Best 138 quotes in «publishing quotes» category

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.

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

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.

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The pain of an unpublished manuscript is akin to the trauma of bearing an unborn.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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)

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Publishing is in a kind of Jurassic age.

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

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

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

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

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

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

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.

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.