Tony DiTerlizzi Quotes

I have worked with several art directors and production designers who are just magnificent. Dave Getz, Paul Felix, Ian Gooding... just amazing artists, and I would say, if I had anything to do with it, I just pick good artists!

Developing a new designer colouring book with Laurence King has been a real passion project of mine.

The art editor in charge of the covers at the 'New Yorker' is Francoise Mouly. She's very familiar with the eccentricities and personalities of cartoonists, so working with her is very easy.

A typical agent in New York gets 400 query letters a month. Of those, they might ask to read 3-4 manuscripts, and of those, they might ask to represent 1.

I'm not sure how writers and artists of other graphic novels join forces, but this is how the process worked for me: First, I produced my final script. Then, Mark Siegel, my editor at First Second, assembled information about 10 or 12 different artists and had me look through their portfolios to see what kind of styles appealed to me.

A magazine is not just one person. And a fashion shoot is the same!

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

If you want to send a manuscript, send it to an agent. And send a letter first, asking permission. Launch it into the real world of cold-blooded commercial response, not into the fantasyland of wishful thinking, cowardice and surrender to Resistance.

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.

We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.

My wife Victoria Harwood was art director on 'Far North,' and she had designed my student film, 'The Sheep Thief.'

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.

People generally don't recognize how long it takes to conceive, publish, and write a book.

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.

It takes a long time to publish a book.

The first version of The Beautiful Room Is Empty was the first mss. I'd ever submitted to New York editors.

My husband, a.k.a. Swede, and I both come from athletic backgrounds, so once we identified the goal - get book published - we attacked it. At any given time, I would have my writing out in 25 various forms - either contests, mentoring critiques, agent/publisher queries, etc.

When I work as an art director, I don't ask to see sketches from illustrators or photographers. I give them a basic idea, and then I say, 'Send it to me, it'll be fine' - I get out of the way.

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 have very talented art directors in my agency who start out telling me, 'Well, this is what the picture is... ' I ask, 'Well, what's the headline?' and they say, 'We haven't done that yet, but it looks this way.' But I'm still writing copy, almost every day.

God of War' was a 40-60 person team. It was a lot of very different, very passionate, very crazy people.

Music needs a visual element to make it tangible. So, naturally, there's gonna be a synergy between high-level art direction and high-level albums.

At every writers' conference, you have the opportunity to hear from best-selling authors, top literary agents, and excellent editors who will demystify the publishing industry and give you great advice, no matter where you are in your writing career or what you're currently struggling with.

All of the things we learned on 'Coraline' we applied to 'ParaNorman,' and all of the things we learned on 'ParaNorman' and 'Coraline' we applied to 'The Boxtrolls.'

When I wrote my first book, I was too scared to find out how people got books published. I was convinced that you needed some sort of magical potion that I didn't have.