Publishers Quotes - Page 7

• My father was a writer, so I grew up writing and reading and I was really encouraged by him. I had some sort of gift and when it came time to try to find a publisher I had a little bit of an "in" because I had his agent I could turn to, to at least read my initial offerings when I was about 20. But the only problem was that they were just awful, they were just terrible stories and my agent, who ended up being my agent, was very, very sweet about it, but it took about four years until I actually had something worth trying to sell.

  Anne Lamott

  Sweet, Father, Reading

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

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• The Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to a writer in terms of how it affects your contracts, the publishers, and the seriousness with which your work is taken. On the other hand, it does interfere with your private life, or it can if you let it, and it has zero effect on the writing. It doesn't help you write better and if you let it, it will intimidate you about future projects.

  Toni Morrison

  Zero, Taken, Writing

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• A publisher is simply a useful middle-man.

  Oscar Wilde

  Men, Middle

  Letter in 'St James's Gazette' 28 June 1890

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• If the big publishers are doing so well, why do they require writers to send return postage with their manuscripts?

  Dan Poynter

  Return, Bigs, Wells

  Dan Poynter (2003). “The self-publishing manual: how to write, print, and sell your own book”, Para Publishing

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• During the fifteen or twenty years in which I tried - it was not always easy with publishers, newspapers, etc. - to forbid photographs, it was not at all in order to mark a sort of blank, absence, or disappearance of the image; it was because the code that dominates at once the production of these images, the framing they are made to undergo, the social implications (showing the writer's head framed in front his bookshelves, the whole scenario) seemed to me to be, first of all, terribly boring, but also contrary to what I am trying to write and to work on.

  Jacques Derrida

  Writing, Order, Years

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• I prefer short stories, but publishers would, of course, rather that writers produce novels, since novels are still more commercially viable.

  Charles Baxter

  Stories, Produce, Novel

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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• Every writer has his own voice. Other than that I'm always trying to do change-ups and publishers haven't always been happy about that.

  Dean Koontz

  Voice, Always Trying, Havens

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

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• Sometimes many publishers prefer that you write the same book every time, but I have a low boredom threshold so that isn't going to happen.

  Dean Koontz

  Book, Writing, Boredom

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

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• I've had good publishers and bad publishers, and you've got to learn when the advice is sensible and when it's not.

  Dean Koontz

  Advice, Sensible

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

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• Coming after all the bullshit related to A Million Little Pieces, nobody was expecting anything from me. No publisher, no agent, no one. Just me and the book. It was great.

  James Frey

  Book, Bullshit, Pieces

  Interview with Stephen Elliott, therumpus.net. January 20, 2009.

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• The true experimenters are there but no-one hears about them - the critical/review system tends to concentrate on the handful of 'major' writers and their promising successors; bookshops tend not to sell them; publishers don't promote them. It's the same fate as has befallen poetry.

  John Scott

  Fate, Reviews, Bookshops

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• When I worked at Microsoft, I got to go and visit a bunch of different companies. Probably a hundred different companies a year. You'd see all the different ways they'd work. The guys who did Ventura Publisher one day, and then United Airlines the next. You'd see the 12 guys in Texas doing Doom, and then you'd go see Aetna life insurance.

  Gabe Newell

  Texas, Years, Guy

  "Valve’s Gabe Newell discusses the frontiers of gaming, from wearable technology to 'tongue controllers'". Interview with Ed Fries, venturebeat.com. July 25, 2012.

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• That's absolutely true, but one problem with the digital revolution, which may tie into what I said earlier, is that there can be a collapse of quality. You may not have liked the decisions made by publishers in the past, you may not have liked the decisions made by magazine editors or newspaper editors in the past. At least there was some quality control

  William Monahan

  Past, Editors, Digital Revolution

  Source: collider.com

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• To aspiring writers, I would tell them that we live in a wonderful time where you're able to make your work visible, easily. If you think about it, even ten years ago or twenty years ago, there was a middle man, there was a publisher, there were studios, there was this world of rejection letters. Now, we're in a place where we have the technology and the ability to go shoot our own movies or to put stuff on YouTube or a blog, if you're a writer, or self-publish.

  Diablo Cody

  Men, Thinking, Technology

  "Diablo Cody Talks YOUNG ADULT, the EVIL DEAD Remake, SWEET VALLEY HIGH, Her Directorial Debut, and a Lot More". Interview with Steve 'Frosty' Weintraub, collider.com. December 16, 2011.

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• Publishing is no longer simply a matter of picking worthy manuscripts and putting them on offer. It is now as important to market books properly, to work with the bookstore chains to getterms, co-op advertising, and the like. The difficulty is that publishers who can market are most often not the publishers with worthy lists.

  Olivia Goldsmith

  Book, Important, Matter

  Olivia Goldsmith (2014). “The Bestseller”, p.370, Diversion Books

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• Publishers are all cohorts of the devil; there must be a special hell for them somewhere.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Special, Devil, Hell

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• No author is a man of genius to his publisher.

  Heinrich Heine

  Men, Genius

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• I was dropped by my publisher after my first two books. But I always believed in myself.

  John Boyne

  Book, Two, Firsts

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• I believe that all brands will become storytellers, editors and publishers, all stores will become magazines, and all media companies will become stores. There will be too many of all of them. The strongest ones, the ones who offer the best customer experience, will survive.

  Natalie Massenet

  Believe, Media, Editors

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• I don't want to name names because they'd be mad at me if I did, but people who are significant novelists can't get published by real publishers at this point, or have to go through two years of trying after writing a novel that's taken them five or six years and simply can't get the thing in print. Or it gets in print and it doesn't get reviewed in the New York Times Book Review and disappears without a trace. I mean, it's terrifying. I don't know how anybody can stand it. It's such an enormous amount of work and the economics of it are really quite brutal.

  Tony Kushner

  New York, Real, Book

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Authors by the hundreds can tell you stories by the thousands of those rejection slips before they found a publisher who was willing to 'gamble' on an unknown.

  Zig Ziglar

  Rejection, Stories, Found

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• You had censorship. If you brought a manuscript to the publisher, you knew he would suggest changes. If you wanted to write and speak what you thought had to be written and spoken, you had to act against all these suppressive rules.

  Stefan Heym

  Writing, Censorship, Speak

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• Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it. If you were going to give Rock 'n' Roll another name you might as well call it Chuck Berry. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first - Rock and Roll or Christianity.

  John Lennon

  Jesus, Thinking, Rock And Roll

  'Evening Standard' 4 March 1966 (interview with Maureen Cleave).

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• I don't like that word [memoir]. Whenever my publishers have wanted to use it, I've told them to take it away.

  Paul Auster

  Use, Memoir, Wanted

  Interview with Nathalie Cochoy, Sophie Vallas, transatlantica.revues.org. March 2014.

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• [Mark] Twain was a publisher. He published General Grant's Memoirs (a big success) and had a hand in the publishing of many of his own books. He would, I think, be very keen about the question of how a book would sell.

  Hal Holbrook

  Book, Thinking, Hands

  Source: www.broadwayworld.com

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