Quotes About Success

It's always hard to write and get your words out there, to find an editor, a publisher - readers! - who are going to appreciate them.

Now that I'm being very successful, publishers are trying to mainstream me, but I'm unabashedly genre. It's what I like to read, what I like to write.

Publishers are very risk-averse, so they lean towards licenses and sequels. But the fact is that even those are not guaranteed hits. So, if 'playing it safe' does not guarantee hits, they might as well leave it up to the really creative, risk-taking people, because they couldn't do any worse.

With the success of 'Black Privilege,' of course, the book publishers wanted me to come with another book immediately. They came with the check, but I don't do things for money.

The conventional wisdom is that authors get only one chance in this world. If your first novel doesn't sell, publishers and bookstores lose interest, and your career stalls, barring an act of God or Oprah.

Coming into the business, you'd pass through these little agencies until you got to understand what was happening in the business, unless you were really able to have a style strong enough to go directly to the publishers.

The first book I did - the first successful book - was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.

I had a job, I got ill, I left the job to get better, and while I was getting better, I wrote some stories. I sent them to some publishers and the fifth one who replied said they'd take them. Then they went bankrupt. Then that bankrupt publisher got bought by a bigger firm. Story: in the end is the beginning, and in the beginning is the end.

Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller.

I believe I'm a better writer now than I was when I started. I'm grateful that I had good guidance because you don't make it in this business without good editors and a lot of support from your publishers.

Writers generally get into writing because they want to write, not because they want to be independent publishers, and you can't really fault someone for saying, 'What I'm doing right now works, so there's no reason to change it.'

I don't chase publishers. Publishers chase me.

Like most new writers, I could only hope that one day one publisher might agree to publish one of my books; I couldn't imagine several publishers all wanting to buy the first book I'd written.

Nobody sells books like J.K. Rowling. We have a rule in publishing: Never compare anything to 'Harry Potter' because it's like lightning in a bottle.

I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years.

To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author.

I really only have been seriously writing, finishing things and publishing things since January '91.

If you don't put 99 percent of yourself into the writing, there will be no publishing career. There's the writer and there's the author. The author - you don't ever think about the author. Just think about the writer. So my advice would be, find a way to not care - easier said than done.

Publishing is a business. Writing may be art, but publishing, when all is said and done, comes down to dollars.

I know publishing now more as an author than with occasional peaks inside those elite offices than as an industry insider. It was difficult publishing a novel the first time around, while working behind the scenes, knowing all that has to happen to make a book a success and to still make the leap as an author.

Publishing for me is a business, not an ideology.

Publishing had been successful where there had been natural geographic monopolies.

Publishing is a business of relationships. The relationships you make at one house can carry over to another.

I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.