John Updike Quotes

Writers have to be careful not to confuse personal attention with the attention that's going towards the book.

The traditional route to success in science fiction is by making a name for yourself in short fiction, so people who read science fiction magazines will recognize your byline on a novel.

What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer's life with the writing. I think that's something a lot of writers are having to face. Writers have become much more public now.

It is important to find a publisher and equally important not to be noticed until your third or fourth book.

Obviously, my name is known now, but I don't think people generally tend to recognize authors very much. People like J. K. Rowling maybe, Gillian Flynn might be recognized, but I reckon she could walk by me on the street, and I wouldn't know who she was.

One of the things I liked about writing for a magazine was a kind of anonymity. When you do books, it's different than magazine pieces because you become a 'figure.'

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.

Out of all artists, authors are the least trained for the spotlight. Wanting attention isn't a requisite part of the package.

Sadly, I don't think books ever sell based on your name alone - the minute we make an assumption like that is the minute it all goes horribly wrong!

Writers say many true things about their own experiences with publicity and promotion.

Whenever anyone calls me 'The new J..K. Rowling,' I think, 'What's wrong with the old one?'

Authors should be honored only for their works.

Not long after I published my first book, I quickly found I was terrible at being interviewed.

I have high hopes for Renee Ballard's literary life, and it can't start out better than the top of 'USA TODAY''s best-seller list.

I didn't like being a name attached to a book.

The only time I was ever approached to write a book was when I was most famous.

The TV audience is way bigger than a book audience, and no matter what I do, I'm always thinking if this will help people read my books.

Debut novels are difficult because nobody knows you... they just don't find a huge audience, because that's how the market works.

To move up to hardcover is a way of getting more attention for my books. It means a lot to me: It means my books are legitimate.

I'm like a unicorn; I'm a midlist writer who hasn't done anything else but write. But because I wasn't amazingly famous, I didn't become Stephanie Meyer, or even a huge literary name like a Jonathan Franzen or a Joshua Ferris.

Marketing is what gets you noticed, and that side of it something - this side of it, if you like, doing interviews - is the side of it that I least enjoy, and yet is 50% of the project.

I don't know that I've gotten much feedback directly from the literary world; sometimes I doubt even the notion that there is a literary world, though I guess there is or was.

I recognize that I'm probably the luckiest novelist in recent memory, because Sherman Alexie, a writer I greatly admire, raved about my book on 'The Colbert Report,' and then Mr. Colbert himself urged his viewers to buy it - on his show and on Twitter.

At one of the first science fiction conventions I ever went to, I saw a guy wearing a sandwich board promoting his book. Count me out of that one.

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.