Publishing Quotes - Page 18

• As time has gone on and we're at the end of the 20th century and major publishing is a big business, yes, of course we're going to get a lot of plain, mediocre trash. There are a lot of writers who get huge advances for books that don't go anywhere and they have to burn them somewhere or throw them away. I always think about all the poor trees that have been sacrificed.

  Ana Castillo

  Book, Thinking, Tree

  Source: www.english.illinois.edu

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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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• There is no devious and dangerous life. I've lived a charmed life, especially in the last thirty years since I've started publishing. I've won the lottery. And I keep winning it every year and I am so fortunate to do something I thoroughly enjoy and still enjoy after a bunch of books.

  John Grisham

  Book, Winning, Enjoy

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I remember Stephen King did a fundraiser one time with J.K. Rowling and he was very impressed with her. But we talk a lot about publishing, bookselling, and book writing. He's been around for ten years longer than me and was a bestseller right off the bat. And he's seen and done everything. It's rare to be with somebody who has been through all of that.

  John Grisham

  Book, Writing, Done

  Source: therumpus.net

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• What happened was I was a songwriter on Quincy Jones' publishing company, Qwest, for two and a half years before I gave him the song for Michael Jackson. He had a meeting with the songwriters. I think there were about six of us on the West Coast and we all had a meeting at his house where he sort of gave us an outline of what he wanted. To finish this BAD album Jones needed one more song to round out the album. I took notes and then I then took my notes to my writing partner Glen Ballard.

  Siedah Garrett

  Song, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.ebony.com

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• My abject hatred of actors and the acting world. I went to college as an actor, and halfway through, I switched to playwriting and directing. Then I spent a couple years working in publishing, doing some freelance journalism for The Village Voice and Musician magazine. I thought my life was going to be as a writer, but then I realized I missed performing, so I got into comedy. It was a nice combination of things I was sort of good at. I was a pretty good writer and a decent actor, but I didn't really like acting, and I didn't have the discipline to be a writer.

  Christian Finnegan

  Couple, Nice, College

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• There has to be a kind of grassroots push, a movement, as it were, against the inherent isolationism of American capitalism as practiced in the publishing industry. There need to be grants and government support and a few publishers, mainstream and independent, who are not afraid to challenge American readership. We need to build a network of translators, publishers and readers. We hope that our annual anthology might provide an upsurge in interest for European fiction and then, as we publish it every year, become a habit to many readers.

  Aleksandar Hemon

  Independent, Support, Challenges

  Source: www.omnivoracious.com

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• With the communication internet, whole industries have been disrupted. You're in the publishing industry, you understand that. Before, we had newspapers, magazines - now you're on the web. I'm in book publishing. I don't have to tell you what's happened to us. Television has taken a hit. The music industry. But, thousands of new businesses have emerged on this new communication revolution platform. Not just Google, Facebook, and Twitter. There are thousands of operations. Businesses that are doing the platforms, the apps. They're mining the big data. They're creating the connections.

  Jeremy Rifkin

  Book, Communication, Taken

  Source: www.businessinsider.com

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• In a two-year period, all my dreams came true: the birth of a son... publishing a best-selling book... launching a successful organization... joining the [Barack] Obama Administration... And then all my nightmares came true.

  Van Jones

  Dream, Book, Son

  Source: aalbc.com

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• But I account the use that a man should seek of the publishing of his own writings before his death, to be but an untimely anticipation of that which is proper to follow a man, and not to go along with him.

  Francis Bacon

  Writing, Men, Use

  Francis Bacon, David Mallet (1740). “The Works of Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Viscount St. Alban, Lord High Chancellor of England ...: With Several Additional Pieces, Never Before Printed in Any Edition of His Works. To which is Prefixed, a New Life of the Author”, p.536

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• One of the greatest threats facing book publishing, and the entire country for that matter, is censorship.

  Bennett Cerf

  Country, Book, Matter

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• We have a massive system to regulate creativity. A massive system of lawyers regulating creativity as copyright law has expanded in unrecognizable forms, going from a regulation of publishing to a regulation of copying.

  Lawrence Lessig

  Creativity, Law, Copying

  Keynote address at the Open Source Convention, July 24, 2002.

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• The way British publishing works is that you go from not being published no matter how good you are, to being published no matter how bad you are.

  Tibor Fischer

  Matter, Way, British

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• Sadly, as with so much about history's heroes, it's the spotting of potential fame that's the difficulty, whether it's publishing their poems, hanging their paintings, or buying their old underwear. Think of the great men whose lives passed in penury and hacking coughs due to public unawareness that their littlest possession would end up at Sothebys or the basement at Fort Knox.

  Alan Coren

  Hero, Men, Thinking

  Alan Coren (2008). “Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks: The Essential Alan Coren”, p.118, Canongate Books

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• A lot of people get to the point in their careers where blurbs are ghostwritten for them, because they're like, "I want to support this person, it's good for my career," and so they get someone at the publishing house to do it, or they copy something from the press release. People write their own blurbs, absolutely, some huge percentage of the time.

  Emily Gould

  Writing, Publishing House, Careers

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Every paper published in a respectable journal should have a preface by the author stating why he is publishing the article, and what value he sees in it. I have no hope that this practice will ever be adopted.

  Morris Kline

  Practice, Should Have, Paper

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• The successful editor is one who is constantly finding newwriters, nurturing their talents, and publishing them with critical and financial success.

  A. Scott Berg

  Successful, Editors, Financial

  A. Scott Berg (2013). “Max Perkins: Editor of Genius”, Simon and Schuster

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• I'd written my first novel for adults, which was called Basic Eight and was set in a high school, and we were having a devil of a time selling it. It ended up in the hands of an editor of a children's publishing house, for which it was entirely inappropriate. She said, "Well, we can't publish this, but I think you should write something for children," which I thought was a really terrible idea.

  Daniel Handler

  Children, Writing, School

  Interview with Tasha Robinson, www.avclub.com. November 16, 2005.

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• My father, Benjamin Shiller, told me not to believe in authorities or celebrities - that society tends to imagine them as superhuman. It's good advice. People are snowed by celebrities all the time. In academia people have this idea of achieving stardom - publishing in the best journals, being at the best university, writing on the hot topic everyone else is writing about. But that's what my father told me not to do. He taught me that you have to pursue things that sound right to you.

  Robert J. Shiller

  Father, Believe, Writing

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• Technology and the internet have changed the world of publishing forever.

  Mary Kay Andrews

  Technology, Forever, World

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• The music publishing I own is fabulous recording.

  Paul McCartney

  Fabulous

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• The strange thing is, we never owned our own publishing; it was always getting bought and sold.

  Paul McCartney

  Strange, Strange Things

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• I'm referred to, I see, as 'the biggest banker in modern publishing'. Now there's a line that needed the celebrated Guardian proof-reading.

  Terry Pratchett

  Reading, Bankers, Lines

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• The current publishing scene is extremely good for the big, popular books. They sell them brilliantly, market them and all that. It is not good for the little books. And really valuable books have been allowed to go out of print. In the old days, the publishers knew that these difficult books, the books that appeal only to a minority, were very productive in the long run. Because they're probably the books that will be read in the next generation.

  Doris Lessing

  Running, Book, Long

  "A Notorious Life". Interview with Dwight Garner, www.salon.com. November 11, 1997.

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• Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea.

  Margaret Atwood

  Book, Sea, Bottles

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