Christian Nestell Bovee Quotes

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.

Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book.

You write one book and you're ready for fame and fortune. I don't know that people are spending the time and attention on learning how to write-which takes years. Everybody sees the success stories.

To make a book is as much a trade as to make a clock; something more than intelligence is required to become an author.

There is no idea so brilliant or original that a sufficiently-untalented writer can't screw it up.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

I know some authors who have gotten $25,000 advances and put it all into marketing, others who allocate $5,000 or $1,000.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

I have been rejected 120 times, probably because I didn't write the right book.

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

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

I know very well that one cannot become an author by just writing a book.

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

The publication of a book only brings very paltry results to its author.

In terms of the economics, yes obviously the rise of e-books and how people choose to read books has a big effect on the economics of the game. But whether people are buying them on paper or downloading them there's still some poor wretch in a room who is trying to write a poem, write a story, write a novel. And so my job doesn't change. It's just how people receive it and economic conditions on the ground change, but that doesn't affect what I write.

If you don't believe in yourself, and you don't have the fortitude to make that dream happen, why should the hotshots in the publishing world take a chance on you? I don't believe that you need an MFA to be a writer, but I do think you need to take some good workshops.

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

The seeds of genius are in many blogs, but bloggers lack the interest in or understanding of the difference between blogging and fully-formed literary efforts.

In the present age, alas! our pens are ravished by unlettered authors and unmannered critics, that make a havoc rather than a building, a wilderness rather than a garden. But, a lack! what boots it to drop tears upon the preterit?

I quit law in 1988 to start writing, and it took me 17 years from that point to get a book contract. I guess you can say I was on the slow train.

When you get the ideas, that's a thrill; when you're writing the book and it's corning out well, that's a thrill; when you finish it and other people read it, that's a thrill. There are going to be reviews, of course; not everyone's going to love it. You feel sort of naked and vulnerable in a way. That's just a minor part of the process, really. If you can't take that part, you shouldn't be in the business. But there are so many joys to writing.

I believe no one qualification is so likely to make a good writer, as the power of rejecting his own thoughts.

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

Writing books isn't a drastic departure from writing for the stage.

Write your goddamned book now. The world awaits.