Evan Hunter Quotes

If somebody writes a book and doesn't care for the survival of that book, he's an imbecile.

When you write a book, you are asking someone to make an investment in their time and money. A column can come and go as the weeks pass, but a book needs to be timeless.

Planet Lucy Press? I incorporated myself to deal with publishing and was calling myself Big Bang Incorporated, which of course has to do with the Big Bang at the beginning of creation.

One, I have a wonderful publisher, Black Sparrow Press; as long as they exist, they will keep me in print. And they claim they sell very respectable numbers of my books, so I guess, and it's true, every place I go, my books are in libraries and on bookshelves.

Others, amounting to four novels and a mess of short stories which I did not think worth preserving, I have done my best to eliminate from the record by refusing all requests for permission to reprint them, and I hope I have done a good job of making them hard to unearth.

What's important to me is that all of my books are in print - and, in a way, that becomes the challenge, not winning this prize or getting that review. It's that the work is there, and you can walk into many bookshops throughout the world and buy it.

Fame, money and the size of the market are not very important to me. What is, is writing a book that is worth doing and then publishing it. I don't write books for entertainment, for people to pass the time then throw away.

As the publisher of FSG and the custodian of its legacy, I have an interested insider's view.

People have bad things to say about publishers, but I think they still have services, and I want to see what they are. And if they end up not being any good, I don't have to keep using them.

I looked back at some of my earlier published stories with genuine horror and remorse. I got thinking, How many extant copies might there be, who owns them, and do they keep their doors locked?

I did have a nice career in print, but traditional publishers don't always have the resources to create individualized marketing for their authors. Mine never figured out how to package books as hot as mine so that they found their full audience. Finally, I got frustrated enough over my lack of traction to walk away.

Self-publishing worked for me. Being able to put your work in print, even if it's a tiny print-on-demand print run of a dozen or so copies, shows publishers and editors a completed piece of work and that you can follow through on a project.

The following Wednesday, I opted to go with Random House.

Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.

Dr. Johnson has said that the chief glory of a country arises from its authors. But then that is only as they are oracles of wisdom; unless they teach virtue, they are more worthy of a halter than of the laurel.

Early in my publishing career, someone told me I'd need to have five books in print before I could quit my job as a journalist. Turns out it was closer to 10 books. It also turns out that while it's great to see my titles on bookstore shelves, my best customers are schools and libraries.

I know dozens of authors who have had a lot of books published by New York, and they won't ever take another Big 6 contract since they've gotten a taste of the freedom, control, and money self-publishing offers.

I think there's a responsibility of the publisher, of the company, to make sure the staple books that have been around for decades come out in a timely manner.

I publish my own books, so there isn't a certain editor I owe the book to at a publishing house.

Unfortunately for me, most of the books I'd want to reprint were written for savvy publishers like Harlequin and Berkley who have held on to electronic rights. But I do have another option: Publish new e-books myself.

As an author on a corporate press, you have a lot less control over the finished product. I figure if I spend a couple years writing something, I want to be able to decide what the cover looks like and how it's going to be presented.

Because most writers have totally unrealistic concepts of how publishing works.

I'm beyond thrilled to be working with Faber, whose literary history is second to none. And I'm even more excited to bring my books to a wider audience in the U.K.

Every writer secretly hopes that what he or she has written will endure.

Everyone in the book's ecology, starting with the author and including the publisher, the distributor, the booksellers, the libraries, and ending up with the reader, should benefit from a healthy book trade.