Quotes About Publishing

I wrote five issues of that and got the sack. Actually, they paid me for eight, but they changed their minds about the direction and threw three issues out the window.

I didn't want the headache of having a publisher reviewing everything I wrote in advance.

In the first year, 1988, I wrote and sold 3 novels.

I wrote speculative fiction because I loved to read it, and thought I could do better than some of the people who were getting published.

I was so naive about writing, I went to the public library and checked out the only volume they had on the topic - an academic treatise about publishing from the WWII era.

Money is an unavoidable consequence, but it isn't the reason I write; if it was, I wouldn't have written any of the YA books, because advances in that field are small compared to what I'd got now for an 'adult' DW.

As an undergrad, I was the editor of the Yale humor magazine, and since then, I've published humor in the 'New York Times' and 'Atlantic,' among other places.

Yeah, now we publish whenever we feel like it.

After an author has been dead for some time, it becomes increasingly difficult for his publishers to get a new book out of him each year.

Before I wrote my first novel, 'The Expats,' I spent nearly two decades at various arms of publishing houses such as Random House, Workman, and HarperCollins, mostly as an acquisitions editor. But a more accurate title for that job might be rejection editor: while I acquired maybe a dozen projects per year, I'd reject hundreds upon hundreds.

You're always told by your publisher that you must only write one book a year and some years you should perhaps write none at all.

If you imagine writing 1,000 words a day, which most journalists do, that would be a very long book a year. I don't manage nearly that... but I have published slightly too much recently.

If you want to publish two books a year under your own name and your publisher doesn't, maybe you need a different publisher.

I haven't written a young-adult book in years. I'm also doing six 'Goosebumps' books a year now.

I've always liked the tradition of publishing work serially in the comic-book 'pamphlet' format and then collecting that work in book form, so I've just stuck with it.

I think the more avenues that open up when people want to publish, the better. Some of the authors that want to jump ship from the traditional houses and go on their own, you know what? Good luck. It's going to be a lot tougher than you think.

I doubt I'll ever have another traditional print deal.

If a traditional publisher offered me a quarter of a million dollars for a novel, I'd consider it. But anything less than that, I'm sure I can do better on my own.

I'm especially interested in projects from authors who were always wonderful writers but who got stuck in the midlist mire due to the challenges of traditional publishing.

I think most new writers are better off going with traditional publishers who will actually, at a minimum, edit your work, package it well, and market it for you.

Ages ago, when I published 'Amelia's Notebook,' I'd sent it to traditional publishers I'd been working with, but nobody knew what to do with it. Tricycle was this small publisher who didn't know any better, and they took a chance.

In 1998, I self-published online in order to get a traditional deal.

The real important thing about Digital-Original publication goes beyond the fact that authors make more money off each sale than through traditional publishing. It's that we get to bypass a system of gatekeepers who have more than 'quality' as criteria for what they choose.

My understanding is that a book becomes a best seller only when it is pirated, sold on footpaths and at traffic lights.