Sonny Mehta Quotes

Readers are always surprised to learn that authors have little or no input regarding the cover art for their books.

There's a lot more to publishing a book than writing it and slapping a cover on it.

Of course, to publish something, you have to write it, polish it, then hire out the line editing, copy editing and cover design. After which, you pick your way through the minefield of conforming to the differing requirements of Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Smashwords, or hire someone to do it for you.

A publisher - and I write as one - does far more than print and sell a book. It selects, nurtures, positions and promotes the writer's work.

I love jezebel.com for the latest on fashion, style, and celebrity gossip. I also love gawker.com for New York celebrity sightings, and galleycat.com and trashionista.com for book news.

No matter how well a person writes, a successful book is a team effort involving many, many people.

In my ideal world, my next novel would have a first printing of, say, 2,500 hardcovers for reviewers, libraries, collectors, and autograph hounds. The publisher could print more copies if they get low. And simultaneously, or six weeks later, the book would be available in paperback.

My parents were in the book business, my brothers still run the Dutton bookstores in Los Angeles, and I've been interested in editing books and journals all of my life.

It's hard selling books in general: companies are merging, editors being laid off, bricks-and-mortar bookstores closing, large chain bookstores squeezing out independents, and online retailers squeezing out chain bookstores.

I love the look of books published by the firm of Rupert Hart-Davis: They strike me as handsome, elegant, and inviting. I'll pick up almost anything with that imprint, especially if it's in a jacket or priced low.

A book's title is vital.

I came into book publishing without any particular impulse to be in book publishing.

I think the book business is really sitting on the greatest moment in the history of time. We are providing the stories to the hungry public. We have more avenues to do it than ever before.

A writer can spend a decade working obsessively on a novel, but in the commerce of publishing, many of the most important decisions about any book will be made based on very short pitches - from literary agent to editor to sales rep to bookstore buyer to a potential reader standing in the bookstore, asking, 'What's it about?'

When you're making a print book in 2012, I actually think the onus is on you - and on your publisher - to make something that's worth buying in its physical edition.

I have always discouraged young writers from self-publishing, by which I mean going to a vanity publisher and spending your hard earned savings - say, some two-three lakhs - and getting your book printed. It's not published; it's printed!

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

All that are printed and bound are not books; they do not necessarily belong to letters, but are oftener to be ranked with the other luxuries and appendages of civilized life. Base wares are palmed off under a thousand disguises.

There can hardly be a stranger commodity in the world than books. Printed by people who don't understand them; sold by people who don't understand them; bound, criticized and read by people who don't understand them; and now even written by people who don't understand them.

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.

Yet I'm making a book and I'm going to care immensely about what words get bound in the pages, and I want the object to look good. I won't believe in it and it won't be real to me until there's a finished book I can hold.

In Poland, for a while, my books all had cartoons on the cover. I trust my publishers in each country to know what works in their individual markets.

The world has been printing books for 450 years, and yet gunpowder still has a wider circulation. Never mind! Printer's ink is the greater explosive: it will win.

At different times and in different places I have come to expect certain books to look a certain way, and, as in all fashions, these changing features fix a precise quality onto a book's definition. I judge a book by its cover; I judge a book by its shape.