Publishers Weekly Quotes

...graced by some delicate, perceptive and fine-boned writing, is at the heart of the book, and Creel gets it all just right. ~ Publishers Weekly

I'll read any anthologies or collection I can get my hands on. If I find a book mentioned in 'Publisher's Weekly,' and it looks like it will be dark, I'll track it down. ~ Ellen Datlow

Hitchcock's debut novel introduces 14-year-old Jessie Pearl, who endures more than her fair share of hardships, beginning with the death of her mother. Opening in 1922, the story follows the daily activities on the family's North Carolina tobacco farm. ...Hitchcock's story is gently and lovingly written, with elements drawn from her own family history. Its detailed honesty about the particular struggles of the period, especially for strong women (Maude, a no-nonsense midwife, is particularly memorable), is significant.
- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ~ Publishers Weekly

A laconic and highly entertaining" novel. "The characters are strong, each showing major evidence of being a product of their respective cultures. Overall, the story is a strong one, with a couple of well-executed twists that succeed in surprising the reader."

- Publishers Weekly judge for the 2014 ABNA Contest, Two Brides for Ewan de Buchan


"I love historical romance novels and this one right off the bat based on the plot/hook made me want to read more. I devoured this...and re-read it twice. It seems like the author has a very good handle on the time period in which this novel is set."

- 2014 ABNA Contest judge, Two Brides for Ewan de Buchan


"I think this is really well crafted and interesting. The plot/hook caught me from the first paragraph. The characters are well done and I really loved the novelist's attention to historical detail...It's a really great romance novel, and is of publication quality. This novelist has a real future in writing romance (or even general fiction) books."

- 2014 ABNA Contest judge, Two Brides for Ewan de Buchan ~ E. Elizabeth Watson

Dellosso's cleverly plotted second Jed Patrick novel (after 2015's Centralia) finds the Afghan war vet hiding with his wife, Karen, and their eight-year-old daughter, Lilly, in a cabin in the Idaho wilderness. Two months earlier, two CIA agents gave him a thumb drive containing "every damaging piece of information about the Centralia Project," the exposure of which threatens to cause a "scandal that would be talked and read about for decades to come." Then one day Jed returns to the cabin to find Karen in tears. She tells him that three armed men burst into the cabin asking for the thumb drive, but she didn't know where it was. The men took Lilly, and vowed they would return for Karen. More shocks follow. Meanwhile, CIA technician Tiffany Stockton discovers a plot to control Jed's mind in a sophisticated update of The Manchurian Candidate. Can she stop him from becomes an unwilling assassin? Dellosso expertly misdirects readers, but they should be prepared for only serviceable prose. ~ Publishers Weekly

LOUIS SACHAR is the author of the New York Times #1 bestseller Holes, winner of the Newbery Medal, the National Book Award, and the Christopher Award. He is also the author of Stanley Yelnats' Survival Guide to Camp Green Lake; Small Steps, winner of the Schneider Family Book Award; and The Cardturner, a Publishers Weekly Best Book, a Parents' Choice Gold Award recipient, and an ALA-YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults book. His books for younger readers include There's a Boy in the Girls' Bathroom, The Boy Who Lost His Face, Dogs Don't Tell Jokes, and the Marvin Redpost series, among many others. ~ Louis Sachar

This series opener offers an intriguing premise born from the bloody mythology of Central America…fans of mythology-driven stories will appreciate Dela's integration of Mayan/Aztec legends into an otherwise typical supernatural romance. ~ BookLife-Publisher's Weekly)

A library of mostly unread books is far more inspiring than a library of books already read. There's nothing more exciting than finishing a book, and walking over to your shelves to figure out what you're going to read next.
[The Wonderful and Terrible Habit of Buying Too Many Books, PWxyz (news blog of Publishers Weekly), February 16th, 2012] ~ Gabe Habash

I thought I'd go home and reread Sue Grafton. It's been a while since I last read the one about the topless dancer who gets poison injected into one of her implants."
"'D' Is For Cup."
"Right. Bern, you know what I wish? I wish she didn't have to stop at twenty-six. When the alphabet's used up, what happens to Kinsey?"
"Are you kidding? She goes straight into doublé letters. 'AA' Is For drunks, 'BB' Is For Gun, 'CC' Is For Rider. There was a whole list in Publishers Weekly a few months back. 'PP' Is For Golden Showers, 'ZZ' Is For Topp- I can't remember them all, but it looks as though she can go on forever."
"Bern, that's wonderful news."
"You'll be reading about Kinsey fifty years from now," I told her. "'AAA' Is for Motorists, 'MMM' Is for Scotch Tape. You'll never have to stop. ~ Lawrence Block

