Book Retailers Quotes

Which is the healthier kind of literary diversity: an un-gate-kept self-published book world, run substantially through Amazon? Or our current book world, which is part-gate-kept, part-not, with many different publishers and retailers and platforms? I'm not smart enough to figure it out, but if I had to guess I'd guess the latter.

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

As long as we have Netfix, Turner Classic Movies, Amazon, YouTube, and bookstores, there is no excuse ever to lack inspiration.

Booksellers initially thought of Amazon as their best friend. They were coming in, and they were challenging Barnes and Noble, and Borders, which were the big, dominant corporations of the day, and that they would disrupt them and make them less powerful, but they could never envision that Amazon would overtake them all.

I think of my books as mainstream and that's were most people who read them look for them in book stores.

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 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.

I want my books sold on airport bookstalls.

The marketplace for books when I entered the business shortly after World War II consisted of a thousand or so well stocked independent booksellers in major towns and cities supplemented by thousands of smaller shops that carried limited stocks of mostly current titles along with greeting cards, toys and so on.

Sometimes people who sell books are seen as corporate salesmen, and people who sell reading are seen as literacy advocates, but you can't really separate the two.

I know how to sell books.

When you're making a print book in 2012, I actually think the onus is on you - and on your publisher - to make something that's worth buying in its physical edition.

Selling books is hard to engineer.

When I talk to booksellers, they tell me how hard it is to hand-sell some of my books because I do keep popping around.

I've drunk Amazon's free Diet Coke. Nothing makes more sense to me than a company trying to make bookselling into a profitable business. I'm not anti-Amazon, and I'm not pro-publishers either. I'm pro-books.

I'm very privy to the way bookstores work, and I think a lot about the ecosystem that my books have been published in. I think it's great to be aware of how publishing works.