Author Royalties Quotes

I don't mind saying, you know, that I don't take a salary from the church, and God has blessed me with more money than I could imagine from my books.

Teaching other people to write is not something I can do. The only kind of advice I can give them will be trite by its nature. Of course, read a lot, write a lot. The kind of advice I wish I had been given is all of a practical nature, having to do with publishers and agents.

Most writers can write books faster than publishers can write checks.

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.

I've had good publishers and bad publishers, and you've got to learn when the advice is sensible and when it's not.

I know there's a lot of talk about self-publishing right now. Everyone's giddy with the possibilities. And I'll admit that it looks good on paper: sell your books directly and keep a bigger chunk of the profit for yourself. No rejection letters. No hassle with agents. Sounds good, right?

I am writing my second novel for children for Simon and Schuster.

Having books published is very destructive to writing.

If you're looking for a book that will spike in sales and then go away and then spike again when it comes out in paperback, your normal model, I definitely won't give you that.

If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly.... You are paid for being something less than a man. The state does not commonly reward a genius any more wisely. Even the poet laureate would rather not have to celebrate the accidents of royalty. He must be bribed with a pipe of wine; and perhaps another poet is called away from his muse to gauge that very pipe.

Book publishing was never a heaven "run by editors", and it is by no means today a hell "run by accountants." If our "sole interest" was "instant profit," not only would we never do any number of the things we actually do every day, we probably wouldn't be in book publishing at all.

I think there is a huge difference between writers who have very big sales, and writers who have small sales. Even writers with very high reputations, even Nobel prize winners, often sell in very low figures.