Quotes About Publishing

Last year I think I made more from my Image books than anywhere else.

I was paid more for the serialization rights for each book than I got as an advance for my first novel. In other words, there is an economic value in serialization in and of itself.

I know one author whose royalty income has been halved from £34,000 a year to £16,000.

Once you realize just the sort of glut of books that exists out there, it does become incumbent on you not to add to it unless you have a damn good reason.

Writing a novel is hard work but it feels great to have the printed copy in my hand. Tonight I celebrate with the Laneway Press team who have helped me so very much. Prepare for the popping of corks!

It breaks my heart that we are always being nudged toward the most recently published books, when so many worthy books have gone unexplored.

Once you've published a few books, you drag around this ball and chain of a back list. All the evidence of how few you've sold is there. I think a lot of writers my age have this strange experience of going from would-be to has-been.

It was not until I began to write a book called 'Light Years' that an editor really stepped in. The editor was Joe Fox at Random House, and he wound up editing a subsequent book.

I walked into Relativity Records as a musician who could not be taken advantage of. That's why I wound up owning all my own publishing and making a deal that was quite advantageous for a new solo artist. But I really didn't think of myself as an entrepreneur.

My biggest luck was the Terry McMillan era, because what happened after the phenomenon of 'Waiting to Exhale' is that publishing woke up. They said, 'Wow. Black people do read.'

Though an angel should write, still 'tis devils must print.

To become self-aware, people must be allowed to hear a plurality of opinions and then make up their own minds. They must be allowed to say, write and publish whatever they want. Freedom of expression is the most basic, but fundamental, right. Without it, human beings are reduced to automatons.

Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.

For 20 years, Simon & Schuster asked me, 'Why don't you write your autobiography?'

To read a book, to think it over, and to write out notes is a useful exercise; a book which will not repay some hard thought is not worth publishing.

There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth publishing, to find honest men to publish it, and to find sensible men to read it.

The problem with making movies is that you have to devote so much of your life to fawning and flattering the men in suits, whereas that doesn't happen in books. You just go and write, and then the book comes out.

Thought is more than a right - it is the very breath of man. Whoever fetters thought attacks man himself. To speak, to write, to publish, are things, so far as the right is concerned, absolutely identical. They are the ever-enlarging circles of intelligence in action; they are the sonorous waves of thought.

The idea that you're not a writer until you're published is a lie.

I dreamt of being a writer once I started to read. I started to write 'Bonjour Tristesse' in bistros around the Sorbonne. I finished it, I sent it to editors. It was accepted.

As a writer, it's disheartening to write books that you pour your soul into and not have them distributed widely enough to find their audience.

I call Algonquin Books 'the gods and goddesses of publishing.' Not only did they give me a career, they care deeply about every writer in their flock.

It's common procedure in the industry for people with little or no professional writing experience to get a book deal because of their profile, and then hire a writer.

I never set out to become 'famous.' I mean, when you're 14 you think 'I'm gonna become a writer and people will want my autograph and that'll be cool,' but you grow up and you learn that's just not how the world works. I resigned myself to the fact that I would probably never be published and if I did it probably wouldn't be a big deal.