Chad Harbach Quotes

When I started out in the early 1930s, there were a great many magazines that published short stories. Unfortunately, the short-story market has dwindled to almost nothing.

New York is the Hollywood of the publishing industry, complete with stars, starlets, suicidal publishers/producers, intrigues, and a lot of money.

You know, in the old days, you might be able to slowly sort of build an audience for your work by publishing two, three novels before you hit it big. You know, now, there's much more of an emphasis in the publishing houses on making sure that every book makes money.

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

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.

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

If you're going to write a book that might, in its very best accidental career, sell 30,000 copies, you've got to have a day job.

You come out of your MFA program with a cogent clutch of stories, trying to get an agent interested, and she or he admits these are quality, sure, but this agent actually needs something the publisher can make money on. So you get kind of bullied by the market into writing a novel.

Today, there are more opportunities for writers in terms of access to larger success, but it's more difficult to publish a literary novel in the lower ranges. In other words, you almost have to hit a home run. You can hit a triple, maybe, but nobody's interested in a single.

The novel is just fine: It's novelists who aren't doing so well.

On the other hand, now that I'm not dependent on fiction for my income, I've been writing more short stories despite the fact that there's no real paying market for short horror other than Cemetery Dance.

There are 2,000 young-adult novels published a year, and hardly any of them ever break out.

If you look at the publishers I've worked with, generally, they're a great bunch. Creation is unlike any other publishing house you can think of. The people I've worked with have integrity and intelligence and, almost always, less money than ideas.

Most publishers seem very reluctant to publish short story collections at all; they bring them out in paperback, often disguised as novels.

I had a very realistic expectation of the level of success that it was possible to attain writing romance novels.

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

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.

Like pretty much every short story writer, I submitted to every market under the sun and hoped for the best. The rejection letters I've collected over the years can probably make a book of their own.

[Mid-list writers are now] less greed on the part of both publishers and chain booksellers. It is easier for them to publish and sell only blockbusters and leave the real work to small presses.

Seventeen publishers rejected the manuscript, at which time we knew we had something pretty hot.

I think the path to becoming a writer has become more through the novel. It's easier to get a novel published than a book of stories, obviously, especially through big publishers.

My biggest luck was the Terry McMillan era, because what happened after the phenomenon of 'Waiting to Exhale' is that publishing woke up. They said, 'Wow. Black people do read.'

Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.

It's taken me 15 years to feel I might be able to write and publish short stories, and for the assiduous checks of the industry to allow some through.

Despite what you hear about the publishing industry being a fixed game that you can only get in if you know somebody, I'm here in person to tell you it ain't so. If your stuff is really any good, sooner or later some editor will take a chance on you.