Robin Sloan Quotes

The first paragraph of my book must get me my reader. The last paragraph of a chapter must compel my reader to turn the page. The last paragraph of my book must ensure that my reader looks out for my next book.

Nowadays, everyone seems to have a blog that finds readers.

Publishers should use the paperback side to leverage the ebook side.

I think the book business is really sitting on the greatest moment in the history of time. We are providing the stories to the hungry public. We have more avenues to do it than ever before.

Apple doesn't need to maximize book sales. It simply needs to keep publishers happy enough to maintain an impressive-sounding inventory of titles while waiting for entirely new forms of publishing to develop.

It's a good time to be in the content business though, the branded content business.

People read me but they don't subscribe.

All the marketing and advertising sells the book as what it is and hopes that the book will be displayed so that your readers can find it.

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

I am stunned by how much time and effort I must spend marketing my book and interacting with my readers. With social media, you don't just publish a book and figure you've done your part; your fans want to talk to you, have a conversation.

One of the things that is counterintuitive about BuzzFeed is that there's not a natural corollary to what we're doing because it isn't possible to distribute content through word-of-mouth in print.

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.

The first thing you learn when you're blogging is that people are one click away from leaving you. So you've got to get to the point, you can't waste people's time, you've got to give them some value for their limited attention span.

We all know about blogs and how big they are.

I've worked with many large and small publishers, and nearly all of them love the value that Instapaper provides to their readers.

But I care about the reader, and I'm trying to keep the reader's attention for as long as I can.

One of the nice things about publishing with Amazon is that the window for marketing is much longer than with a traditional publisher because these titles are not coming off of shelves.

I knew people were independently publishing, and I buy books on Amazon. I began seriously considering it when Amanda Hocking was in the news about her self-publishing success.

When I was first writing 'Feed' - which was the first book I published as Mira - I talked about it very openly on my blog, on Twitter, that I was writing this book, and it wasn't until after it was sold that I said 'Mira Grant' wrote this book. And the reason there was really purely marketing-based.

Digital platforms are worthless without content. They're shiny sacks with bells and whistles, but without content, they're empty sacks. It is not about pixels versus print. It is not about how you're reading. It is about what you're reading.

Online publication is fine with me, in part because I hope to collect those stories later.

I think 'The Time Traveler's Wife' is one of the most brilliantly marketed books I have ever seen.

A blurb might bring a reader to a book, but then the book itself has to do the rest of the work.

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.

The first chapter sells the book; the last chapter sells the next book.