Heather Brooke Quotes

One question that often comes up is why, in this age of blogs and tweets and instant digital communication of all kinds, it still takes so long to publish a book.

I worked in publishing before I became an author, so I knew how a book gets made.

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.

There's a lot more to publishing a book than writing it and slapping a cover on it.

It takes a long time to publish a book.

You want to publish with a publisher because a publisher knows how to publish a book. And you don't. You really don't.

Books are such quiet things - created in silence, read in silence - yet publishing a book has become a very noisy business. I've been noisy, too. I felt like I had to be in order to connect with my readers.

Each of my books has taken me a different length of time to write - eight months for 'Seesaw Girl,' eight months for 'Shard,' three years for 'When My Name Was Keoko!' The publisher takes another year and a half to work on the book, so altogether each book can take up to three or four years to publish.

Speak to any editor and ask them what they turned down, and they'll have long lists of books.

The wheels of publishing never slow down.

A publisher - and I write as one - does far more than print and sell a book. It selects, nurtures, positions and promotes the writer's work.

Even after the text is written, there are a tremendous number of stages along the way to the finished book. If a publisher cares about the finished product, none of them will be omitted.

When I was growing up the publishing world seemed so far away. When my mother wrote a book, she would look up the address of publishers on the backs of the books she owned and send off her manuscript.

Kindle Singles is publishing on skates. It prints like lightning; our book meets readers in hours. I've spent so many years waiting for publishers to consider whether they wanted to print a book of mine, making contracts, taking months to fit it into the Fall list or the Spring list, fitting it into an advertising plan.

Every single one of my books had its title changed almost as we were going to press, for all sorts of different reasons.

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.

The process of writing a book is so removed in my mind from the process of publishing it that I often forget for great stretches that I eventually hope to do the latter.

Save yourself some grief. Check with the publicist you hire to see what other books he/she has coming out at the same time as yours.

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

I publish my own books, so there isn't a certain editor I owe the book to at a publishing house.

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.

We had to figure out how to produce books in a cost-effective way.

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 lived through a classic publishing story. My editor was fired a month before the book came out. The editor who took it over already had a full plate. It was never advertised. We didn't get reviewed in any major outlets.

Bantam Press. And they commissioned me to write it. And when that was completed, they sold it to Harper and Row. And then I put it out to every movie studio in town. And they all turned it down.