Book Rights Quotes

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

'The Dovekeepers' is a fantastic novel written by Alice Hoffman; it was a bestselling novel, and I fell in love with the book and bought the rights to it.

Stephen King told me a long time ago, when he gave me some advice about the movies. He said to take the money up front and expect it to be something different than the book and if you don't like that don't deal with Hollywood. But if you take the money, shut up and don't criticize the film because you sold it. The movie doesn't change a word of the book.

I've thought of publishing a book of my hate mail, but I don't own the rights to the letters.

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

Fox bought the rights to the book way back when, and there was this attempt by Fox to make a movie out of 'The Hot Zone,' and it tended tragically in a Hollywood disaster involving Robert Redford and Jodie Foster and Ridley Scott. But the rights have been sitting at Fox ever since.

Slamming the book shut produces a wind on the face, a weather that is copyrighted by the author, and this wind may not be deployed without permission, nor may the pages be turned without express written permission.

I thought I had the rights to The Lord of the Rings. I don't know how Jackson ended up with the rights.

I never actually sought out an agent or a publishing house. A friend of mine named David Simmer got wind of what I was doing, and he sent one of my books to a literary lawyer in Los Angeles. He loved it, and he sent it to other people, including an agent, and he picked me up, and that's how 'Bird Box' got to where it is now.

I bought the rights to this book, 'The Ploughmen,' by a Montana writer named Kim Zupan, and I've written the screenplay, and I really feel pretty strong about it. It's really hauntingly beautiful. It's got some suspense and great drama, but it's a real character thing.

I turned down all the requests for the rights to the books, for years, mostly because they wanted the rights to the characters, and to turn it into a TV series. This would have allowed them to do anything they wanted with the characters, and that just wasn't an option for me.

Selling a book or story has never become absolutely automatic for me.

Some people are just so happy to get published to, they sign anything. Next thing you know, they've signed over the rights to their book.

I can't stand it when writers moan about what film-makers might do or have done to their books. There's a very simple answer: don't take the money.

The standard publishing contract is replete with clauses that strip authors of control over their books.

I fell in love with the book [ Brief Interviews with Hideous Men] and always wanted to do something with and fought to get the rights, which was pretty fun and an incredible experience in itself.

Matthew Vaughn phoned me up and he said, "Hey, listen, the movie has just done gangbusters. We've got to do the second one." And I was like, "Matthew, I have no second book. Dave and I haven't done it," and he's like, "You're kidding!" He said, "This movie's just made $420 million!" I was like, "...We've got nothing." So the amazing thing was, because we own the rights, we still get paid and everything, which is fantastic.

Bantam Press. And they commissioned me to write it. And when that was completed, they sold it to Harper and Row. And then I put it out to every movie studio in town. And they all turned it down.

The following Wednesday, I opted to go with Random House.

There's a lot more to publishing a book than writing it and slapping a cover on it.

Authors of books are not given very much control over the films that are made from their books.

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

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.

A friend of mine, Neil Gaiman, had the film rights to his book 'Stardust' bought by producer Matthew Vaughn and suggested I adapt it for the screen.