Publishing Quotes

If they didn't stop this, she was going to come
embarrassingly quickly.
Possibly even right now.
Not to mention the fact she never let men she barely knew unzip her and suck on her nipples. ~ Amy Andrews

I wrote a blog post about how the book is different from the blog and why I chose to go the self-publishing route. I wrote guests posts for blogs like Techcrunch, which helped immensely and for which I'm very grateful. I used my social networks: Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google+, Quora, and Pinterest. ~ James Altucher

Writing a book and not publishing it, is like building a boat and never sailing it - UNTHINKABLE! ~ Tony Jones

Book-publishing is all about politics. Agents, editors, which books will be puffed, which ignored, etc. ~ Alexander Theroux

If you enjoy knocking self-publishing writers, write something better first, then, knock on! ~ Robert Scott

I thought, 'Okay, what's going to be my edge, and how am I going to define what I'm doing differently?' Once I had that key idea of the software developer as an artist, once I had that idea, a whole bunch of other ideas flowed from that, because I realized that I need to go study the music industry, I need to study the book publishing and Hollywood and figure out how they do things, why they do them that way, and then I need to borrow, and rearrange, the things that they're doing to fit my industry so that I can invent and create this new industry. ~ Trip Hawkins

You can't judge a book by it's cover but you can sure sell a bunch of books if you have a good one. ~ Jayce O'Neal

Lately, because computer technology has made self-publishing an easier and less expensive venture, I'm getting a lot of review copies of amateur books by writers who would be better advised to hone their craft before committing it to print. The best thing you can do as a beginning writer is to write, write, write - and read, read, read. Concentrating on publication prematurely is a mistake. You don't pick up a violin and expect to play Carnegie Hall within the year - yet somehow people forget that writing also requires technical skills that need to be learned, practiced, honed. If I had a dollar for every person I've met who thought, with no prior experience, they could sit down and write a novel and instantly win awards and make their living as a writer, I'd be a rich woman today. It's unrealistic, and it's also mildly insulting to professional writers who have worked hard to perfect their craft. Of course, then you hear stories about people like J.K. Rowling, who did sit down with no prior experience and write a worldwide best-seller...but such people are as rare as hen's teeth. Every day I work with talented, accomplished writers who have many novels in print and awards to their name and who are 'still' struggling to make a living. The thing I often find myself wanting to say to new writers is: Write because you love writing, learn your craft, be patient, and be realistic. Anais Nin said about writing, "It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it bre ~ Terri Windling

I should have my own publishing companies. ~ Solomon Burke

The Death of Jesus 28Later, knowing that everything had now been finished, and so that Scripture would be fulfilled, Jesus said, "I am thirsty." 29A jar of wine vinegar was there, so they soaked a sponge in it, put the sponge on a stalk of the hyssop plant, and lifted it to Jesus' lips. 30When he had received the drink, Jesus said, "It is finished." With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. ~ Zondervan Publishing

Pain was a wild animal, not to be held in a fenced yard, or a house, or a shoe box, or a heart, where it would only do damage. Finn ~ AP Publishing

The original idea of blog publishing was that writer and reader would be on the same level. That it would be a conversation - not a lecture. People lost sight of that. We didn't. Kinja is designed to break down the walls of the ghettos. So that everybody - editor, writer, source, subject, expert, fan - can be a contributor. ~ Nick Denton

I bless / all knowledge of love, all ways of publishing it. ~ Mona Van Duyn

We have a massive system to regulate creativity. A massive system of lawyers regulating creativity as copyright law has expanded in unrecognizable forms, going from a regulation of publishing to a regulation of copying. ~ Lawrence Lessig

Yet the history of media shows that this is just the modern incarnation of the timeless complaint of the intellectual elite, every time technology makes publishing easier, that the wrong sort of people will use it to publish the wrong sorts of things. ~ Tom Standage

I felt the comics grew because they became the common man's literature, the common man's art, the common man's publishing. ~ Jack Kirby

London thou art a jewel of jewels, & jasper of jocunditie -- music, talk, friendship, city views, books, publishing, something central & inexplicable. ~ Virginia Woolf

Commerce is abusive. It's very hobbling to always be saying, 'Please let me put this out, this thing I've worked on for years.' It's like a nasty parent saying, 'No! Now go to your room.' As publishing companies got bigger, you felt even less significant. ~ Patti Davis

