Eddie Campbell Quotes

Thousands of books are published every year in India, and it's becoming more difficult to stand out and get people to buy the books. The only way to get people notice the book is to create a buzz much before it's released.

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.

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 lived through a classic publishing story. My editor was fired a month before the book came out. The editor who took it over already had a full plate. It was never advertised. We didn't get reviewed in any major outlets.

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

In 2008, when I wrote Book 1 and Book 2, the head of the publishing house suggested twelve books - one each month. For practical reasons, that didn't work out.

I honestly thought I probably did sell 100 million books. That doesn't seem out of the ordinary to me.

If there's a car company, and you have another car company, you don't stop building your car and company because there are others.

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.

One, I have a wonderful publisher, Black Sparrow Press; as long as they exist, they will keep me in print. And they claim they sell very respectable numbers of my books, so I guess, and it's true, every place I go, my books are in libraries and on bookshelves.

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

Being an app developer isn't at all like working at Apple. There is this huge haystack of apps, and even a very shiny needle can get lost in that haystack.

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.

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

No one was interested in picking up a midlist series, even though I have a decent fanbase and respectable numbers.

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.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

For years I'd understood that publishing in paperback was the kiss of death.

Kindle Singles is publishing on skates. It prints like lightning; our book meets readers in hours. I've spent so many years waiting for publishers to consider whether they wanted to print a book of mine, making contracts, taking months to fit it into the Fall list or the Spring list, fitting it into an advertising plan.

The business model - where books can be returned, and where a 50% sell-through is considered acceptable - is archaic and wasteful. Writers get small royalties, little say in how their books are marketed and sold, and simple things like cover and title approval are unheard of unless you're a huge bestseller.

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 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.