Book Distribution Quotes

Barnes & Noble, along with other independent bookstores, are refusing to stock Amazon Publishing titles. They'll order books from the online retail giant if customers ask, but bookstores have so far declined to be 'showrooms' for Amazon.

Publishing a book is a very different thing than writing one.

As part of my research for An Anthology of Authors' Atrocity Stories About Publishers, I conducted a study (employing my usual controls) that showed the average shelf life of a trade book to be somewhere between milk and yoghurt.

I am hoping to work with writers publishing books for first time, since I of course remember what that experience is like. It's all a bit of a mystery for new authors who don't know what to expect.

Always I'm working on some of book. That's the way I make a living.

One, I have a wonderful publisher, Black Sparrow Press; as long as they exist, they will keep me in print. And they claim they sell very respectable numbers of my books, so I guess, and it's true, every place I go, my books are in libraries and on bookshelves.

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

I publish my own books, so there isn't a certain editor I owe the book to at a publishing house.

The one thing which we were left almost wholly without, during the war, was literature. Nobody thought of importing books through the blockade, to any adequate extent, and the facilities for publishing them, even if we had had authors to write them, were very poor indeed.

I honestly thought I probably did sell 100 million books. That doesn't seem out of the ordinary to me.

At present, however, I don't think the Net is a very good medium for books, books should really be inexpensive lightweight paperbacks you can bang around.

If I'm on the road for Random House, I'm presenting a book with the hope people will buy it.

The connection between authors, printers, and booksellers must be kept up.

Digital books and other texts are increasingly coming under the control of distributors and other gatekeepers rather than readers and libraries.

Just for me - obviously, not all writers think this - but for me, I feel like seeing my book in Target and Barnes & Noble is pretty successful.

For as to the dispersing of Books, that Circumstance does perhaps as much harm as good: Since Nonsense flies with greater Celerity, and makes greater Impression than Reason; though indeed no particular species of Nonsense is so durable. But the several Forms of Nonsense never cease succeeding one another; and Men are always under the Dominion of some one or other, though nothing was ever equal in Absurdity and Wickedness to our present Patriotism.

My parents were in the book business, my brothers still run the Dutton bookstores in Los Angeles, and I've been interested in editing books and journals all of my life.

I worked in a bookstore in Oslo, importing the English-language books.

I find it hard to think of myself as selling books. I don't even have a Web site. I want to sit and write, not sell.

Writing books isn't a drastic departure from writing for the stage.

I do send out information about my books. Very few people buy the books that way, but I always feel that if they want to know more about the process, they can get the information from my books.

If you want to publish two books a year under your own name and your publisher doesn't, maybe you need a different publisher.

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

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 think I'm gonna attach myself to the sinking ship that is book publishing.