Chris Pavone Quotes

There's almost no author alive who isn't weathering the tumultuous changes in the publishing industry.

To make a bestseller, there are more customers than just your customers: Selling to the end-user is just one piece of the puzzle. In my case, I needed to first sell myself to the publisher to get marketing support and national retail distribution.

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?

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.

It's hard selling books in general: companies are merging, editors being laid off, bricks-and-mortar bookstores closing, large chain bookstores squeezing out independents, and online retailers squeezing out chain bookstores.

With the big publishers, they publish 50 books and promote five.

According to my royalty statements, 'The Green Progression' sold 392 copies in hardcover.

As for indie writers, a lot of them don't realize that they're in the hurry-up-and-wait business, not the wait-and-hurry-up business. They work really, really, really hard at goosing the first-month sales, and then getting disappointed when those sales either go down or never happen in the first place.

A writer can spend a decade working obsessively on a novel, but in the commerce of publishing, many of the most important decisions about any book will be made based on very short pitches - from literary agent to editor to sales rep to bookstore buyer to a potential reader standing in the bookstore, asking, 'What's it about?'

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

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.

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

While some of the big publishers might give out 200,000 advances, if your book does not hit some of the lists in the second week, they stop paying attention to you.

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

For years I'd understood that publishing in paperback was the kiss of death.

I am hoping to work with writers publishing books for first time, since I of course remember what that experience is like. It's all a bit of a mystery for new authors who don't know what to expect.

In my ideal world, my next novel would have a first printing of, say, 2,500 hardcovers for reviewers, libraries, collectors, and autograph hounds. The publisher could print more copies if they get low. And simultaneously, or six weeks later, the book would be available in paperback.

And books that were published in much larger numbers than Selfish, Little are hard to find. And publishers who wanted to publish my last few works have them stuck in limbo while new distribution ideas and legal issues and fears are blown away.

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.

Estimates are that in 2012, more than 32 million books were available - the explosion, thanks to the ease of self-publishing; 2013 could see even more titles grace our virtual bookstores! That means we are going to be awash in covers and titles, plot descriptions and characters.

I do send out information about my books. Very few people buy the books that way, but I always feel that if they want to know more about the process, they can get the information from my books.

Early in my publishing career, someone told me I'd need to have five books in print before I could quit my job as a journalist. Turns out it was closer to 10 books. It also turns out that while it's great to see my titles on bookstore shelves, my best customers are schools and libraries.

I'm very privy to the way bookstores work, and I think a lot about the ecosystem that my books have been published in. I think it's great to be aware of how publishing works.

I myself don't know what makes my books work. I enter a bookstore and I'm frankly overwhelmed by the number of books in most of them, and I know people are buying mine.