Mark Twain Quotes

The more books there are on shelves, the more will be sold. Once you get to the level of The Secret and have 40-100 copies in many stores, managers have almost no choice but to put them in prime real estate like front-of-store, end caps, or front window.

If you're looking for a book that will spike in sales and then go away and then spike again when it comes out in paperback, your normal model, I definitely won't give you that.

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

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

I know publishing now more as an author than with occasional peaks inside those elite offices than as an industry insider. It was difficult publishing a novel the first time around, while working behind the scenes, knowing all that has to happen to make a book a success and to still make the leap as an author.

Jerry and I hoped that it would be a popular bestseller.

If you're a retailer and know that once a year you're going to get Mary Higgins Clark's book on a given date, you're going to have an awful lot of copies out there in time for that. You'd have to be simple-minded not to do that - although bookselling prior to 1950 never made that connection.

There is such a very large quantity of books clamouring for a buyer's attention that publishers have relied more and more on support such as blurbs as a way of getting an independent recommendation from a familiar name, much in the same way that Amazon.com will send an e-mail recommending Book A to a customer who's already purchased Book B.

Not all new books carry endorsements, and I wouldn't say that blurbs are indispensable for marketing.

Most new books drop immediately into the oblivion they so richly deserve.

The book trade invented literary prizes to stimulate sales, not to reward merit.

The first page sells this book. The last page sells your next book.

I'd like to sell a lot of books.

Each new book that comes out kind of pulls up the old ones a little bit.

[Mark] Twain was a publisher. He published General Grant's Memoirs (a big success) and had a hand in the publishing of many of his own books. He would, I think, be very keen about the question of how a book would sell.

Write the best book you possibly can, then dedicate yourself to getting people to read it.

The point is that if a book that had been published three years ago started to sell twice as many all of a sudden it probably wouldn't even get no­ticed. People wouldn't be tracking it. The system has cleaned up its act an awful lot but the best-seller list system is not an entirely foolproof thing.

Publishing is the only industry I can think of where most of the employees spend most of their time stating with great self-assurance that they don't know how to do their jobs. "I don't know how to sell this," they explain, frowning, as though it's your fault. "I don't know how to package this. I don't know what the market is for this book. I don't know how we're going to draw attention to this." In most occupations, people try to hide their incompetence; only in publishing is it flaunted as though it were the chief qualification for the job.

The current publishing scene is extremely good for the big, popular books. They sell them brilliantly, market them and all that. It is not good for the little books. And really valuable books have been allowed to go out of print. In the old days, the publishers knew that these difficult books, the books that appeal only to a minority, were very productive in the long run. Because they're probably the books that will be read in the next generation.

I think people need to remember that a book isn't done after a few rewrites and a publisher isn't going to buy an 'undone' book so the hard part is making it a book that at least ten other people want to pay for to read.

Always I'm working on some of book. That's the way I make a living.

I kept thinking maybe in the future editions [of Dark Money] I should sell it along with, like, some kind of, you know, Pepto Bismol or something. I wanted it to read a little bit like a thriller, so that it truly grabbed people.

It's really hard to get a book published, even a good book, but the better the book is the better chance it has of eventually catching someone's attention.

Writing a book is like an unknown abyss, every time. Every book is different. Contrary to what unpublished writers think, it's horrible to have a book out.

The best time to start promoting your book is three years before it comes out. Three years to build a reputation, build a permission asset, build a blog, build a following, build credibility and build the connections you'll need later.