Publication - is the auction of the mind ... ~ Emily Dickinson

Honestly, the essence of publishing hasn't changed. Since the days of the cave man carving stuff on the cave walls, people have wanted stories, and storytellers have wanted an audience. That is still the case. The changes are really a matter of format. ~ Susan Wiggs

As the Kindle's dread grip on digital publishing is challenged by tablet computers and Android smartphones, with their bright screens and high resolution, the need for illustration is growing. ~ Chris Riddell

I think the online space can be a free space, in that we are not reliant online on the publishing industry or readers who just don't get it. ~ Kate Zambreno

the Supreme Alpha Male it's my duty to protect them, so I created this island ~ Curvy Love Publishing

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves - the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public - has stopped being a problem. ~ Clay Shirky

The road to publishing success is paved with writing. ~ David John Griffin

Whatever you may have heard, self-publishing is not a short cut to anything. Except maybe insanity. Self-publishing, like every other kind of publishing, is hard work. You don't wake up one morning good at it. You have to work for that. ~ Zoe Winters

I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Programs has a temporary results leading to nothingness, and the Gospel the brings the result of Eternal life. ~ Tommie Scott

I believe that this notion of self-publishing, which is what Blogger and blogging are really about, is the next big wave of human communication. The last big wave was Web activity. Before that one it was e-mail. Instant messaging was an extension of e-mail, real-time e-mail. ~ Eric Schmidt

Still, I kept writing. I had no guarantee that I would someday win awards for writing. Heavens, the only person during that time who seemed to think I could write something worth publishing was my loyal husband. But I always remembered the professor from graduate school who urged me to write and who recommended me for that first writing assignment in 1964. When I protested to Sara Little that I didn't want to add another mediocre writer to the world, she gently reminded me that if I didn't dare mediocrity, I would never write anything at all. ~ Katherine Paterson

Once a discovery has been published, there is no way of un-publishing it. ~ Nick Bostrom

Federal and state agencies are another possible candidate for this long-term preservation role when it comes to published materials. In the United States, the Library of Congress and the National Archives play major preservation roles, but neither institution can reasonably claim to hold a complete record of our cultural and scientific legacy - especially in an era when much of the publishing takes place on the web. ~ John Palfrey

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. ~ James Salter

Who is better off? The one who writes to revel in the voluptuousness of the life that surrounds them? Or the one who writes to escape the tediousness of that which awaits them outside? Whose flame will last longer? ~ Roman Payne

Quotes › Authors › D › Damian Barr › The stories we tell ourselves about...

The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are very often not really what happened. And as I started to write stuff down, I started to challenge what I thought I knew about myself, my culture, my family, all of it. It was a huge, destroying process that completely took over my life. I just wasn't here, I mean I was physically present, but I wasn't here, I was back in the 1980s. ~ Damian Barr

You have to consistently work at building your audience or platform. ~ W. Terry Whalin

I am really very grateful for this Award. It is one of the first given to a woman, and to two women at that. When I first started getting work published, I used to have wistful thoughts at the way all important awards were given to men. Women, I used to think, could be as innovative, imaginative and productive as possible - and women were the ones mostly at work in the field of fantasy for children and young adults - but only let a man enter the field, and people instantly regarded what he had to say and what he did as more Important. He got respectful reviews as well as awards, even if what he was doing - which it often was - was imitating the women. But you have changed all that.
Thank you for being so enlightened.
Women, large-minded, formidable women, have played an almost exclusive part in helping my career. I have hardly ever dealt with a man - at least, when it came to publishing: ~ Diana Wynne Jones

Still, to be urged to write and to be urged to publish are two different things and nobody so far was urging her to do the latter. ~ Alan Bennett

A publishing house is a fragile organism, dear sir," he says. "If at any point something goes askew, then the disorder spreads, chaos opens beneath our feet. Forgive me, won't you? When I think about it I have an attack of vertigo." And he covers his eyes, as if pursued by the sight of billions of pages, lines, words, whirling in a dust storm. ~ Italo Calvino

Writing is such a solitary occupation that it takes a long time to build up a group of professional peers with whom you genuinely identify. ~ Sara Sheridan

