Katie Kitamura Quotes

Japan, Germany, and India seem to me to have serious writers, readers, and book buyers, but the Netherlands has struck me as the most robust literary culture in the world.

I've never seen a worse situation than that of young writers in the United States. The publishing business in North America is so commercialized.

Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.

I would very much like to become a best-selling author.

I guess if one set of my books was selling like Stephen King's, and the other wasn't selling at all, editors would want me to do the ones that sold like Stephen King's. But they seem to be willing to let me pick what I want to do next.

It's not like publishing is perfect. Far from it. The industry is struggling to adapt and survive, and it's incredibly frustrating trying to break in.

It's great that in the German language I've sold almost 30 million books. Isn't that amazing?

No one was interested in picking up a midlist series, even though I have a decent fanbase and respectable numbers.

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

The moment I said I'd finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who'd got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I'd written Harry Potter. That would have been why.

You know, it's sort of common wisdom among New York publishers that short story collections don't make money.

As publishers focus on blockbusters, they steadily lose interest in little-known authors from other countries.

My first novel was turned down by about twenty publishers over a period of two and a half years. Because my name is Irish and would not be familiar to English editors, one of them said: 'If she writes anything else, do let us know.' Slowly, very slowly, the books began to sell and be noticed.

If you're going to write a book that might, in its very best accidental career, sell 30,000 copies, you've got to have a day job.

Today, there are more opportunities for writers in terms of access to larger success, but it's more difficult to publish a literary novel in the lower ranges. In other words, you almost have to hit a home run. You can hit a triple, maybe, but nobody's interested in a single.

You know, in the old days, you might be able to slowly sort of build an audience for your work by publishing two, three novels before you hit it big. You know, now, there's much more of an emphasis in the publishing houses on making sure that every book makes money.

There are 2,000 young-adult novels published a year, and hardly any of them ever break out.

Books on horse racing subjects have never done well, and I am told that publishers had come to think of them as the literary version of box office poison.

For me to be a billion-dollar author, I need to have people buying my books at Wal-Mart.

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.

This book, 'Stupid White Men,' has sold now over four million copies worldwide. Probably about half of that may be in the U.S. and Canada, and the rest, overseas.

My book sales make 'real writers' possible.

I had a very realistic expectation of the level of success that it was possible to attain writing romance novels.

I'm just happy to have some American readers - enough that it's a viable proposition for my books to appear there.

The big bestsellers aren't being created by Barnes & Noble.