Quotes About Career

Well I guess the plan was to write poetry and publish books and make a living from writing poetry. That was a pretty ambitious plan I guess.

I published 'Rules of Civility' while I was still working. It became a best seller. I was working on this book, and then I decided to retire.

When I look back at my career as an author, I don't look at the first book that was ever published as to where my career began - I look to the first book that I ever wrote.

When I wrote the first Betsy book, 'Undead and Unwed,' I had no idea, none, that it would be a career-defining, genre-defining book, the first of over a dozen in the series, the first of over 70 published books, the first on my road to the best-seller list, the first on my road to being published in 15 countries.

Writing careers are short. For every 100 writers, 99 never get published. Of those who do, only one in every hundred gets a career out of it, so I count myself as immensely privileged.

If, after five years, I hadn't had anything published, I was just going to forget it and go back to TV full-time until I retired or they put me out to pasture.

After 'Click, Clack, Moo' was published, I was still practicing law and had no plans to make a career change.

I'd rather be a cartoonist. I don't want to be a publisher.

Never the less, at the age of fifteen, having never seen a writer, a poet, a publisher or a magazine editor, and having only the vaguest ideas of procedure, I began working on the profession I had chosen.

I assumed 'Freak the Mighty' was probably too weird and melodramatic to find a publisher. I certainly never expected the book to have a profound influence on my career as a writer, but indeed it has.

I would hate to be that person who is, you know, the mystery writer who has to deliver a book every year to publisher X.

The paradox of being in an industry where other people are usually the gatekeepers: publishers, editors - there are a lot of barriers to having control over your career. But coming out of hip-hop, the mindset was always to create your own.

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.

Publishers send me a lot of first novels because my first novel was the defining novel of my career, and I guess a lot of people want my benediction or something.

The effect of prizes on one's career - if that is what to call it - is considerable, since they give one more clout with publishers and more notoriety among journalists. The effect on one's writing, however, is nil - otherwise, one would be in deep trouble.

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.

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.'

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.

I graduated with an English degree and worked for awhile in academic publishing.

I worked in the book publishing business for nearly two decades before I turned my attention to writing, first with a couple ghostwriting projects, plus a crappy novel that absolutely no one wanted to publish. Then I moved to Luxembourg for my wife's job and found the inspiration for 'The Expats.'

When I left college I thought - based on a staggeringly inadequate understanding of how the world worked - that I might like to go into book publishing.

I got a couple of stories published, but the kind of money you were making for publishing a short story, I could see I wasn't going to make a living at it.

I loved publishing; I loved working in the book industry, but I've been writing pretty much nonstop since I was 19. I realized very early on that I would need a day job, and I wanted one that was in books.