Even if you are a best-seller you feel insecure because it is all so unpredictable.
Only a person with a Best Seller mind can write Best Sellers.
The measure of a great writer is not how many weeks his books spend on the best-seller lists, but how many years his books remain in print after his death.
Over-certified adjectives are the mark of most best-seller writing
Ask yourself, what makes my book so different? So interesting? Don’t write to be a best seller. Write for and from your heart, not your wallet. Write something you want to be remembered by.
I ain't no author, man . . . my writing skills are not of "New York Times" best-seller quality, trust and believe it ain't. My vocabulary ain't.
No one can write a best seller by trying to. He must write with complete sincerity; the clichés that make you laugh, the hackneyed characters, the well-worn situations, the commonplace story that excites your derision, seem neither hackneyed, well worn nor commonplace to him. ... The conclusion is obvious: you cannot write anything that will convince unless you are yourself convinced. The best seller sells because he writes with his heart's blood.
Too many people write books because they want to be a New York Times best-seller. They want the glory and the fame.
A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent
If you look at the best-seller list for American fiction, they're all sequels to detective stories or stories about hunting serial killers. That's what's called American fiction these days.
If you're looking for a New York Times best-seller, I may or may not give you that.
Ironically, white America will catapult books about race to the top of the best-seller list, even as racism remains a national open wound. Obsession ain't solution, however, because reading even at its most intense and verisimilitudinous is vicarious, and once you close the book you're off the hook.
The Apple iPad is not going to be the company's next runaway best seller. Not if the industry can help it... With the iPad, Apple may have irked it's somewhat new partner Intel Corp. Intel gets spanked by nobody.
Somehow, women's romance novels are not titled He Stopped When I Said "No". They are, though, titled Sweet Savage Love, in which the woman rejects the hand of her gentler lover who saves her from the rapist and marries the man who repeatedly and savagely rapes her. It is this "marry the rapist" theme that not only turned Sweet Savage Love into a best-seller but also into one of women's most enduring romance novels.
I do not know whether to be delighted or outraged by the fact that Literary Theory: An Introduction was the subject of a study by a well known U.S. business school, which was intrigued to discover how an academic text could become a best-seller.
Today we hear a great deal about Organizational Men, Mass Culture, Conformity, the Lonely Crowd, the Power Elite and its Conspiracy of Mediocrity. We forget that the very volume of this criticism is an indication that our society is still radically pluralistic. Not only are there plenty of exceptionalists who take exception to the stereotyping of the mass culture but that very string of epithets comes from a series of books that have been recent best-sellers, symptoms of a popular, living tradition of dissent from things as they are.
[As of November 17, 2006] 'Noelle's Treasure Tale' has remained at No. 3 on the New York Times children's best seller list since its October 10 release.
Excellence is THE trend of the '80s. Walk into any shopping mall bookstore, go to the rack where they keep the best-sellers such as Garfield Gets Spayed, and you'll see a half-dozen books telling you how to be excellent: In Search of Excellence, Finding Excellence, Grasping Hold of Excellence, Where to Hide Your Excellence at Night So the Cleaning Personnel Don't Steal It, etc.
Tom Paine was a great American visionary. His book, Common Sense, sold a couple of hundred thousand copies in a population of four or five million. That means it was a best seller for years. People were thoughtful then. Hope is one thing. But you need to have hope with thought.
None of my books are best-sellers. In fact, the only thing that's kept me alive is the books that are in paperback. People find them, they like them, and they pass them on.
When Emily Dickinson's poems were published in the 1890s, they were a best-seller; the first book of her poems went through eleven editions of a print run of about 400. So the first print run out of Boston for a first book of poems was 400 for a country that had fifty million people in it. Now a first print run for a first book is maybe 2,000? So that's a five-time increase in the expectation of readership. Probably the audience is almost exactly the same size as it was in 1900, if you just took that one example.
Young adults that actually read are reading bodice rippers and best-sellers and me. And Horror.
The point is that if a book that had been published three years ago started to sell twice as many all of a sudden it probably wouldn't even get noticed. People wouldn't be tracking it. The system has cleaned up its act an awful lot but the best-seller list system is not an entirely foolproof thing.
I wrote 'The Art of the Deal' and numerous other books. Some were number one best-sellers. I guess 'The Art of the Deal' is the best-selling business book of all time.
My father didn't want to go to Manhattan for me, and I came to Manhattan and I have done a great job in Manhattan. And then I wrote a best-seller and I wrote numerous best-sellers.
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