George Burns Quotes

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

As an author, I love to know my book sells really well.

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

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.

Some books and authors are best sellers, but most aren't. It may be easier to self-publish than it is to traditionally publish, but in all honesty, it's harder to be a best seller self-publishing than it is with a house.

I'd like to sell a lot of books.

I have grown into a Bestsellasaurus Rex - a big, stumbling book-beast that is loved when it shits money and hated when it tramples houses... I started out as a storyteller; along the way I became an economic force.

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

When I sit down to write a book, I don't ask myself, "How many am I going to sell?"

Publishers are in business to make money, and if your books do well they don't care if you are male, female, or an elephant.

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.

What I tend to get from America is very enthusiastic letters and e-mail from librarians and schoolteachers, the gatekeepers, though I hesitate to use that word. I've never been a huge seller.

I myself don't know what makes my books work. I enter a bookstore and I'm frankly overwhelmed by the number of books in most of them, and I know people are buying mine.

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

You know, in the old days, you might be able to slowly sort of build an audience for your work by publishing two, three novels before you hit it big. You know, now, there's much more of an emphasis in the publishing houses on making sure that every book makes money.

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

I think there's a difference between having a bestselling book - meaning through marketing, PR and buying that first wave of customers - and writing a bestselling book. The second implies that the product propels itself to the best seller list.

Oddly, for a book to do well merely because people like it is surprisingly rare.

There's so much published by so many different publishers. Most of the time, I don't have to confront that, but walking into a conference center filled with books - and people buying them or not buying them, being interested or not interested in them - that's just overwhelming to me now.

An author needs to be in the market. He or she needs to come out with a new book every year. That keeps you alive in the public mind and gives a push to your older books.

Buying new books supports the writer by providing both a royalty and an audience; a writer whose book sells well has a better chance of selling another.

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

What more do I need to say? Conservative books sell. I can't help it if liberal books don't sell.