Best 138 quotes in «publishing quotes» category

This is the cusp of an age at least as exciting and as brimful of potential as the early days of the printing press.

This may sound like a terrible generalization but the Japanese language has taught me that a person's understanding of the world need not be so well articulated -- so rationally articulated -- the way it tends to be in Western languages. The Japanese language has the full potential to be logical and analytical, but it seems to me that it isn't its real business to be that way. At least, not the Japanese language we still use today. You can mix the present and the past tense. You don't have to specify whether something is singular or plural. You aren't always looking for a cogent progression of sentences; conjunctions such as "but," "and," and "so" are hence not all that important. Many Japanese people used to criticize their language for inhibiting rational thought. It was quite liberating to me when I realized that we can understand the world in different ways depending on the language we use. There isn't a right way or a wrong way.

Try being an indie author, a minority author, a woman, and a person with health issues in the world of traditional - that's where you are clearly 'different' and marginalized. I am all of that, yet I am still here and smiling. Life is good!

Traditional publishers spend hundreds of thousands of dollars marketing and promoting a single book. With that kind of budget, as opposed to the budget of indie publishers, every single traditionally published book should be a #1 bestseller on all lists. Every traditionally published author should be millionaires with that kind of marketing budget. But they're not, so...it isn't how much you spend on marketing the book that determines the success of the book, it is how really good it is, and what is loved by the people as a whole, not by the editors. - Kailin Gow on Economy of Book Publishing, Authors Voice

Turning a manuscript into a book is easy; getting the manuscript ready to become a book is hard.

When a book leaves its author's desk it changes. Even before anyone has read it, before eyes other than its creator's have looked upon a single phrase, it is irretrievably altered. It has become a book that can be read, that no longer belongs to its maker. It has acquired, in a sense, free will. It will make its journey through the world and there is no longer anything the author can do about it. Even he, as he looks at its sentences, reads them differently now that they can be read by others. They look like different sentences. The book has gone out into the world and the world has remade it.

We have more choice than ever before about where and how we buy and read books.

We can’t be everything for our book. Sometimes, we must surrender it to people who can help. It’s all about the book. It’s not a reflection of your competence. But, please ask from the right people. Hire the right people. Approach experts. Friends are great for moral support, but when you need expertise and advise, then ask the experts. Otherwise, you’d be a blind man being guided by another blind man telling you which way to go. A practice that is too common in this industry.

When people ask what I would tell my younger self, the budding writer at the beginning of her career, it is always the same: I wish I could have prepared myself for what happens to a writer when she is brutally honest, when she speaks truth to power in a raw and emotional way. The literary establishment continues to privilege work that’s just a touch removed, “refined” they would call it. Writers who tone down their anguish, their rage, their nontraditional, “deviant choices are perceived as more skilled, more worthy of critical acclaim. This often has a lot to do with racism and sexism, and the stories we are “allowed” to tell as people of color. The classification is not a new phenomenon nor is the marginalization of powerful autobiographical stories that demand engagement. I wish I had known all this, not because I would have done things differently, but because I would not have been so surprised by some of the dismissive responses to my work. I would have been more prepared.

Writing is such a solitary occupation that it takes a long time to build up a group of professional peers with whom you genuinely identify.

When you're a new author, you have a fearsome enemy. ANONYMITY. We know this, and it's our biggest fear. The fear that nobody will read our work plagues most of us, keeping us awake at nights. No matter what some authors say, we published because we want to be read.

Who is better off? The one who writes to revel in the voluptuousness of the life that surrounds them? Or the one who writes to escape the tediousness of that which awaits them outside? Whose flame will last longer?

Writing a book is a job, like any other. It requires research, analysis, testing, and entire days in front of a laptop, typing, reading, editing, proofreading, etc. If books were free, writers wouldn't have time to write, because they would be too busy, working on something else. It is hard to sacrifice your social life and weekends to write books when you need to keep a job or more at the same time. In this sense, when an author offers a book, he is disrespecting himself, insulting his past efforts to get him where he is now, and devaluing his own work. The idea that ebooks shouldn't cost more than a few dollars is actually already an underestimation of the value offered. And the idea that a person should get a book for free is contradictory to the purpose of obtaining value from the reading. That is why writers should never offer books and readers should always be willing to pay anything for what they want to read.