I often think publishing a book is like doing a poo. Once it's ready for the world, you have to relinquish that control and let nature take its course. A few will be impressed by your creation, others will be disgusted. Plus, no one will enjoy your success and achievement in producing it as much as you did. ~ H.O. Charles

One of the best book marketing tips I can give you is simply building relationships - well that and publishing more books. ~ Heather Hart

No book or magazine article is for "everyone" so know your audience, then target them with your writing. ~ W. Terry Whalin

It was one of the realities of publishing: what was truly new often languished in the warehouse nearly unasked-for. One of the tricks of publishing was catching the wave of public taste at the right moment. ~ Jonathan Galassi

I like businesses in transition, first of all. If ever there were a business in transition, it is publishing. ~ Barry Diller

If the man screwed like he kissed she was a goner ~ Amy Andrews

For a while I never show anybody what I'm writing, and during that time I need the feeling that publishing is only an option. I might publish this, I might not. I think if I had to publish it, I might panic. ~ Daniel Kehlmann

First one gets works of art, then criticism of them, then criticism of the criticism, and, finally, a book on The Literary Situation , a book which tells you all about writers, critics, publishing, paperbacked books, the tendencies of the (literary) time, what sells and how much, what writers wear and drink and want, what their wives wear and drink and want, and so on. ~ Randall Jarrell

There's a cardinal rule in book publishing that applies equally to brain surgery and auto mechanics: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Since people are still buying the original Where Is God When It Hurts? ~ Philip Yancey

I'm feeling more and more thoughts that aren't songs, just reflections. I'm always been very shy and in some ways a prisoner in one language and I feel that the liberation of creativity has to be in all senses. So I've been deciding to publishing something very simple but very small at the same time, nothing egocentric. ~ Ana Tijoux

It's a funny thing, really, me publishing a book.... I've had so many people tell me it was stupid or impossible or that I wouldn't never rise to such an occasion, but then -laughs- here I am: A Published Author. ~ Molly Lynn Robinson

Writing is about you. Publishing is about the book. Marketing is about the reader. ~ Joanna Penn

It's a difficult path that we tread, us Indie self-publishers, but we're not alone. How many bands practicing in their dad's garage have heard of a group from the neighbourhood who got signed by a recording company? Or how many artists who love to paint, but are not really getting anywhere with it hear of someone they went to art school with being offered an exhibition in a gallery? How many chefs who love to get creative around food hear of someone else who's just landed a job with Marco Pierre White?
There's no difference between us and them. There is, however, a huge difference in how everyone else perceives the writer. And there's a huge difference between all of us – the writers, the musicians, the composers, the chefs, the dance choreographers and to a certain extent the tradesmen - and the rest of society in that no one understands us. It's a wretched dream to hope that our creativity gets recognised while our family thinks we're wasting our time when the lawn needs mowing, the deck needs painting and the bedroom needs decorating.
It's acceptable to go into the garage to tinker about with a motorbike, but it's a waste of a good Sunday afternoon if you go into the garage and practice your guitar, or sit in your study attempting to capture words that have been floating around your brain forever. ~ Karl Wiggins

Don't give up. Research like crazy. Join a writer's organization. Read books on the publishing world. It all helps! ~ Darynda Jones

Writers are the lunatic fringe of publishing. ~ Judith Rossner

Both outer and inner phenomena arise as a result of causes and conditions. Outer phenomena, the things of the physical world, arise in a series of seven steps. The texts use the example of a seed giving rise to a plant that gives rise to a fruit. The seven steps are: seed, sprout, leaflets, stemmed plant, bud, flower, fruit. Each stage succeeds the previous one in time and in order, each giving rise to the next. ~ Dharma Publishing

A friend of mine suddenly announced she had written a novel and got a publishing deal; I thought, 'Hang on ... if she can do it, I can bloody well do it, too.' That novel went to a bidding war, and went on to be a huge best-seller. ~ Jane Green

Console game publishing has become more like theatrical release film-making and it is very hard if you are not one of the major publishers, and even for them it is hard unless they are working with major game brands. ~ Trip Hawkins

If anyone had told Joss last week that she'd be dry humping a twenty-seven-year-old she'd met only five days prior in the bathroom of the loft above her garage, she'd have committed them for psychiatric evaluation. But here she was and she could not get enough.
Her body throbbed with need. Maybe she needed committing? ~ Amy Andrews