When the author is not traveling, he works at an L-shaped desk, which affords a view north through a large sunny window. He writes everything on an electric typewriter because "it has to be a book from the first day," he explains. He has no daily routine because of all the traveling he does, but follows a very disciplined writing process. He writes each page six times, then places it in a three-ring binder with a DePauw University cover ("a talisman," he calls this memento from his alma mater). When he feels that he has gotten a page just right, he takes out another 20 words. "After a year, I've come to the end. Then I'll take this first chapter, and without rereading it, I'll throw it away and write the chapter that goes at the beginning. Because the first chapter is the last chapter in disguise." He always hands in a completed manuscript, and his editor is his first reader. ~ Jennifer M. Brown

A lot of people know about the power of the WWE brand. We're in 145 countries in 30 different languages. We reach about 650 million households worldwide on a global weekly basis. But what they don't know about WWE is that we use all of that power to give back to the community through events like Hurricane Sandy Relief. ~ Stephanie McMahon

In Heaven all reviews will be favorable; here on earth, the publisher realizes, plausibility demands an occasional bad one, some convincing lump in all that leaven, and he accepts it somewhat as a theologian accepts Evil. ~ Randall Jarrell

I am very happily employed as a full-time software engineer; I travel a lot, and I write books along with this here weekly TechCrunch column; and I still find the time to work on my own software side projects. ~ Jon Evans

My publishers will make any kind of a beautiful book I design and send in to them, but ... For poetry they have less use than a rooster would have for skates. ~ Gene Stratton-Porter

It was necessary that I leave Schruns and go to New York to rearrange publishers. I did my business in
New York and when I got back to Paris I should have caught the first train from the Gare de 1'Est that would take me down to Austria. But the girl I was in love with was in Paris then, and I did not take the first train, or the second or the third. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Authors change publishers because it's like being married for a long time and suddenly you want to go out and have a wild affair! No, not seriously, sometimes the deal is more interesting with a new publisher, and other times they have more enthusiasm for your books. ~ Jackie Collins

My wife, Caroline Spector, and I pitched some comic ideas to various publishers back in the '80s, but nothing ever came of it. ~ Warren Spector

Filming a movie is different from a TV show because film is a lot quicker, you get to see the character progress and grow all in one script, and in television, you wait for a weekly update on each character. ~ Ariel Winter

All of the dissatisfactions he had felt in his practice of the art form he had stumbled across within a week of his arrival in America, the cheap conventions, the low expectations among publishers, readers, parents, and educators, the spatial constraints that he had been struggling against in the pages of Luna Moth, seemed capable of being completely overcome, exceeded, and escaped. The Amazing Cavalieri was going to break free, forever, of the nine little boxes. ~ Michael Chabon

Once publishers got interested in it, it was a year in developing, and it was launched, I think, in 1960. But Willie Lumpkin didn't last long - it only last a little better than a year, maybe a year and a half. ~ Dan DeCarlo

When you are uncomfortable with the tasks you are ignoring in favor of the urgency of the moment, guilt, mental angst, and frustration build up. To solve this, you need to make a conscious choice between the preplanned and the seemingly urgent at the moment. Then, renegotiate any timeline agreements with yourself. This simple and conscious mental alignment combined with the elevated perspective of the weekly review is enough to regain control and relax your mind in the face of daily surprises. ~ 2 Minute Insight

As I get older, I'm finding that I recognize certain celebrities only because they frequently grace the pages of US Weekly, but beyond that, I have no idea what they do. ~ Laurie Foos

For the last fifty years or so, The Novel's demise has been broadcast on an almost weekly basis. Yet it strikes me that whatever happens, however else the geography of the imagination might modify in the future in, say, the digital ether, The Novel will continue to survive for some long time to come because it is able to investigate and cherish two things that film, music, painting, dance, architecture, drama, podcasts, cellphone exchanges, and even poetry can't in a lush, protracted mode. The first is the intricacy and beauty of language - especially the polyphonic qualities of it to which Bakhtin first drew our attention. And the second is human consciousness. What other art form allows one to feel we are entering and inhabiting another mind for hundreds of pages and several weeks on end? ~ Lance Olsen

We flew down weekly to meet with IBM, but they thought the way to measure software was the amount of code we wrote, when really the better the software, the fewer lines of code. ~ Bill Gates

I started with small-press publishers, who were willing to publish all sorts of forms. I didn't move to the larger presses until they knew what they were getting in for. ~ Lydia Davis

It's a strange irony that most people who are truly creative don't really know where their ideas come from. To be a writer, just like all crafts, is an art form. You can take evening classes in writing at the local library, where you go along every Tuesday night and read out your weekly piece, and that can serve to improve your expertise a little, but to be a Wrong Planet writer you have to first of all be an artist. The art of searching for words radiates from deep inside the writer, and I truly feel that when a true writer is sitting quietly at his desk his movements are beautifully interwoven. His breathing will even come with an effortless grace. The ability to move fluidly in his study in this manner begins with a truly intuitive knowledge, although if the truth were known, there's a little bit of insanity in the writer that does everyone an awful lot of good. ~ Karl Wiggins

I think most new writers are better off going with traditional publishers who will actually, at a minimum, edit your work, package it well, and market it for you. ~ Ellen Datlow

