Mark Millar Quotes

I had already drafted the manuscript that would become my first book by the time I graduated from college, but I had no idea what to do with it.

It used to be a lot easier to get a book deal.

I think you have to have a publishing house that offers you some support.

I had the easiest publishing experience in the entire world. I sent out fifteen courier letters to agents, got five no replies, nine rejections and one I want to see it. A month later I had an agent. Another month later I had a three book deal with Little Brown.

Don't do a hard sell or try to tell the agent that you're going to be a bestseller or the next John Grisham. This goes down very badly. If your work is good, then they are skilled enough to know this within a few pages.

I don't have a publisher yet, so I'm not in the process of that next stage and I don't know what that's going to look like. So I feel like I finished stage one [with my book].

I wrote a novel, Ghost Road Rules, and as soon as it was done and polished, I began reaching out to agents. I ignored the frequent advice to 'shoot low and try for a low-level agent because they're the only ones that will take a flyer on a new author.' That sounded like bad advice to me.

Many writers will get a contract by selling chapters and outlines or something like that. I wrote the entire novel, and when it was all finished, I would give it to my agent and say, 'Well, here's a novel; sell it if you can.' And they would do that, and it was good because I never had anyone looking over my shoulder.

I became a connoisseur of that nasty thud a manuscript makes when it comes through the letter box.

When you write a book for publication, you're writing it for other people to read.

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.

The usual way - through a long series of rejections, revising my manuscripts, and kept trying again and again. Finally I was fortunate enough to find a good agent.

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.

I never want to deal with a book once I'm finished writing.

One shouldn't say yes in desperation to the first publisher who approaches. New authors especially should wait and weigh their deal and agree only when they are sure that they have landed themselves a good offer.

As I see it, my job has always been to champion the work of the authors I publish.

I worked on 'Always and Forever, Lara Jean' for a few months before I breathed a word of it my editor or agent.

For a very long time, I thought everyone I met through the process of getting an agent and a publishing deal had made a mistake. When they agreed to pay me for the book, I thought they would ask me for the money back.

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

When a colleague of mine had a notable New York Times book, I said, turn one of the chapters in the collection into a pitch for a novel and sell it to your publisher.

Probably because I really love this bookmaking and storytelling world, I'd been thinking for years about the possibility of becoming a literary agent.

A publisher should always be on the receiving end. He should take an interest in almost any subject and remain anonymous, letting the author take center stage.

You don't sit up in a cave and write the Great American Novel and know it is utterly superb, and then throw it page by page into the fire. You just don't do that. You send it out. You have to send it out.

The wheels of publishing never slow down.

I got a couple of different contacts from publishing companies saying they'd be interested in a book about my work: not a kiss-and-tell book, which I specifically put in the contract. Just a book about my work and what I did.