It is proper Netiquette to post pictures with status updates to make them more engaging. NetworkEtiquette.net ~ David Chiles

Publishing would be so wonderful without those wretched authors. ~ Jonathan Galassi

I've been willing to go for years without publishing. That's been my career. ~ Marguerite Young

Avoid the RTP Syndrome. When you rush to Publish, you rush to mistakes and chaos. Guaranteed. ~ Judith Briles

Whenever the end is
Do you think you can see it?
Well, until you get there
Go on, go ahead and scream it
Just say it ~ Hal Leonard Publishing Company

A person who wrote badly did better than a person who does not write at all. A bad writing can be corrected. An empty page remains an empty page. ~ Israelmore Ayivor

They needed to develop an interest in the world, they needed social contact and to develop an aspiration to improve their wellbeing before we had any chance of persuading them to become involved in self-managing their health and wellness. ~ FlatBear Publishing

I think the search engines are the new equivalent of publishing: an enabler of information. ~ James Dyson

For twenty years I have sat alone at a desk tinkering with sentences and then sending them out, and for most of my literary life the difference between throwing something in the trash and publishing it was imperceptible... ~ Rebecca Solnit

Other than being an artist, I've also wanted to be a writer since I was able to read. The simple fact is that I've aslo been a writer my whole life. Thanks to the magic of blogs and self-publishing, anyone can be a writer now. In fact, even before all of these new and exciting outlets became available anyone still could be a writer. It's actually a simple process. Just begin writing. You don't need anyone's permission, or a degree; hell, you don't even need an audience. Just write. The act of writing makes you a writer. So now that I've completed this book, I dub myself an Official Writer. ~ Cee Jay Inky Jones

I cannot replace an idol by turning away from it. I must turn toward something. As ~ Zondervan Publishing

I write the books I want to write. I'm delighted if they sell well and I'm not expecting my publishers to just keep giving me money, but there's no way I want to bow to commercial pleasure. I mean, there's plenty of people publishing very good commercial stuff. If my stuff is commercial that's great, but it's not why I write. ~ Michèle Roberts

When a liberal professor takes enormous intellectual liberties by openly promoting an ideological agenda to his students, the cry of academic freedom rings across the quads. But when a conservative professor is punished for publishing an article in a politically incorrect journal, there is no defense of intellectual diversity. What is billed as academic neutrality turns out to be a smoke screen for the relativistic liberal agenda.

Today's relativists could not have gotten away with their double standards in a culture that prized truth. But a gradual, sustained assault on truth has been carried out through the soft underbelly of Western culture: the arts. In film, music, and television, the themes of sensual pleasure and individual choice have drowned out the tried-and-true virtues of faith, family, self-sacrifice, duty, honor, patriotism, and fidelity in marriage. Cultural mechanics have wielded their tools to dull the public's sense of reasonable limits. In an Age of Consent, the silly and the profound are becoming indistinguishable. ~ Gary L. Bauer

Hold on, baby." He slid his hands under her ass before rising to his feet. Harper gave a little squeal as she held tight. "I'm going to make you come so hard you're going to want to name a day of the week after me. ~ Amy Andrews

New information and communications technologies can improve the quality of life for people with disabilities, but only if such technologies are designed from the beginning so that everyone can use them. Given the explosive growth in the use of the World Wide Web for publishing, electronic commerce, lifelong learning and the delivery of government services, it is vital that the Web be accessible to everyone. ~ William J. Clinton

I think the publishing industry is dismayingly like the movie business. It grows more corporate by the day. ~ Matthew Specktor

It began to falter not when the book publishers who loved books gave way to those who preferred profits to reading. It happened when publishers and editors cut back on their drinking. If there is one national flower in book publishing, it is the martini. ~ Al Silverman

In TIME June 7, 2010
On the sustainability of the publishing industry, in the Chicago Tribune:
"I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea. We live in a literate time, and our children are writing up a storm, often combining letters and numbers ... The future of publishing: 18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood relatives. Average annual earnings: $175." - 5/26/10 ~ Garrison Keillor

Though the publishing industry swears the market is oversaturated, books written by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and by embedded journalists keep on coming. ~ Matt Gallagher

