Mark Crispin Miller Quotes

One of the saddest things about publishing is how quickly it ages what it touches. The frenzy involved in getting books on shelves, and in putting the word out that they're there, moves at a speed that is not the speed of writing, let alone of reading.

I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'

I believe if you write a great book, the chances are it'll get a great reception.

The hardest thing in the world for a writer is to amass a readership. So many good books come out, and so many good books disappear.

Sadly, I don't think books ever sell based on your name alone - the minute we make an assumption like that is the minute it all goes horribly wrong!

I know another New York Times bestselling author - Beth Kephart - she self-published one of her books.

It took a brave editor in the U.S. to sign a contract for Dancing Girls, and without her belief in the book, I'm not sure it would ever have found its way into print.

My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.

At a time when there's younger writers starting up and it's inevitable that you're becoming less fashionable, at a time when the industrial pressures apply more and more to books, how do you keep a book you wrote 28 years ago selling well year on year? Because it really is getting harder.

There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth publishing, to find honest men to publish it, and to find sensible men to read it.

There's certainly more new SF available than when I started writing. That means there's also more bad SF available. Whether there is also more good is a matter for future historians of the field.

The idea is to become a best-selling author first and then the rest of my books will be slam dunks.

Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

As a writer, you write the book, you give it to your editor, it's copy edited, it's published, it's thrown out there, and then there's a response.

When you're an established name, you know that a children's book will have a pretty good chance of getting picked up. Like Madonna. It's not that I had this great idea. Actually, in my case, it was a great idea.

Jerry and I hoped that it would be a popular bestseller.

It may be that Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf were sitting around fretting about their Amazon reviews or their pre-pub whatever, but I kind of doubt it. I don't think that's how the work probably got made.

Debut novels are difficult because nobody knows you... they just don't find a huge audience, because that's how the market works.

Don't do a hard sell or try to tell the agent that you're going to be a bestseller or the next John Grisham. This goes down very badly. If your work is good, then they are skilled enough to know this within a few pages.

I always grew up with the idea that in order to be a successful writer, I should have a book published.

Inevitably, most readers come to John Cheever's 'Journals' via his fiction. Whatever value they might have in their own right, their viability as a publishing proposition was conditional on the interest of the large readership of his novels and stories.

Most new books drop immediately into the oblivion they so richly deserve.

I'm not sure if you can strive your way into a career as a novelist. You have to write books; there are no short cuts.

I honestly thought I probably did sell 100 million books. That doesn't seem out of the ordinary to me.

I know very well that one cannot become an author by just writing a book.