Jay Asher Quotes

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

Actually, I love trying to figure out why certain books become hits while others, which may be just as good, have trouble finding an audience.

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.

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

If you don't make the best-seller list, if you don't get shortlisted for any prizes, it's goodbye.

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

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.

The marketability, the success of a book, ultimately rests with whether or not people will find the concept/characters/title/cover appealing.

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

Heinlein never had a best-seller. Even, I think, with Stranger in a Strange Land, I don't think it was actually on the New York Times best seller list.

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

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.

I'm surviving and developing as a writer. I don't know what brings you to mass attention in terms of sales. But I've gotten more and more comfortable with it. Of course if that changes, I'll be comfortable with that. All I can do is write the best books I can.

My book sales make 'real writers' possible.

I had a very realistic expectation of the level of success that it was possible to attain writing romance novels.

I have high hopes for Renee Ballard's literary life, and it can't start out better than the top of 'USA TODAY''s best-seller list.

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

When I started writing, the deal was that publishers gave you a grand or two as an advance to buy some sweets, with the promise that they would make a big putsch with your fourth book when you'd built up a bit of a following. But by the time my fourth book came out, previously unpublished authors were the new big thing.