Jonathan Maberry Quotes

I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books.

A publisher many years ago asked if I'd like to write a novel for £50. And I said, 'Absolutely.'

In the summer of '80, Silhouette bought my first book.

How lucky am I? Quite often I speak at book festivals, and people ask me how I got published. There's people who have been working on a book for as long as ten years, and I feel like such a cow.

I had already drafted the manuscript that would become my first book by the time I graduated from college, but I had no idea what to do with it.

When I was growing up the publishing world seemed so far away. When my mother wrote a book, she would look up the address of publishers on the backs of the books she owned and send off her manuscript.

I teach a non-fiction writing class at New York University, and one of my great pleasures is deciding on the syllabus.

I sold my very first novel when I was 24 or 25 years old.

Three publishers came to me at the White House after George lost and said, 'We would like to publish your book.' I said, 'Well, I don't have a book,' and they said well it's a well known fact that you have kept diaries.

I got a book deal without even turning in one shred of a writing sample.

Non-fiction books have helped me enormously with lots of my books.

With 'California,' editors were reading it, and fast, and others were emailing my agent to request it. Ultimately, there were a few editors interested in the book, and it sold at auction about two weeks after the submission process started. I couldn't believe it!

I left my job as a feature writer on a newspaper to write a book, then sent it off to a number of agents thinking they would all reject me. Within a week, most had come back to say they loved what they had read, which then led to a bidding war for my first two novels.

I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books. While I'm writing a book, which I probably do two out of every three years, it's like having a second job. I squeeze in the hours when I can.

That wasn't a bad price for a first book. My agent upped it as much as possible. I was 27 and had nothing behind me. I was working like a fool to earn a living and pay for my apartment.

History was a hobby for about, oh, 20 years before I got into print.

I've written a lot of books in my time, and to write a book about Joe McCarthy and have some of the major media paying attention, I'm not used to that.

I never expected to write a book about a slum in Ireland that was going to catapult me, as they say, into some kind of - onto the best seller list.

My first book deal was for two Mark Genevich novels. I hadn't planned on writing a second Genevich novel, but I was contracted to do so, and so there I was being introduced as a crime writer.

I sat down to try to write 'Edinburgh,' an autobiographical novel, and that took five years to write and two years to sell.

Having 'The Expats' not be 'wholesale-y' rejected by the world made it possible for me to write the second book and have a publisher buy it before it was entirely written. And it made it easier for me and my publisher to get 'The Accident' out into the world without trying to convince people to pay attention to it the way you do for a first novel.

University printing presses exist, and are subsidised by the Government for the purpose of producing books which no one can read; and they are true to their high calling.

In 2011, I announced that I was going to retire, and my agent panicked. So she says: No, no, no. You have to write a book with your husband.

I remember Stephen King did a fundraiser one time with J.K. Rowling and he was very impressed with her. But we talk a lot about publishing, bookselling, and book writing. He's been around for ten years longer than me and was a bestseller right off the bat. And he's seen and done everything. It's rare to be with somebody who has been through all of that.

I don't have a publisher yet, so I'm not in the process of that next stage and I don't know what that's going to look like. So I feel like I finished stage one [with my book].