Michelle Moran Quotes

The moment I said I'd finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who'd got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I'd written Harry Potter. That would have been why.

When I sold my first book, 'A Conspiracy of Tall Men,' it was part of a two-book deal. It wasn't hugely lucrative, but it was enough money for me to quit the paralegal job I had in San Francisco.

I got a book deal without even turning in one shred of a writing sample.

My self-publishing adventure led to my work being picked up by a traditional publisher and eventually hitting the bestseller lists. That led to two more bestselling novels.

I left my job as a feature writer on a newspaper to write a book, then sent it off to a number of agents thinking they would all reject me. Within a week, most had come back to say they loved what they had read, which then led to a bidding war for my first two novels.

Like most new writers, I could only hope that one day one publisher might agree to publish one of my books; I couldn't imagine several publishers all wanting to buy the first book I'd written.

For a very long time, I thought everyone I met through the process of getting an agent and a publishing deal had made a mistake. When they agreed to pay me for the book, I thought they would ask me for the money back.

In the summer of '80, Silhouette bought my first book.

I would very much like to become a best-selling author.

Hell hath no fury like a hustler with a literary agent.

I'd only been in the business three or four years, but I told myself that someday I'd like to be Mort Janklow.

I got a couple of different contacts from publishing companies saying they'd be interested in a book about my work: not a kiss-and-tell book, which I specifically put in the contract. Just a book about my work and what I did.

Sweden is a small country, and a Swedish writer can barely make a living as an author. We were able to quit our jobs as journalists only after we had been translated into, among others, German.

I'm looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.

It's great that in the German language I've sold almost 30 million books. Isn't that amazing?

It's very hard to get one publisher to accept an author going over to the other author's company to collaborate.

My first novel took almost six years to sell and was rejected 37 times in the interim, and then finally sold for the smallest amount of money my literary agent had ever negotiated for a work of fiction.

I sold my very first novel when I was 24 or 25 years old.

I think you have to have a publishing house that offers you some support.

When you write a book for publication, you're writing it for other people to read.

It is important to find a publisher and equally important not to be noticed until your third or fourth book.

I wrote one book, signed with a good agent, and sat back and waited for the phone to ring. I was sure that the great news would come at any moment. Four books later, I finally got that call.

I had the easiest publishing experience in the entire world. I sent out fifteen courier letters to agents, got five no replies, nine rejections and one I want to see it. A month later I had an agent. Another month later I had a three book deal with Little Brown.

Australian SF book publishing has undergone a boom recently, and sometimes it's easier for new writers to sell a book to a local publisher first, which then makes a US edition more likely.

A publisher saw one of my historical novels and thought I would write an admirable detective story, so she offered me a two-book contract, and I grabbed it.