephen King's First Rule of Writers and Agents, learned by bitter personal experience: You don't need one until you're making enough for someone to steal ... and if you're making that much, you'll be able to take your pick of good agents.

You'd think that the ability to write lucid prose would be the bottom line for any publishing novelist, but it is not so... You would expect that proofreaders and copy editors would pick this sort of stuff up even if the writers of such embarrassing English do not, but many of them seem as illiterate as the writers they are trying to bail out.

Yeah, well, we're all writers, aren't we? He's a writer that hasn't been published, and I'm a writer who hasn't written anything.

Beginning in the 17th century, technological advances in publishing and transportation created a Republic of Letters and a Reading Revolution in which the seeds of the Humanitarian Revolution took root (chapter 4). More people read books, including fiction that led them to inhabit the minds of other people, and satire that led them to question their society's norms.

The ordering of events is in the right direction: technological advances in publishing, the mass production of books, the expansion of literacy, and the popularity of the novel all preceded the major humanitarian reforms of the 18th century.

The majority of scientific papers are published by a very small group of scientists. A tiny proportion of musicians produces almost all the recorded commercial music. Just a handful of authors sell all the books. A million and a half separately titled books (!) sell each year in the US. However, only five hundred of these sell more than a hundred thousand copies.

For one thing, we're doing publishing wrong.

United States HarperCollins Publishers Inc. 195 Broadway

Thousands of books are published every year in India, and it's becoming more difficult to stand out and get people to buy the books. The only way to get people notice the book is to create a buzz much before it's released.

The best thing anybody has ever done is to advise me against publishing a poem that shows me at less than my best, such as it is. That's the kind of advice most of us resist but really should relish.

Most publishers seem very reluctant to publish short story collections at all; they bring them out in paperback, often disguised as novels.

The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all 'bottom line' editors; everything depends on the money.

You have to remember when we were going once a month, we were putting out issues that were 480 pages, and people were complaining that these were too big, I can't get through a 480 page magazine every month.

When a book comes from the publisher and you see it for the first time... Of course it's not remotely like seeing a baby for the first time, but I can remember with each book what room I was in when I opened it. That would be excitement, though, I think. Not pride.

A writer can spend a decade working obsessively on a novel, but in the commerce of publishing, many of the most important decisions about any book will be made based on very short pitches - from literary agent to editor to sales rep to bookstore buyer to a potential reader standing in the bookstore, asking, 'What's it about?'

It's a grave mistake in publishing, whether you're talking about Internet or print publication, to try to play to a limited repertoire of established reader interests.

The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book - it makes a very poor doorstop.

This paperback is very interesting, but I find it will never replace a hardcover book - it makes a very poor doorstop.

Hell hath no fury like a hustler with a literary agent.

For most of my career I illustrated books for other people.

I wrote 'And Two Boys Booed' several years ago, but we really chased around looking for the perfect illustrator, so it took a while.