Book Selling Quotes

The Internet is disrupting every media industry...people can complain about that, but complaining is not a strategy. And Amazon is not happening to book selling, the future is happening to book selling.

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

Very early on in the process of trying to sell 'The Summer Prince,' I was told, 'Slavery seems to be very important to this society - is that on purpose?' Well, duh.

I like to have fun out there. I work hard, and then I get to cut loose and go out and tour, and I enjoy it. I like to go out and meet the people. I love to sell books.

I don't like it when I see my books sold cheaply.

We sell books, other people sell shoes. What's the difference? Publishing isn't the highest art.

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?

A boy has to peddle his book.

My bookshelves have no order. I prune them regularly and sell the books to Myopic Books, a Chicago bookstore. They give me store credit, and then I spend all the store credit, and, presumably, return to sell them back more of the books I bought from them.

I'm all for selling books, but when guys are burning my house down, that's where I draw the line.

Jeff Bezos was one of those best and brightest who came to N.Y. to work in finance. He didn't need to know anything about retail bookselling to start Amazon.

We need to write books that publicists and marketers and booksellers and book club leaders and librarians and readers can get excited about. That have something about them that makes them stand out. That makes them shine.

A writer can spend a decade working obsessively on a novel, but in the commerce of publishing, many of the most important decisions about any book will be made based on very short pitches - from literary agent to editor to sales rep to bookstore buyer to a potential reader standing in the bookstore, asking, 'What's it about?'

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'm going to go do this crazy thing. I'm going to start this company selling books online.

Selling books is hard to engineer.

I think I'm more marketing- and sales-oriented than others, and the notion of selling books continues to interest me.

I worked at a Books-a-Million in Louisville for several years.

You're gay, you sell books... you probably shag the books.

Books seem to me to be pestilent things, and infect all that trade in them...with something very perverse and brutal. Printers, binders, sellers, and others that make a trade and gain out of them have universally so odd a turn and corruption of mind that they have a way of dealing peculiar to themselves, and not conformed to the good of society and that general fairness which cements mankind.

I am not a total, complete nitwit when it comes to selling books. I promise you there will be unexpected things. Some of them I don't know yet. She's writing it all herself.

I have been told by an eminent bookseller, that in no branch of his business , after tracts of popular devotion, were so many books as those on the law exported to the Plantations .

Writing blurbs for books means you have to read the book, and it cuts into the business of bookselling. So every time I get a blurb from a bookseller, I try to write a thank you note.

I remember Stephen King did a fundraiser one time with J.K. Rowling and he was very impressed with her. But we talk a lot about publishing, bookselling, and book writing. He's been around for ten years longer than me and was a bestseller right off the bat. And he's seen and done everything. It's rare to be with somebody who has been through all of that.

I'd like to sell a lot of books.