Eula Biss Quotes

I don't have a publisher yet, so I'm not in the process of that next stage and I don't know what that's going to look like. So I feel like I finished stage one [with my book].

It used to be a lot easier to get a book deal.

The trick was really finding the appropriate publisher for each of the projects I'd devised.

I sat down to try to write 'Edinburgh,' an autobiographical novel, and that took five years to write and two years to sell.

I set the goal of getting a book contract by age thirty.

The process of writing a book is so removed in my mind from the process of publishing it that I often forget for great stretches that I eventually hope to do the latter.

A publisher should always be on the receiving end. He should take an interest in almost any subject and remain anonymous, letting the author take center stage.

You don't sit up in a cave and write the Great American Novel and know it is utterly superb, and then throw it page by page into the fire. You just don't do that. You send it out. You have to send it out.

Many writers will get a contract by selling chapters and outlines or something like that. I wrote the entire novel, and when it was all finished, I would give it to my agent and say, 'Well, here's a novel; sell it if you can.' And they would do that, and it was good because I never had anyone looking over my shoulder.

I enjoy writing. Publishing... not so much. I've been lucky to work with some very talented people in the publishing world, and the print industry has allowed me to write full time.

I was a book editor for nine years. I'm familiar with the opposite experience, bracing myself for the likelihood that no one would want to publish my book.

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

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.

A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.

It generally takes me about nine months from the point the book is conceived to the point my editor sends it off to be typeset.

Would you care to publish this? Sincerely, Robert B. Parker.

Selling a book or story has never become absolutely automatic for me.

I never want to deal with a book once I'm finished writing.

I worked on 'Always and Forever, Lara Jean' for a few months before I breathed a word of it my editor or agent.

Publishing a book is a very different thing than writing one.

When I wrote my first book, I was too scared to find out how people got books published. I was convinced that you needed some sort of magical potion that I didn't have.

I have a color-coded computer spreadsheet that divides things down to chapter fragments. Each character's point-of-view is a different color. The text of the manuscript is color-coded the same way. The last thing I do before submitting the manuscript is turn all those colors back to black.

I wrote my first novel-length story when I was 14 but had no idea what to do with it. Brisbane was a long way from the publishing industry then. Nowhere's a long way from the publishing industry now.

Writing a book is not a crime.

Writing takes a lot of patience. It usually takes me a year to write a book. One time, it took me 14 years to write a book, not that I worked on it every day.