Write from the heart. A book without a pulse is like a person without a spirit." Linda Radke, President of Five Star Publications

Writing the same kind of material is no guarantee you'll be working from the same ethos so that writers from different fields are just as likely to have an understanding of each other's work as someone working in the same genre.

You can’t give what you don’t have. To write, you must read. To write well, read well.

But we discovered that, although I liked publishing, the commercial side meant nothing at all to me.

Being a writer now is about so much more than writing. There's publishing, touring, marketing, web presence.

You don’t become a good writer overnight. It takes persistence and repetition to gain mastery.

You may receive a pie, eat it and forget. You may receive champagne, drink it and forget. But when you receive a book, you can open it again and again.

And I'm working with all these great people at Sony Publishing.

If you would be thrilled by watching the galloping advance of a major glacier, you'd be ecstatic watching changes in publishing.

I like businesses in transition, first of all. If ever there were a business in transition, it is publishing.

I think the search engines are the new equivalent of publishing: an enabler of information.

I'm happy to report that 'The New Press' is still in business to this day. But not thanks to me. I was a really bad publishing intern.

I understand it is 13-8 against Egon Ronay publishing a Good Betting Shop Food Guide by 1997.

All indies self-publish but not all self-publishers are indie.

Publishing is, by its nature, about deadlines, and deadlines are toxic.

The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from 'Why publish this?' to 'Why not?

The publishing industry is stuck somewhere in the Jurassic era.

The strange thing is, we never owned our own publishing; it was always getting bought and sold.

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

Publishing is in a kind of Jurassic age.

Publishing requires a lot of persistence and a fair amount of luck.

Self-publishing is great, but I don't want to be an icon for it, or anything else.

The future of publishing is about having connections to readers and the knowledge of what those readers want.

There's a lot more to publishing a book than writing it and slapping a cover on it.

Almost every single thing you hope publication will do for you is a fantasy, a hologram--it's the eagle on your credit card that only seems to soar.

An author’s strong belief and enthusiasm will affect the writing of the book and often the publisher’s commitment to it.

Apparently, my hopes, dreams and aspirations were no match against my poor spelling, punctuation and grammar.

[April Michelle Davis's motto on freelancing in the publishing industry:] Like it, love it, live it. Like your genres, love what you do, live your profession.

A person who wrote badly did better than a person who does not write at all. A bad writing can be corrected. An empty page remains an empty page.

Author branding is the process of positioning an author as the center of attraction and influence, to be the preferred choice in a given theme, style, category, niche or genre

As it stands there is a very strong argument that as the book trade becomes increasingly corporate it's our literary heritage that is at risk - a vital part of our culture.

Authors today need a publisher as much as they need a tapeworm in their guts.

A vision of the little house in Soho flickered across his mind’s eye, his mother at a desk, writing in her journal, with hazy sunlight streaming through the morning windows. The woman inhabited a world he had once thought his own – a world of publishers and reliable suppliers. A London that was confident and competent amid its grey, puddle-strewn streets.

As long as your work remains unwritten in your head, it has no effect on anyone. Except you. And not in a good way. Once you let your idea out of the hermetically sealed vault of your brain and out into the fresh air, it will immediately start to evolve. The minute you get it down on a piece of paper, it will change. And once you let it out of the house — once someone else gets to experience it — everything is changed. You are changed. The project is changed. The audience is changed. That’s the alchemy of art.

By their very nature, idiots do not have the intellectual capacity to identify genius. All that idiots are mentally equipped to recognize are other idiots.

Before Gutenberg, libraries were small -- the Cambridge University library had only 122 volumes in 1424, for instance; after Gutenberg literacy became widespread.

Between my first book tour, in 2003, and the next one, in 2009, many of the places I visited had undergone a significant transformation or vanished: Cody’s in Berkeley, seven branch libraries in Philadelphia, twelve of the fourteen bookstores in Harvard Square, Harry W. Schwartz in Milwaukee and, in my own hometown of Washington, D.C., Olsson’s and Chapters.