Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are read and then possibly cherished, or else misinterp...
Persistence can look a lot like stupid.
(p. pr. & vb. n.) of Publish
Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller li...
It’s always the end of the world,” said Russell Grandinetti, one of Amazon’s top executives. “You could set your watch on it arriving.” He pointed out, though, that the landscape was in some ways chan...
Someone ought to publish a book about the doomsayers who keep publishing books about the end of publishing.
When I finally did confront Mr. Arcott, after my return to Falchester, he had the cheek to try and argue that his intellectual thievery had been a compliment and a favor. After all, it meant my work w...
Josephy visited several leading Manhattan bookstores and sadly discovered the explanation [from his agent] to be generally correct; books about Indians were shelved in the back of the stores alongside...
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...
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.
Publishing would be so wonderful without those wretched authors.
An author’s strong belief and enthusiasm will affect the writing of the book and often the publisher’s commitment to it.
To refer even in passing to unpublished or struggling authors and their problems is to put oneself at some risk, so I will say here and now that any unsolicited manuscripts or typescripts sent to me w...
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.
It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.
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.
One alphabet at a time, you can write an encyclopaedia. One word at a time, you can publish an entire library.
Before Gutenberg, libraries were small -- the Cambridge University library had only 122 volumes in 1424, for instance; after Gutenberg literacy became widespread.
Contract law is essentially a defensive scorched-earth battleground where the constant question is, “if my business partner was possessed by a brain-eating monster from beyond spacetime tomorrow, what...
Note to the wise: whenever someone insists that he wants to buy something from you, but tells you there’s no real value in it yet, two things are happening: he’s lying, and you’re being taken.
It takes a village to build success in publishing a book - it takes friends that are willing to help - it takes hours upon hours of no's to get to a yes, it takes many twists and turns with seemingly...
