Simon Sebag Montefiore Quotes

Thousands of books are published every year in India, and it's becoming more difficult to stand out and get people to buy the books. The only way to get people notice the book is to create a buzz much before it's released.

With a hardcover, you get two chances, a year apart, for the book to make an impact - often with a new cover featuring artfully crafted snippets of reviews, a new marketing campaign and maybe even a new publisher.

PR and marketing doesn't sell books. It gets attention for them. It sends readers to bookstores and websites to read a few pages.

Ask your agent to set up a meeting with either your editor or the marketing department of the house or both so you can find out what they're doing, what they aren't, and what you can do to help.

Don't hire anyone - no matter what they offer - who promises you they'll sell 'X' copies of your book. Every book is different. The best any marketing company or PR firm can do for your book is make potential readers aware of it.

I think it's a fallacy to say that a good book sells itself. It doesn't happen. I'm a voracious reader and I can give you a long list of books which should have been best sellers but they aren't. How can you buy a book if you haven't heard of it?

With the big publishers, they publish 50 books and promote five.

There's a lot more to publishing a book than writing it and slapping a cover on it.

Publicity doesn't work for books. It really doesn't. All it does is get your name in front of a reader who might then glance at your book. Or not.

Publishing a book is a very different thing than writing one.

If I'm on the road for Random House, I'm presenting a book with the hope people will buy it.

Not all new books carry endorsements, and I wouldn't say that blurbs are indispensable for marketing.

I do send out information about my books. Very few people buy the books that way, but I always feel that if they want to know more about the process, they can get the information from my books.

An author's ability to bring a marketing synopsis to the table - along with a great manuscript - makes a difference in what books get picked up. This is true for both fiction and nonfiction titles. You need to show your publisher what you've got in your marketing arsenal.

The process of writing a book is so removed in my mind from the process of publishing it that I often forget for great stretches that I eventually hope to do the latter.

No one really knows the value of book tours. Whether or not they're good ideas, or if they improve book sales. I happen to think the author is the last person you'd want to talk to about a book. They hate it by that point; they've already moved on to a new lover. Besides, the author never knows what the book is about anyway.

According to my royalty statements, 'The Green Progression' sold 392 copies in hardcover.

A bad book and good marketing won't work, the same way a good book and bad marketing will also not work. There is no choice in the matter that if you need to write a good book, you also need to have good marketing for it.

I think there's a difference between having a bestselling book - meaning through marketing, PR and buying that first wave of customers - and writing a bestselling book. The second implies that the product propels itself to the best seller list.

I know how to sell books.

A writer can spend a decade working obsessively on a novel, but in the commerce of publishing, many of the most important decisions about any book will be made based on very short pitches - from literary agent to editor to sales rep to bookstore buyer to a potential reader standing in the bookstore, asking, 'What's it about?'

I did have a nice career in print, but traditional publishers don't always have the resources to create individualized marketing for their authors. Mine never figured out how to package books as hot as mine so that they found their full audience. Finally, I got frustrated enough over my lack of traction to walk away.

All the marketing and advertising sells the book as what it is and hopes that the book will be displayed so that your readers can find it.

There's almost no author alive who isn't weathering the tumultuous changes in the publishing industry.

To make a bestseller, there are more customers than just your customers: Selling to the end-user is just one piece of the puzzle. In my case, I needed to first sell myself to the publisher to get marketing support and national retail distribution.