I know well enough that very few people who are supposedly interested in writing are interested in writing well. They are interested in publishing something, and if possible in making a "killing." They are interested in being a writer not in writing ... If this is what you are interested in, I am not going to be much use to you. ~ Flannery O'Connor

Suddenly I could control every aspect of publishing, and it was incredibly empowering! I didn't have to sit by the phone any longer waiting for things to happen because I was the one making them happen. That's why I decided to start Amber House Books. ~ Teresa Medeiros

I remember going into a bookshop, and the only book I saw with a black child on the cover was 'A Thief in the Village' by James Berry, and I thought, 'Is this still the state of publishing?' Then I thought, 'Either I can whine about it or try to do something about it.' ~ Malorie Blackman

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. ~ M.J. Rose

The successful publishing house is the one that can guess ahead, not the one that imitates the past. ~ Helen Jacobs

[On working with James Joyce:] So, either you run your publishing business far away, where your writer can't get at it, or you publish right alongside of him - and have much more fun - and much more expense. ~ Sylvia Beach

My belief that the publishing industry is run by prigs and cowards dates back to many years before I even had the idea for the book. ~ Jessa Crispin

I will continue to write what I love to read, and the fact that it doesn't sell as well as romance or sci-fi or fantasy isn't the point. ~ Joanna Penn

The wisdom in publishing is that short-story collections don't sell. All too often short-story collections are viewed as vanity projects or are published by small presses, are not seen as real in the way that novels are real. Still, for me, the short stories are the places where I get to fly, to experiment, to play. I ~ Neil Gaiman

I lived through a classic publishing story. My editor was fired a month before the book came out. The editor who took it over already had a full plate. It was never advertised. We didn't get reviewed in any major outlets. ~ Anita Diament

Being self-published makes me no less "published" than the authors who are with publishing companies. ~ Adrienne Thompson

I have finally reverted the publishing rights for my Cocoon Trilogy back to me and, for the first time, e-published the final book - Butterfly: Tomorrow's Children. Cocoon, the movie and the book, was only the beginning. ~ David Saperstein

Stay the night, don't stay the night. I'm not going to read anything into it, okay? If you want to hang out, then I'm around. Your call. I'm not going to boil your pet bunny or tell Facebook you have a small dick, I promise. ~ Amy Andrews

Dream up a book on Monday, publish it on Friday. ~ Jill Novak

The hardest thing about writing a novel is getting it published. ~ Marianne Cushing

I wish that the act of publishing a book was less of a nerve-wracking experience. ~ Charlie Huston

A comic book publisher says he's trying to increase voter turnout in the presidential election by publishing comic books about John McCain and Barack Obama. Yeah, the publisher said that the election comic books are targeted at first-time voters and long-time virgins. ~ Conan O'Brien

Now, grip the bull tight with your thighs." She dutifully tensed her thighs. "Not tense. Grip. Real hard with your whole thigh." His voice dropped, his lips pressing in closer to her ear as he murmured, "I know you know how to do that."
A surge of heat shot from her core. Didn't he know she was having a hard enough time sitting on the damn thing as it was without sexual innuendo messing with her equilibrium? She shot him a don't-make-me-get-off-this-thing look but gripped.
Hard.
"Atta girl," he whispered.
Joss gritted her teeth. "Don't push your luck, cowboy. ~ Amy Andrews

Another Brownell adage that Perkins subscribed to was that the worst reason for publishing anything was that it resembled something else, that however unconscious, "an imitation is always inferior. ~ A. Scott Berg

Marketing isn't sleazy car salesman tactics.
Marketing isn't tricking people into buying.
Marketing isn't unethical.
Marketing isn't intrusive self-promotion.
Marketing is two things: (1) creating lasting connections with people, through (2) a focus on being relentlessly helpful. ~ Tim Grahl

Actively, we are motivated by the never-ending desires of the self. We are compelled to pursue whatever the self imagines will satisfy its desires. We are convinced that satisfaction of desire is the source of true happiness.
Yet the very nature of desire does not permit happiness. Like trying to quench one's thirst by drinking salt water, satisfying desire only stimulates the flow of desire. In the wake of fulfillment, desire once more stirs and reaches out. There is never lasting satisfaction, not even completion. ~ Dharma Publishing

McSweeney's as a publishing company is built on a business model that only works when we sell physical books. So we try to put a lot of effort into the design and production of the book-as-object. ~ Dave Eggers