John Grisham Quotes

I think I'm gonna attach myself to the sinking ship that is book publishing.

The marketplace for books when I entered the business shortly after World War II consisted of a thousand or so well stocked independent booksellers in major towns and cities supplemented by thousands of smaller shops that carried limited stocks of mostly current titles along with greeting cards, toys and so on.

Apple doesn't need to maximize book sales. It simply needs to keep publishers happy enough to maintain an impressive-sounding inventory of titles while waiting for entirely new forms of publishing to develop.

There's almost no author alive who isn't weathering the tumultuous changes in the publishing industry.

Remember that just because major publishing is having trouble, that doesn't mean people have stopped reading books. Printed books won't go away, but ebooks won't go away, either.

I've drunk Amazon's free Diet Coke. Nothing makes more sense to me than a company trying to make bookselling into a profitable business. I'm not anti-Amazon, and I'm not pro-publishers either. I'm pro-books.

It's hard selling books in general: companies are merging, editors being laid off, bricks-and-mortar bookstores closing, large chain bookstores squeezing out independents, and online retailers squeezing out chain bookstores.

I knew people were independently publishing, and I buy books on Amazon. I began seriously considering it when Amanda Hocking was in the news about her self-publishing success.

The big bestsellers aren't being created by Barnes & Noble.

The e-book does seem at the moment to threaten the livelihood of writers, because the way in which writers are paid for their work in the form of e-books is very much up in the air.

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.

My books don't sell anymore. There are many reasons why they don't sell, but one of the reasons is because people don't read anymore. Forget about reading books of detail - they don't read at all.

What's encouraging is that the early new platforms - Kindle and iPad - are clearly leading to people buying more books. The data is in on that.

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.

We are forced by the major publishers to include electronic rights in the contracts we make with publishers for new books. And there's very little we can do about that.

We each take up one virtual space per title... Virtual shelf life is forever. In a bookstore, you have anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to sell your title, and then it gets returned. This is a big waste of money, and no incentive at all for the bookseller to move the book.

Many European countries, as well as Australia, Canada, Israel, and New Zealand, have adopted legislation that creates a 'public lending right', where the government recognises that enabling hundreds of people to read a single copy of a book provides a public good, but that doing so is likely to reduce sales of the book.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

For years I'd understood that publishing in paperback was the kiss of death.

Kindle Singles is publishing on skates. It prints like lightning; our book meets readers in hours. I've spent so many years waiting for publishers to consider whether they wanted to print a book of mine, making contracts, taking months to fit it into the Fall list or the Spring list, fitting it into an advertising plan.

And books that were published in much larger numbers than Selfish, Little are hard to find. And publishers who wanted to publish my last few works have them stuck in limbo while new distribution ideas and legal issues and fears are blown away.

The business model - where books can be returned, and where a 50% sell-through is considered acceptable - is archaic and wasteful. Writers get small royalties, little say in how their books are marketed and sold, and simple things like cover and title approval are unheard of unless you're a huge bestseller.

Booksellers are tied to publishing - they need conventional publishing models to continue - but for those companies, that's not the case. Amazon is an infrastructure company; Apple sells hardware; Google is really an advertising company. You can't afford as a publisher to have those companies control your route to market.

I make a good living selling hardback books through paper publishers, and I have many friends in the industry who will suffer as it changes, so on a personal level, the transition to digital isn't something I welcome wholeheartedly.

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.