Mary Matalin Quotes

I want to write a best-selling book.

Digital-Original just shifts the R&D costs for publishing to the authors and affords us the chance to write the stories we want to write and the stories our patrons want to read.

I think I got spoiled and that writing a short story and getting it published, or writing a novel and getting it published, you pretty much get to do the first, second and third draft yourself without a whole lot of interference.

I know from an editor's point of view or a publisher's point of view it's easier to slot me into a particular niche. But I know that I'd be bored unless I wrote a book that in some senses was a challenge.

You set up the story, but the characters start talking, and they go places that you didn't expect. You have to follow.

I think I'm more marketing- and sales-oriented than others, and the notion of selling books continues to interest me.

I'm just going to write whatever I'm going to write, and whatever shelf or section they end up on at the bookstore is just going to be that, and I'll let the marketing people pull their hair out and worry about it.

Publishing is the final step in making a book; if I was afraid to publish one, I wouldn't write it in the first place.

I publish my own books, so there isn't a certain editor I owe the book to at a publishing house.

Whether you work with a small or corporate press, the important thing is to have realistic expectations in terms of sales, promotion, and the work you have to do as an author promoting your novel.

I've never read a screenplay in advance. You trust the artist.

The possibilities are infinite with new writing; every time you open a new script, there's no limit to what it might contain.

Never index your own book.

I've said in many interviews that I like my fiction to be unpredictable. I like there to be considerable suspense.

Print-on-demand publishing is the new farm system for new voices in fiction. Authors who have compelling things to say, who can market their stories in compelling ways, will succeed.

I never know what's going to happen in a novel. I don't have a plan or an outline.

People generally don't recognize how long it takes to conceive, publish, and write a book.

I think people become consumed with selling a book when they need to be consumed with writing it.

What the podcast novelists do isn't all that different from what self-publishers do. We put the books out in different formats, but the goal is the same: build an audience and attract a publisher.

I'm not like J.K. Rowling, where I know there's going to be this number of seasons, and I know exactly what's going to happen. I would be so bored if that was the case. There would be no journey. There would be nothing to discover.

I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.

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.

Not surprisingly, the chief way self-published authors get the word out about their books is through the Internet.

I find it hard to think of myself as selling books. I don't even have a Web site. I want to sit and write, not sell.

I knew people were independently publishing, and I buy books on Amazon. I began seriously considering it when Amanda Hocking was in the news about her self-publishing success.