Quotes About Publishing

Does the book industry suffer from the classical "expert problem" with the buildup of rules of thumb that do not have empirical validity? More than half a million readers later I am discovering that books are not written for book editors.

Cherry-picking has optionality: the one telling the story (and publishing it) has the advantage of being able to show the confirmatory examples and completely ignore the rest

It is uphill work writing books

Amazon can deal directly with writers and publish—and distribute—their work to the public, what need is there for the publishing houses? The means of production are in the hands of the masses now, not in the hands of the elites.

Google is in a sense serving as a time machine, and we're just now being able to measure the effect this has on publishing, advertising, and attention.

I thought a book on miracles might be a great idea, but just because it's a great idea doesn't mean I'm supposed to do it. But my editor persisted, and eventually I thought, 'He's right. I should write this book.'

I'm definitely not a monthly guy. Probably never will be. I'm simply in awe of the guys who do monthly books well... hell, in awe of people who do monthlies period.

Yet the logic of academic grants and promotions tells you to publish at once, and for goodness' sake don't prod it too hard.

And if I've got to die, I want to die an editor.

Yet the history of media shows that this is just the modern incarnation of the timeless complaint of the intellectual elite, every time technology makes publishing easier, that the wrong sort of people will use it to publish the wrong sorts of things.

In 1983 I lost my job—or left it. One, the other, or both. In any case, I had been part-time for a while, coming into the publishing house one day a week to do the correspondence-telephoning-meetings that were part of the job; editing manuscripts at home.

But the important thing is that I don't do anything else. I avoid social life normally associated with publishing. I don't go to the cocktail parties, I don't give or go to dinner parties. I need that time in the evening because I can do a tremendous amount of work then. And I can concentrate. When I sit down to write I never brood. I have so many other things to do, with my children and teaching, that I can't afford it...

Publishing the charter is a major milestone, because it is the first official document of your approval project.

If you do not seek to publish what you have written, then you are not a writer and you never will be.

An editor - a person employed on a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.

I wrote for twelve years and collected 250 rejection slips before getting any fiction published, so I guess outside reinforcement isn't all that important to me.

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

Work from your own side of literature/ & room fetish, not publishing's -

When I first started with 'Twilight,' I didn't have any experience. I didn't know what I was doing. So I was pretty intimidated by the editors and the publishers, and I felt like I was a kid in school with the principal telling me what to do! It was hard for me.

I don't Twitter or blog. I'm bad at small talk, and don't have good 'chat'. Talk to me about publishing, and I can go on for hours.

When I was first writing 'Feed' - which was the first book I published as Mira - I talked about it very openly on my blog, on Twitter, that I was writing this book, and it wasn't until after it was sold that I said 'Mira Grant' wrote this book. And the reason there was really purely marketing-based.

I have a private press. I'm a book artist. I publish books of other authors and artists. I do the illustrating. I set the type. I print it myself on my press. I do everything but bind it.

The best source for finding an agent is called Literary Agents of North America. It's a complete list of agents, not only by name and address, but by type of book they represent and by what their submission criteria are.

If you've written a powerful book about a woman and your publisher then puts a 'feminine' image on the cover, it 'types' the book.