Tony Bradman Quotes

The only two kinds of books could earn an American writer a living are cookbooks and detective novels.

As soon as I finish a book, I sell the paperback rights to different publishers and that's where I recoup my money.

We, the authors, want people to buy books. That is the only way we can earn - from our royality.

I think it is worse [in 2015] for a mid-list author such as myself. You either have to sell like Stephen King or go with the small presses where there is no money. I was lucky to have been in the right place and time for many years.

I guess if one set of my books was selling like Stephen King's, and the other wasn't selling at all, editors would want me to do the ones that sold like Stephen King's. But they seem to be willing to let me pick what I want to do next.

My first two books did nada. I ended up paying the publishers.

I do one Xanth novel a year, because at the moment that is all that publishers will accept; they don't want any other type of fiction from me, so Xanth pays my way.

If you're going to write a book that might, in its very best accidental career, sell 30,000 copies, you've got to have a day job.

I can ask for a £25,000 advance, but then you spend a year writing the book, and £25,000 is a loan against sales, and you can easily spend five years earning out. So that's £25,000 for six years.

When a single author uploading his own books to Amazon can earn more money than a large N.Y. publisher exploiting both print and e-rights, there's something amiss.

For me to be a billion-dollar author, I need to have people buying my books at Wal-Mart.

Writing books and being paid for it - it's not like winning the Lottery. You can't suddenly go, 'Yippee!' and start throwing tenners in the air. I've done pretty well out of it, but certainly not enough to say, 'Right, that's me set up for life.'

My book sales make 'real writers' possible.

I had a very realistic expectation of the level of success that it was possible to attain writing romance novels.

When I started writing, the deal was that publishers gave you a grand or two as an advance to buy some sweets, with the promise that they would make a big putsch with your fourth book when you'd built up a bit of a following. But by the time my fourth book came out, previously unpublished authors were the new big thing.

We authors certainly don't know what is going to happen to our books. Are they going to disappear into the ether, following music downloads, or are ebooks going to open up a whole new world of readers? And how much are we being paid per copy? We haven't a clue.

The first book advance I got was paid out in thirds. And over time, as I've had different deals, the advances get chopped up into ever-smaller parcels.

The publication of a book only brings very paltry results to its author.

The hard fact is that not everyone does get published.

After a while, if you're a writer, you want to start appearing in the bookstores of the place you're living in.

I remember a period where my publisher said to me, 'Look, your historical work is selling much better than your contemporary work, so please give us more historicals.'

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

I'm always surprised when large numbers of people buy my books.

Now my only income is a few royalty cheques from my books.

I never set out to do this - getting to No. 1 in the 'New York Times' bestseller list wasn't even a pipedream.