Publishing Quotes

Canada is the place where maple syrup is its own food group.

~ Jenny Mcwha

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!

~ Kailin Gow

As long as your work remains unwritten in your head, it has no effect on anyone. Except you. And not in a good way. Once you let your idea out of the hermetically sealed vault of your brain and out into the fresh air, it will immediately start to evolve. The minute you get it down on a piece of paper, it will change.And once you let it out of the house — once someone else gets to experience it — everything is changed.You are changed. The project is changed. The audience is changed.That’s the alchemy of art.

~ Sam Bennett

What has seven editions (the book had already gone into no less) got to do with the value of it? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself — a voice answering a voice.

~ Virginia Woolf

F(r)iction is the best of everything we’ve ever loved. F(r)iction is experimental. F(r)iction is strange. F(r)iction pokes the soft spots, touches nerves most would rather remain protected. F(r)iction is secrets and truths and most importantly—stories. F(r)iction is weird, in every respect.

~ Tethered By Letters

The pain of an unpublished manuscript is akin to the trauma of bearing an unborn.

~ Anurag Shourie

Publishers are notoriously slothful about numbers, unless they're attached to dollar signs - unlike journalists, quarterbacks, and felony criminal defendants who tend to be keenly aware of numbers at all times.

~ Hunter S. Thompson

He wondered fleetingly how many people who sat alone for hours as they scribbled their stories practiced talking about their work during their coffee breaks....

~ Robert Galbraith

If I send all the books that I faithfully wrote overseas, would that, for any chance, be considered work-shipping??

~ Ana Claudia Antunes

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

~ Yuri Boganov

The self-addressed stamped envelope. The representation of everything that was wrong with the old publishing industry.

~ Alexei Maxim Russell

I've always felt that good writing does not have to be literary.

~ Sara Sheridan

Beautiful publishers say beautiful things and then We're sorry, but no... and then more beautiful things. It's a shit sandwich with branston pickle and melted gouda.I read it out loud to the kids. I stick it to the fridge with the others. Some writers do that because it turns their crank to have a Wall of Publishers Who Passed And Will Someday Regret It. I don't. Each one is, really and truly, a gift. We look at them and the boys and I talk about rejection, all kinds of it. Creative, karmic, romantic. Nothing works out until something does.

~ Kate Inglis

Some writers aren't writers, they are mere escapees' and refugees' on an exile from the jungle of thoughts.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

A vision of the little house in Soho flickered across his mind’s eye, his mother at a desk, writing in her journal, with hazy sunlight streaming through the morning windows. The woman inhabited a world he had once thought his own – a world of publishers and reliable suppliers. A London that was confident and competent amid its grey, puddle-strewn streets.

~ Sara Sheridan

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.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Publishers are businesses and I don’t blame them for that. If they didn’t make money by publishing books, there wouldn’t be any books.

~ Johnny Rich

A good book is not the same as a successful one.

~ Johnny Rich

But just understand the difference between a man like Reardon and a man like me. He is the old type of unpractical artist; I am the literary man of 1882. He won't make concessions, or rather, he can't make them; he can't supply the market. I--well, you may say that at present, I do nothing; but that's a great mistake, I am learning my business. Literature nowadays is a trade. Putting aside men of genius, who may succeed by mere cosmic force, your successful man of letters is your skilful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets; when one kind of goods begins to go off slackly, he is ready with something new and appetising. He knows perfectly all the possible sources of income. Whatever he has to sell, he'll get payment for it from all sorts of various quarters; none of your unpractical selling for a lump sum to a middleman who will make six distinct profits.

~ George Gissing

By their very nature, idiots do not have the intellectual capacity to identify genius. All that idiots are mentally equipped to recognize are other idiots.

~ Dermot Davis

Three carefully stringed words are worth more than a book of gibberish. It's not the word count but the impact of those words that counts.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Every line we succeed in publishing today - no matter how uncertain the future to which we entrust it - is a victory wrenched from the powers of darkness.

~ Walter Benjamin

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 no end to the detours, it takes courage to face the unknowns - it takes and it takes and it takes - But then, like a flower opening its blossom - it gives.........

~ Rich Okun

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.

~ Mike Stackpole

An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile.

~ George Bernard Shaw

Publishing is a business and writing is an art. The two have to be crammed together despite the clearly different motivations behind them.

~ Michelle M. Pillow

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 is the worst thing they could do to me?

~ Charles Stross

Don't simply dream, create. Don't simply create, ship. Don't simply ship, dream.

~ Ryan Lilly

Before Gutenberg, libraries were small -- the Cambridge University library had only 122 volumes in 1424, for instance; after Gutenberg literacy became widespread.

~ Larry Stone

One alphabet at a time, you can write an encyclopaedia. One word at a time, you can publish an entire library.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

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.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Confidence is going after Moby Dick in a rowboat and taking the tartar sauce with you.

~ Zig Ziglar

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.

~ George Orwell

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.

~ Xavier Forneret

Nowadays, the Internet decides if you're good, not the big man in the big office. No matter how important that man thinks he is, everyone else knows that he's not important anymore, and the Internet decides these things, here in the modern age.

~ Alexei Maxim Russell

Not everyone will like what you write but there's a certain group who'll love what you write. Keep WRITING for them.

~ David Chuka

I hope that, whatever happens within the publishing industry, because of the increased control writers have of their own careers, better sales information and the advent of the internet, that ultimately this change in our working environment will be a change for the better.

~ Sara Sheridan

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.

~ Sara Sheridan

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.

~ Sara Sheridan

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 will be destroyed unread. You must make your way yourself. Why you should be so set on the nearly always disappointing profession is a puzzling question.

~ Kingsley Amis