Ravi Subramanian Quotes

Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.

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!

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

After a while, if you're a writer, you want to start appearing in the bookstores of the place you're living in.

I would very much like to become a best-selling author.

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

Indie writers who promote their book instead of writing the next book are wasting their time. The more books you've written, the more books you'll sell. That's how it works. That's how it's always worked.

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.

In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap.

It is important to find a publisher and equally important not to be noticed until your third or fourth book.

In college, I wrote newspaper articles and songs. Then, on my 21st birthday, I sold my first book. It was a nonfiction book about women pirates - 'Pirates in Petticoats.' After that, I was a book writer for good.

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

Putting out a book is absolutely a lesson in vulnerability because it doesn't matter how much of an audience you have. Some people who have giant audiences can't sell books because those audiences don't feel like they need to give them their money.

The TV audience is way bigger than a book audience, and no matter what I do, I'm always thinking if this will help people read my books.

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

To move up to hardcover is a way of getting more attention for my books. It means a lot to me: It means my books are legitimate.

I don't think about being famous, really. Being an author, I don't generally get stopped as I walk down the street. It's not like being a movie star.

I have been incredibly lucky with my novels but I had absolutely no idea if anyone would be interested in a cookbook. So I started to think about self-publishing.

One, I have a wonderful publisher, Black Sparrow Press; as long as they exist, they will keep me in print. And they claim they sell very respectable numbers of my books, so I guess, and it's true, every place I go, my books are in libraries and on bookshelves.

My first YA novel, not many people have read. It's a fickle business. There's a degree of timing and luck involved.

On the strength of Vonnegut's reputation, 'Breakfast of Champions' spent a year on the best-seller lists, proving that he could indeed publish anything and make money.

Overall, one of the things that excites me most about self-publishing is that the highest-value use of my time in promoting the books will be found in writing more of them.

What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer's life with the writing. I think that's something a lot of writers are having to face. Writers have become much more public now.

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.

My first two books did nada. I ended up paying the publishers.