Terry Pratchett 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.

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

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.

Advances have fallen, generally, for everything except the biggest potential bestsellers. Given all the changes, both economic and technological, SF hasn't done too badly.

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

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.

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

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

No one knows why books do well.

There's so much published by so many different publishers. Most of the time, I don't have to confront that, but walking into a conference center filled with books - and people buying them or not buying them, being interested or not interested in them - that's just overwhelming to me now.

Most new books drop immediately into the oblivion they so richly deserve.

I thought to myself, 'why not write a bestseller?' In the first place, more people buy them and more people read them. You make more money and it doesn’t take any more time to write a bestseller than it does to write a book nobody buys.

I should be sorry to think it was the publishers themselves they got up this entire little flutter to enable them to unload a book that was taking too much room in their cellars, but you can never tell what a publisher will do. I have been one myself.

If you're looking for a book that will spike in sales and then go away and then spike again when it comes out in paperback, your normal model, I definitely won't give you that.

Making books has always felt very connected to my bookselling experience, that of wanting to draw people's attention to things that I liked, to shape things that I liked into new shapes.

I'd like to sell a lot of books.

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

Not all new books carry endorsements, and I wouldn't say that blurbs are indispensable for marketing.

Kids books Grownup books That's just marketing. Books are books.

What more do I need to say? Conservative books sell. I can't help it if liberal books don't sell.

The book trade invented literary prizes to stimulate sales, not to reward merit.

The publication of a book only brings very paltry results to its author.

There can hardly be a stranger commodity in the world than books. Printed by people who don't understand them; sold by people who don't understand them; bound, criticized and read by people who don't understand them; and now even written by people who don't understand them.

The current publishing scene is extremely good for the big, popular books. They sell them brilliantly, market them and all that. It is not good for the little books. And really valuable books have been allowed to go out of print. In the old days, the publishers knew that these difficult books, the books that appeal only to a minority, were very productive in the long run. Because they're probably the books that will be read in the next generation.

I think people need to remember that a book isn't done after a few rewrites and a publisher isn't going to buy an 'undone' book so the hard part is making it a book that at least ten other people want to pay for to read.