Michael Koryta Quotes

I started blogging in 2006 when I had sold my first novel but it had not yet been published, in those anxious months in between while I learned the whole process.

How lucky am I? Quite often I speak at book festivals, and people ask me how I got published. There's people who have been working on a book for as long as ten years, and I feel like such a cow.

I think people become consumed with selling a book when they need to be consumed with writing it.

When I was writing 'The Windup Girl' and 'Ship Breaker,' I was writing those simultaneously, so I was an unpublished writer, not really having that full sense that these books would go out in the world, that they would be successful, that there would be an audience and that there would be fans of those stories.

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

When my first novel was published, I went in great excitement round bookshops in central London to see if they had stocked it.

Every author believes that the book which he is placing before the public will 'fill a long-felt want,' and success or failure depends very much on how closely he has been able to gauge the nature of the 'long-felt want.'

I want to write a best-selling book.

My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.

Writing is a intensely personal activity. I can pen down my best thoughts when I'm alone. But when one is elevated into the stature of an author, you have to think about your books in terms of their business angle.

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.

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

The idea is to become a best-selling author first and then the rest of my books will be slam dunks.

I'm surviving and developing as a writer. I don't know what brings you to mass attention in terms of sales. But I've gotten more and more comfortable with it. Of course if that changes, I'll be comfortable with that. All I can do is write the best books I can.

I have high hopes for Renee Ballard's literary life, and it can't start out better than the top of 'USA TODAY''s best-seller list.

I started writing 'The Lobster Kings' the day after I sold my first novel, 'Touch.'

I published 'Rules of Civility' while I was still working. It became a best seller. I was working on this book, and then I decided to retire.

If I'm writing books, I'm a 'New York Times' bestseller - how do I do it all? I don't know.

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.

Book tours are almost designed to beat out of an author any affection he has for his book.

I started out as a novelist and wrote several novels before deciding to publish one, and I fully intend to go back to the form.

Overall, one of the things that excites me most about self-publishing is that the highest-value use of my time in promoting the books will be found in writing more of them.

I've had the odd good luck of starting slowly and building gradually, something few writers are allowed anymore. As a result I've seen each of my books called the breakthrough. And each was, in its way.

Sadly, I don't think books ever sell based on your name alone - the minute we make an assumption like that is the minute it all goes horribly wrong!

I know another New York Times bestselling author - Beth Kephart - she self-published one of her books.