Amor Towles Quotes

Book tours are almost designed to beat out of an author any affection he has for his book.

When 'The Shadow of the Wind' became a success I had already been a working writer, I'd been through the ups and downs, I'd seen how it worked.

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

Many authors hate to go on grinding book tours. But I've always found it a useful way to be a foreign correspondent in America and take the pulse of the country.

I've had the odd good luck of starting slowly and building gradually, something few writers are allowed anymore. As a result I've seen each of my books called the breakthrough. And each was, in its way.

How lucky am I? Quite often I speak at book festivals, and people ask me how I got published. There's people who have been working on a book for as long as ten years, and I feel like such a cow.

When my first novel was published, I went in great excitement round bookshops in central London to see if they had stocked it.

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

I would love to be in public one day and see someone reading my book. I think that would be so ridiculously cool.

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.

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

For a lot of people, becoming an author is a change in occupation... they are coming from something that totally has nothing to do with this. If they are expecting to come into a room full of people praising them, then they are in the wrong place.

I wanted to be Carrie Vaughn the awesome writer, not the chick who writes the 'Kitty' books.

I never, ever want to be in a position where people are sitting round a table, saying, 'We've got this book. I don't really get it, but we paid for it, so we've got to sell it.' I'm not Tony Parsons; that's not right for me.

I didn't make 'The New York Times' bestseller list until 'Charmed Thirds,' and then again for 'Fourth Comings.' It gave me a certain validation, and it certainly helps position me for future books, but it's not something I think about on a daily basis.

Early in my publishing career, someone told me I'd need to have five books in print before I could quit my job as a journalist. Turns out it was closer to 10 books. It also turns out that while it's great to see my titles on bookstore shelves, my best customers are schools and libraries.

Writing is a intensely personal activity. I can pen down my best thoughts when I'm alone. But when one is elevated into the stature of an author, you have to think about your books in terms of their business angle.

If you're going to write a book that might, in its very best accidental career, sell 30,000 copies, you've got to have a day job.

I've been asked too many times to write a book by the fans.

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

Around the time I turned 30, I wanted to publish a novel.

I made a very conscious effort to finish 'The Cypress House' before 'So Cold the River' launched, because I thought that would help build a buffer between my writing and any impact that came from either the success or the failure of that first book.

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

For me to be a billion-dollar author, I need to have people buying my books at Wal-Mart.