For many citizens, libraries are the one place where the information they need to be engaged in civic life is truly available for free, requiring nothing more than the time to walk into a branch. The reading room of a public library is the place where a daily newspaper, a weekly newsmagazine, and a documentary film are all available for free. In many communities, the library's public lecture room is the only place to hear candidates for office comparing points of view or visiting professors explaining their work on climate change, immigration or job creation. That same room is often the only place where a child from a family without a lot of money can go to see a dramatic reading or a production of a Shakespeare play. (Another of these simple realities in most communities is that a big part of public librarians job is to figure out how to host the community's homeless in a safe and fair manner.) Democracies can work only if all citizens have access to information and culture that can help them make good choices, whether at the voting booth or in other aspects of public life. ~ John Palfrey

HarperCollins Publishers Inc. ~ John Burley

When I was 26, I wrote my first mystery, 'The Thomas Berryman Number', and it was turned down by, I don't know, 31 publishers. Then it won an Edgar for Best First Novel. Go figure. ~ James Patterson

Out past the weekly glimpsed windows, out past the street, lived the world, which had, Old Mrs. Karafilis knew, been dying for years. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

That the Op-Ed page is very important in readers' and the nation's perception of the Times, the perception of its editorial positions, and of its implicit editorial positions as expressed by the publisher's choice of people who are given the freedom to write opinion columns. ~ Daniel Okrent

Inspired by the purse rather than the soul, the mercenary side fairly screams in many of the works put out by every day American publishers. ~ Alma Gluck

When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers. ~ Doris Lessing

Anne of Green Gables was cuddled up next to Huckleberry Finn; The Hunchback of Notre Dame was wedged tightly between Heidi and Little Women; and Nicholas Nickleby leaned in a familiar way against A Girl of the Limberlost. None of the books were in alphabetical order, which made it necessary to cock my head sideways to read each one of the spines. By the end of the third shelf I had begun to realize why librarians are sometimes able to achieve such pinnacles of crankiness: It's because they're in agony. If only publishers could be persuaded, I thought, to stamp all book titles horizontally instead of vertically, a great deal of unpleasantness could be avoided all round. ~ Alan Bradley

Don't cry for publishers, paper books ain't dying. ~ Declan Conner

Haven't you noticed, too, on the part of nearly everyone you know, a growing rebellion against the present? And an increasing longing for the past? I have. Never before in all my long life have I heard so many people wish that they lived 'at the turn of the century,' or 'when life was simpler,' or 'worth living,' or 'when you could bring children into the world and count on the future,' or simply 'in the good old days.' People didn't talk that way when I was young! The present was a glorious time! But they talk that way now.

For the first time in man's history, man is desperate to escape the present. Our newsstands are jammed with escape literature, the very name of which is significant. Entire magazines are devoted to fantastic stories of escape - to other times, past and future, to other worlds and planets - escape to anywhere but here and now. Even our larger magazines, book publishers and Hollywood are beginning to meet the rising demand for this kind of escape. Yes, there is a craving in the world like a thirst, a terrible mass pressure that you can almost feel, of millions of minds struggling against the barriers of time. I am utterly convinced that this terrible mass pressure of millions of minds is already, slightly but definitely, affecting time itself. In the moments when this happens - when the almost universal longing to escape is greatest - my incidents occur. Man is disturbing the clock of time, and I am afraid it will break. When it does, I leave to ~ Jack Finney

A lot of publishers have close relationships with people in power. So the press, which used to speak truth to power, doesn't. The big result of that has been the erosion of trust. ~ Craig Newmark

Yeah! "I love you" is subject to the law of diminishing returns; like one or two other critical weekly elements of a relationship, it loses a bit of thrilling value every time you get it out.' ... That's what happens with "I love you", that same phrase that you once shouted Hollywood or Heathcliff-like in the lashing raining, now- now you are saying it dumbly at the end of every phone conversation, a follow-on from," I'll be back for dinner." Once it came out spontaneous rush, it forced itself out; now it's reflex. ~ David Baddiel

From your "due date" calendar, write down a weekly to-do list of twenty or fewer key items. Each night, create the next day's daily to-do list from the items on the weekly to-do list. Keep it to five to ten items. Try not to add to the daily list once you've made it unless it involves some unanticipated but important item (you don't want to start creating endless lists). Try to avoid swapping out items on your list. ~ Barbara Oakley

NumbersUSA's work was critical to derailing the 2007 comprehensive federal immigration bill, which had, at that point, received the support of President Buch, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the high-tech industry, the Catholic Church, immigrant-advocacy organizations, and several industries reliant on immigration labor, including farming, food services, and construction. During the weeks leading up to the floor vote on the bill, NumbersUSA coordinated weekly phone calls with the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus, mobilized its members to engage key senators, and provided those senators with information and arguments necessary to oppose the bill. Several actors, including pro-immigrant advocates, restrictionists, and members of Congress, have credited NumbersUSA with causing the collapse of the bill in the Senate. ~ Pratheepan Gulasekaram

Being with a small publisher has been huge. They bat for me for everything. ~ Steven Amsterdam