Virginia Postrel Quotes

It's hard selling books in general: companies are merging, editors being laid off, bricks-and-mortar bookstores closing, large chain bookstores squeezing out independents, and online retailers squeezing out chain bookstores.

The marketplace for books when I entered the business shortly after World War II consisted of a thousand or so well stocked independent booksellers in major towns and cities supplemented by thousands of smaller shops that carried limited stocks of mostly current titles along with greeting cards, toys and so on.

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

I'm not itching to sue Amazon or Wal-Mart... they sell a lot of books. But the future is very uncertain with books.

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.

Writers aren't in competition with one another. It isn't a zero sum game. If you have a good book, a good cover, a good product description, and a low price, you can sell well.

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.

My books don't sell anymore. There are many reasons why they don't sell, but one of the reasons is because people don't read anymore. Forget about reading books of detail - they don't read at all.

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.

We each take up one virtual space per title... Virtual shelf life is forever. In a bookstore, you have anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to sell your title, and then it gets returned. This is a big waste of money, and no incentive at all for the bookseller to move the book.

People are looking for original content in many different places, as are advertisers. This takes us into a whole new ballgame.

And books that were published in much larger numbers than Selfish, Little are hard to find. And publishers who wanted to publish my last few works have them stuck in limbo while new distribution ideas and legal issues and fears are blown away.

The Big Five publishing companies are dinosaurs trying to survive in a post-meteor world. They won't.

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.

What I tend to get from America is very enthusiastic letters and e-mail from librarians and schoolteachers, the gatekeepers, though I hesitate to use that word. I've never been a huge seller.

I've drunk Amazon's free Diet Coke. Nothing makes more sense to me than a company trying to make bookselling into a profitable business. I'm not anti-Amazon, and I'm not pro-publishers either. I'm pro-books.

I'm very privy to the way bookstores work, and I think a lot about the ecosystem that my books have been published in. I think it's great to be aware of how publishing works.

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.

It has always been very difficult for writers to survive commercially in India because the market was so small. But that's not true at all any more. It's one of the world's fastest growing and most vibrant markets for books, especially in English.

Never index your own book.

I want my books sold on airport bookstalls.

I know publishing now more as an author than with occasional peaks inside those elite offices than as an industry insider. It was difficult publishing a novel the first time around, while working behind the scenes, knowing all that has to happen to make a book a success and to still make the leap as an author.

No, my publisher has always done the marketing.

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

As for indie writers, a lot of them don't realize that they're in the hurry-up-and-wait business, not the wait-and-hurry-up business. They work really, really, really hard at goosing the first-month sales, and then getting disappointed when those sales either go down or never happen in the first place.