Sarah Dessen Quotes

I was very naive, and I thought it was just a matter of writing my first book and sending it in, and for the rest of my life I would be writing books and collecting royalties. Nobody told me how hard it was going to be to get published.

Whether you work with a small or corporate press, the important thing is to have realistic expectations in terms of sales, promotion, and the work you have to do as an author promoting your novel.

Don't do a hard sell or try to tell the agent that you're going to be a bestseller or the next John Grisham. This goes down very badly. If your work is good, then they are skilled enough to know this within a few pages.

It's hard for a newbie author to get noticed.

Writing a good query letter has very little to do with writing a good novel. But if you can't write the one, it makes it really hard to get the other published.

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].

I think book publishing is fun, but I also know I've been very lucky.

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.

Books are such quiet things - created in silence, read in silence - yet publishing a book has become a very noisy business. I've been noisy, too. I felt like I had to be in order to connect with my readers.

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

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.

I certainly think that the publishing houses have to learn more about this informal network of literary blogging and get over the idea that sending an author on a book tour - to Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles - is a successful model anymore.

I worked in publishing before I became an author, so I knew how a book gets made.

I want to write a best-selling book.

Ages ago, when I published 'Amelia's Notebook,' I'd sent it to traditional publishers I'd been working with, but nobody knew what to do with it. Tricycle was this small publisher who didn't know any better, and they took a chance.

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

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

I am hoping to work with writers publishing books for first time, since I of course remember what that experience is like. It's all a bit of a mystery for new authors who don't know what to expect.

Having a literary agent makes a huge difference in submitting work. My agent has access and tremendous passion.

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.

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

A nonfiction author has to bring a platform with him - radio, a TV show or some kind of recognizable vehicle to help launch them. And the agent is really necessary to represent all of the business interests of the author.

I left my job as a feature writer on a newspaper to write a book, then sent it off to a number of agents thinking they would all reject me. Within a week, most had come back to say they loved what they had read, which then led to a bidding war for my first two novels.

I went to SXSW in 2011. God, that was awful. I mean, I only went because my publisher wanted me to promote the book and the organizers invited me and it seemed silly not to go, especially for a relatively unknown first-time author. This is just not my cup of tea; the fewer such events I do on an annual basis, the happier I feel.

As for indie writers, a lot of them don't realize that they're in the hurry-up-and-wait business, not the wait-and-hurry-up business. They work really, really, really hard at goosing the first-month sales, and then getting disappointed when those sales either go down or never happen in the first place.