Erik Larson Quotes

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.

All writing and publishing is very difficult, regardless of genre. There are going to be obstacles no matter what.

Publishing is the final step in making a book; if I was afraid to publish one, I wouldn't write it in the first place.

It's really hard to get a book published, even a good book, but the better the book is the better chance it has of eventually catching someone's attention.

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.

You want to publish with a publisher because a publisher knows how to publish a book. And you don't. You really don't.

I write slowly by hand. Publishing is effectively bankrupt for you unless you are Danielle Steele. It takes a year to write book and advances are going down or disappearing.

I worked in publishing before I became an author, so I knew how a book gets made.

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.

I'm very privy to the way bookstores work, and I think a lot about the ecosystem that my books have been published in. I think it's great to be aware of how publishing works.

The process of writing a book is so removed in my mind from the process of publishing it that I often forget for great stretches that I eventually hope to do the latter.

Maybe self-publishing is going to be an extra step added to publishing. Maybe what's going to happen is you self-publish a book, someone notices it - an agent? - and it goes from there into the traditional sphere.

Everything is different - except for publishing itself: getting hold of an amazing author, working to make his or her book the best and best-looking it can be, telling the world.

Traditional publishers require an author to submit a manuscript six months in advance, and if pressed, no later than two or three.

It generally takes me about nine months from the point the book is conceived to the point my editor sends it off to be typeset.

People generally don't recognize how long it takes to conceive, publish, and write a book.

I think the more avenues that open up when people want to publish, the better. Some of the authors that want to jump ship from the traditional houses and go on their own, you know what? Good luck. It's going to be a lot tougher than you think.

It takes a long time to publish a book.

The first version of The Beautiful Room Is Empty was the first mss. I'd ever submitted to New York editors.

A good part of the work is just reading a manuscript and coming to the office. I can't imagine wanting to even read an article about book publishing.

Publishing a book is a very different thing than writing one.

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

We see them when they come to New York. They stay at my wife's apartment. We have quite a correspondence with them at all times. They play a very important role, the authors in the firm, because so much of the material we publish is suggested by them.

There are a lot of bottlenecks to getting published. Publishers are only one of them. Having the time is another one. Feeling entitled is another one.

It's easy to get published once you have written a really good book and the hard part, 99 percent of what you need to worry about, is really finishing it.