Patrick deWitt Quotes

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.

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.

All those people whose faces decorate the shopping bags of Barnes and Noble, with a few exceptions, would never get published today.

When 'The Shadow of the Wind' became a success I had already been a working writer, I'd been through the ups and downs, I'd seen how it worked.

My first YA novel, not many people have read. It's a fickle business. There's a degree of timing and luck involved.

When we talk about good books, we often talk about good sentences, but what we rarely talk about is reader pleasure. Yet it is reader pleasure that is going to make a book break out into the kind of success that makes it into a household name.

Ages ago, when I published 'Amelia's Notebook,' I'd sent it to traditional publishers I'd been working with, but nobody knew what to do with it. Tricycle was this small publisher who didn't know any better, and they took a chance.

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!

I know another New York Times bestselling author - Beth Kephart - she self-published one of her books.

The fact is that in this day and age I don't think any novelist can assume that a book will get attention.

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?

I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'

The idea is to become a best-selling author first and then the rest of my books will be slam dunks.

Contrary to popular belief, editors and agents are gagging for good books.

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

I know publishing now more as an author than with occasional peaks inside those elite offices than as an industry insider. It was difficult publishing a novel the first time around, while working behind the scenes, knowing all that has to happen to make a book a success and to still make the leap as an author.

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

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

If I'm writing books, I'm a 'New York Times' bestseller - how do I do it all? I don't know.

Each new book that comes out kind of pulls up the old ones a little bit.

Write the best book you possibly can, then dedicate yourself to getting people to read it.

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.

In the 1930s, all the novelists had seemed to be people who came blazing up into stardom from out of total obscurity. That seemed to be the nature of the beast. The biographical notes on the dustjackets of the novels were terrific.

I got lucky, and the first book, 'The Black Echo,' got published.

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.