Best 138 quotes in «publishing quotes» category

No matter how good it is, your book will not sell itself.

NEWSPAPER: What great paper is the Earth; what a typeface is the Day; what ink is the Night! – Everyone prints, everyone reads; no one understands.

Nowadays, the Internet decides if you're good, not the big man in the big office. No matter how important that man thinks he is, everyone else knows that he's not important anymore, and the Internet decides these things, here in the modern age.

Not everyone will like what you write but there's a certain group who'll love what you write. Keep WRITING for them.

Now, Max, I have told you many times that you are my publisher, and permanently, as far as one can fling about the word in this too mutable world....The idea of leaving you has never for one single moment entered my head.

One alphabet at a time, you can write an encyclopaedia. One word at a time, you can publish an entire library.

One of the greatest gifts we can give someone is our undivided attention--a thought that whispers constantly in the ear of any author who respects their readers.

People can’t read a book if they don’t know it exists. All authors need to do marketing, regardless of how they published.

Përndryshe, në qoftë se shtëpitë botuese mjaftohen të shesin vepra të përkthyera, të cilat janë seleksionuar gjetiu, atëherë kthehemi te muhabeti i free riders; meqë ashtu shtëpitë botuese heqin dorë nga roli i tyre kulturor, duke u mjaftuar me shitjen e qofteve.

Persistence can look a lot like stupid.

Publication is a marathon, not a sprint. Writing the book is only the start.

People don't know they want to become an author until they meet me.

Publishing a book does not make you an authority or an expert. Authorship doesn’t not equal authority.

Publishers are businesses and I don’t blame them for that. If they didn’t make money by publishing books, there wouldn’t be any books.

Publishing a book is like being pregnant. By the end, you're just ready to get that baby out!

Publishing is definitely something you do because you enjoy educating or entertaining people.

Publishing is a business and writing is an art. The two have to be crammed together despite the clearly different motivations behind them.

Quotes › Authors › D › Damian Barr › The stories we tell ourselves about... The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are very often not really what happened. And as I started to write stuff down, I started to challenge what I thought I knew about myself, my culture, my family, all of it. It was a huge, destroying process that completely took over my life. I just wasn't here, I mean I was physically present, but I wasn't here, I was back in the 1980s.

Publishing would be so wonderful without those wretched authors.

Readership is highly dependent upon format and distribution as much as it is on content.

So many authors, so little time to disqualify them!

Rejection is no badge of honour.

Some writers aren't writers, they are mere escapees' and refugees' on an exile from the jungle of thoughts.

Sometimes, I'm brave. Sometimes, I'm just stubbron.

Technically, you cannot really own a book you bought; you can only own the sheets of paper your copy is printed on; unless, of course, you are the book’s publisher.

Stop thinking “Outside the box” and look what is actually in the box first. You jump around from marketing gimmick to marketing gimmick without a clear plan or goal, hoping to reproduce someone else’s success without understanding all of the nuances and factors that went into that success. Further, people are so busy recreating the wheel that they have forgotten what the wheel looks like.

Technological change is discontinuous. The monks in their scriptoria did not invent the printing press, horse breeders did not invent the motorcar, and the music industry did not invent the iPod or launch iTunes. Early in the new century book publishers, confined within their history and outflanked by unencumbered digital innovators, missed yet another critical opportunity, seized once again by Amazon, this time to build their own universal digital catalog, serving e-book users directly and on their own terms while collecting the names, e-mail addresses, and preferences of their customers. This strategic error will have large consequences.

Teams that spend a lot of time learning the tricks of the trade will probably never really learn the trade.

That 'power grab' of Netflix has only led to an incridible amount of horrendous mediocrity. They should simply have focussed on collecting the best series in the world instead of producing them. Its as if a poetry collector suddenly thinks he should become the biggest publisher in the world. Cut out the middle men, but what if those middle men are you?

The big trinity of publishing: mystery, thrillers and romance. If you can combine all three, then it’s a winner’s trifecta and you’ll be rich beyond your dreams.

The hard fact is that writing is available to readers because of market factors as much as particular writing talent.

The endorsements on books aren’t entirely impartial. Unbeknownst to the average reader, blurbs are more often than not from the writer’s best friends, colleagues or teachers, or from authors who share the same editor, publisher or agent. They represent a tangled mass of friendships, rivalries, favors traded and debts repaid, not always in good faith.

The pain of an unpublished manuscript is akin to the trauma of bearing an unborn.

There are two motives for writing a book: one, that you may save what you know, the other, that you may share what you know with the public.

There is a saturation of books on Amazon due to a sudden get-rich-quick surge in "everyone can be authors" seminars similar to the house flipping ones in the early 2000s which led to the housing bubble and an economic slowdown in the U.S. To distinguish quality books from those get-rich-quick ones, look at the author's track record - worldwide recognition as books that garnered credible awards, authors who speak at book industry events, authors who speak at schools, authors whose books are reference materials and reading sources at school and libraries. Get-rich books have a system to get over 500 reviews quickly, manipulates the Kindle Unlimited algorithm, and encourage collusion in the marketplace to knock out rivals. Be wary of trolls who are utilized to knock down the rankings of rival's books too. Once people have heard there is money to be made as a self-published author, just like house flipping, a cottage industry has risen to take advantage of it and turn book publishing into a get rich scheme, which is a shame for all the book publishers and authors, like me, who had published for the love of books, to write to help society, and for the love of literature. Kailin Gow, Parents and Books

There's a particular kind of close you get when you find someone you can trust in a space you don't.

There is only two kind of #books .First one is by some #famous person and Second one makes a person #famous .

The self-addressed stamped envelope. The representation of everything that was wrong with the old publishing industry.

The thing you don't realize, my dear girl, is that I have been forced by the economic realities to start taking publishing very seriously. For example, it has been brought to my attention that our ability to continue to pay the hordes of people employed by M&S (God knows how many mouths have to be fed) depends directly on the number of copies of your new book [Life Before Man] that we are able to sell between September and Christmas. In past I have been able to treat this whole thing as a fun game. I have never been troubled by the cavalier explanations about lost manuscripts and fuck-ups of various sorts. Now I have learned that this is a deadly serious game. I don't laugh at jokes about the Canadian postal service. I cry. (in a letter to author Margaret Atwood, dated February, 1979)

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.

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

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!

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

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 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.

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.

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?