Michael Lewis Quotes

Books are such quiet things - created in silence, read in silence - yet publishing a book has become a very noisy business. I've been noisy, too. I felt like I had to be in order to connect with my readers.

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.

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

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.

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

I started writing 'The Lobster Kings' the day after I sold my first novel, 'Touch.'

I published 'Rules of Civility' while I was still working. It became a best seller. I was working on this book, and then I decided to retire.

If I'm writing books, I'm a 'New York Times' bestseller - how do I do it all? I don't know.

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.

I started blogging in 2006 when I had sold my first novel but it had not yet been published, in those anxious months in between while I learned the whole process.

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.

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

I worked in publishing before I became an author, so I knew how a book gets made.

I want to write a best-selling book.

While some of the big publishers might give out 200,000 advances, if your book does not hit some of the lists in the second week, they stop paying attention to you.

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.

I was very naive, and I thought it was just a matter of writing my first book and sending it in, and for the rest of my life I would be writing books and collecting royalties. Nobody told me how hard it was going to be to get published.

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

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.

After being rejected for years, I found a publisher for 'Keeper,' and it won prizes, and then I had to write a second and a third book because I kept taking the money and spending it.

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.

Often the grind of book promotion wearies you of your own book - though at the same time this frees you from its clutches.