Publication Challenges Quotes

Nobody told me how hard it was going to be to get published. I wrote four novels that nobody wanted, sent them out all over, collected hundreds and hundreds of rejection slips.

In some ways, getting published in children's literature is a little more open than publishing adult literature. It's less hinged on who you might know.

Of course all children's literature is not fantastic, so all fantastic books need not be children's books. It is still possible, even in an age so ferociously anti-romantic as our own, to write fantastic stories for adults: though you will usually need to have made a name in some more fashionable kind of literature before anyone will publish them.

A smart, intellectual magazine is a difficult thing to run because of the need to manage conflicting personalities and opinionated writers who clash constantly, whose clashes make the publication better. It is exhausting and draining, and honestly, the only thing that's harder is probably running a university.

If you write a written book, you're gonna get slowed up by lawyers wanting to see what you say about this person, that person - I couldn't be bothered with it.

The resistance to my work, and to my way of writing, has been there from the beginning. The first things I wrote were these short short stories collected in At the Bottom of the River, and at least three of them are one sentence long. They were printed in The New Yorker, over the objections of many of the editors in the fiction department.

The hard fact is that not everyone does get published.

It took a brave editor in the U.S. to sign a contract for Dancing Girls, and without her belief in the book, I'm not sure it would ever have found its way into print.

I see so many talented writers of color struggling to get their work out to an audience. I know that's the case for all writers - everyone's struggling for attention - but I do think that for writers of color it's harder, and for women it's harder, and for regional writers it's harder, too.

I got a couple of stories published, but the kind of money you were making for publishing a short story, I could see I wasn't going to make a living at it.

I always had good recognition from the Southern writers, but the publishers never took any notice of that.

Most of my books have caused distribution and printing problems in the past.

For a professional writer in the Soviet Union, it works this way. First, you have to have something to say - that's the main thing. Second, it's a matter of who publishes you. If your book has real stuff in it, readers will ferret it out, even in a Siberian journal.

We were constantly appealing for funds from readers when I edited 'The Black Dwarf' in 1968-69.

I have to declare in all candor that no one interested in being published in our time can afford to be so naive as to believe that a book will make it merely because it's good.

Especially with a magazine like Lampoon, which was very dependent on newsstand sales. Our readers didn't usually occupy the same address long enough to get a subscription, because they were in college, or they were hippies. So it was very up-and-down, and we had to calculate how many to print, which was always sort of a headache from a business point of view.