Chad Harbach Quotes

Buying new books supports the writer by providing both a royalty and an audience; a writer whose book sells well has a better chance of selling another.

Some books and authors are best sellers, but most aren't. It may be easier to self-publish than it is to traditionally publish, but in all honesty, it's harder to be a best seller self-publishing than it is with a house.

Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.

My first YA novel, not many people have read. It's a fickle business. There's a degree of timing and luck involved.

No one was interested in picking up a midlist series, even though I have a decent fanbase and respectable numbers.

The fact is that in this day and age I don't think any novelist can assume that a book will get attention.

The moment I said I'd finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who'd got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I'd written Harry Potter. That would have been why.

You know, it's sort of common wisdom among New York publishers that short story collections don't make money.

The idea is to become a best-selling author first and then the rest of my books will be slam dunks.

I know publishing now more as an author than with occasional peaks inside those elite offices than as an industry insider. It was difficult publishing a novel the first time around, while working behind the scenes, knowing all that has to happen to make a book a success and to still make the leap as an author.

The big bestsellers aren't being created by Barnes & Noble.

Debut novels are difficult because nobody knows you... they just don't find a huge audience, because that's how the market works.

When I started writing, the deal was that publishers gave you a grand or two as an advance to buy some sweets, with the promise that they would make a big putsch with your fourth book when you'd built up a bit of a following. But by the time my fourth book came out, previously unpublished authors were the new big thing.

Writers aren't in competition with one another. It isn't a zero sum game. If you have a good book, a good cover, a good product description, and a low price, you can sell well.

As soon as I finish a book, I sell the paperback rights to different publishers and that's where I recoup my money.

When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.

Literary life used to be quite different in Britain in the years I lived there, from 1971 to 1989, because money was not a factor - no one made very much except from U.S. sales and the occasional windfall.

I've never seen a worse situation than that of young writers in the United States. The publishing business in North America is so commercialized.

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

Sadly, I don't think books ever sell based on your name alone - the minute we make an assumption like that is the minute it all goes horribly wrong!

I know another New York Times bestselling author - Beth Kephart - she self-published one of her books.

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.

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

I know some authors who have gotten $25,000 advances and put it all into marketing, others who allocate $5,000 or $1,000.

I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'