Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes

Here's an idea: Spend two or three hours a day at least five days a week in front of a bookstore wearing a sandwich board with your bookcover on it while you chase and chat with anyone you can corral and who is willing to talk to you.

When I talk to booksellers, they tell me how hard it is to hand-sell some of my books because I do keep popping around.

Thousands of books are published every year in India, and it's becoming more difficult to stand out and get people to buy the books. The only way to get people notice the book is to create a buzz much before it's released.

Actually, I love trying to figure out why certain books become hits while others, which may be just as good, have trouble finding an audience.

My personal opinion is that I'm in the media too much. I'm not a politician, I'm a businessman. I would like to be without any extra visibility.

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.

I have zero desire, just so you know, to be in the limelight. I don't think it's good for the country to have a former president criticize his successor. You're not going to see me giving my opinions in the public arena, until I start selling my book. I'm going to emerge then submerge.

I think these days an SF connection would be a boost to other books; I'm sure more people have read my two little detective puzzles because of the SF connection.

Of course, every time someone does a story on plastic surgery, my name will be dragged up. I've made it safe for other people to have plastic surgery. It's no longer a bad word.

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

I think it's a fallacy to say that a good book sells itself. It doesn't happen. I'm a voracious reader and I can give you a long list of books which should have been best sellers but they aren't. How can you buy a book if you haven't heard of it?

With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.

At a time when there's younger writers starting up and it's inevitable that you're becoming less fashionable, at a time when the industrial pressures apply more and more to books, how do you keep a book you wrote 28 years ago selling well year on year? Because it really is getting harder.

What I tend to get from America is very enthusiastic letters and e-mail from librarians and schoolteachers, the gatekeepers, though I hesitate to use that word. I've never been a huge seller.

Each new book that comes out kind of pulls up the old ones a little bit. The new releases are always going to bolster the old releases.

When you're an established name, you know that a children's book will have a pretty good chance of getting picked up. Like Madonna. It's not that I had this great idea. Actually, in my case, it was a great idea.

Obviously it makes a difference if an author has a public online profile of some sort, even just down to the level of having a moderately popular blog. Most books sell 5, 10, or 15 thousand copies. Most are midlist books. With those people, even a modest online presence can make a difference in sales.

After a while, if you're a writer, you want to start appearing in the bookstores of the place you're living in.

There was a sense that there was a lot of word of mouth happening with 'The Memory Keeper's Daughter,' even in hardcover.

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.

If I want to knock a story off the front page, I just change my hairstyle.

I think being in the public eye can only help me launch into the world of fashion.

I've got a publicist at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt who's been working little miracles for me, but it's true the budgets aren't what they once were in terms of advertisement and book tours.

Publishing is a very mysterious business. It is hard to predict what kind of sale or reception a book will have, and advertising seems to do very little good.

The bestseller list is the tip of the iceberg.