Publishing Business Quotes

You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You've been backstage. You've seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a ­romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.

Publishing is a business, but journalism never was and is not essentially a business. Nor is it a profession.

Publishers are in business to make money, and if your books do well they don't care if you are male, female, or an elephant.

As time has gone on and we're at the end of the 20th century and major publishing is a big business, yes, of course we're going to get a lot of plain, mediocre trash. There are a lot of writers who get huge advances for books that don't go anywhere and they have to burn them somewhere or throw them away. I always think about all the poor trees that have been sacrificed.

Print-on-demand and electronic self-publishing options have made it easy for anyone to set up a business as a publisher whether they know what they're doing or not.

The profession is never going back to those days when a handful of wealthy people treated publishing like a hobby: one where the business can lose money because the family has lots of it to burn. Frankly, I don't think that model was ever sustainable, and it really only enriched a small number of writers.

I've never seen a worse situation than that of young writers in the United States. The publishing business in North America is so commercialized.

[Mark] Twain was a publisher. He published General Grant's Memoirs (a big success) and had a hand in the publishing of many of his own books. He would, I think, be very keen about the question of how a book would sell.

Publishing is a business of relationships. The relationships you make at one house can carry over to another.

I've always felt writing is an art. Publishing is a business. I felt strongly if I was going to write, I would write what I wanted to, and if the 'market' didn't respond, there was nothing I could really do about it.

If what we want to do is promote reading and writing and publishing and making sure this is a business that keeps going - because it is a business! It's not just an art - then we have to take responsibility. I get sort of crazy and frothy when I think about this. It really matters.

The publishing industry, unsurprisingly, is full of different people who love different things and express that love in different languages. Find the people, the editors and agents, with whom you share some language, and some sense of what makes literature worth reading.

I have several writer friends, but I don't involve them in my work process. I'm more likely to talk about the business of publishing with them.

Sometimes writers say true things about the overall nature of publicity, promotion, and the publishing industry; but alas, not always.

With the big publishers, they publish 50 books and promote five.

I begin early in the morning and edit everything I wrote the previous day. I write until mid-afternoon. My goal is to write a chapter per week, and if I am not finished by Friday, I write on the weekend. I get a lot of fan emails and answer them every day. In the late afternoon, I attend to the business of publishing, etc.

Publishing is a business, and I completely understand it. But when you don't have to depend on writing for your identity or your income, you can do whatever you want.

Then l learned to play guitar and l started writing songs and my mother formed for me a publishing business, so we started publishing and managing artists.

I have students that I tell, "If your book doesn't sell or you can't publish it, write another book. Quit sitting around." The publishing world is a business, but it's not any big deal. An editor is not your guru. Your agent is not your guru.

Publishing is a very mysterious business. It is hard to predict what kind of sale or reception a book will have, and advertising seems to do very little good.

Publishing is a business. It's about squeezing every last dollar out of every available source, and the most vulnerable source is the author. No clearer proof of that exists than the 'standard' book contract.

The publishers, as I remember at the very beginning of my career, wrote letters with their fountain pens. A letter is different from a phone call or fax. It's a different kind of intimacy. That pervaded the entire business of writing and publishing.

At heart, Pearson is in the intellectual property business, be it through publishing books or the 'Financial Times'.

The strange thing is, we never owned our own publishing; it was always getting bought and sold.

My mother obviously was in the publishing business.