Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Publishers Quotes from famous authors such as C. S. Forester, John Burdett, Patrick White, Michael A. Stackpole, Mark Millar. Let’s look at these pieces of wisdom. We definitely have something to learn from them!
1
I formed a resolution to never write a word I did not want to write; to think only of my own tastes and ideals, without a thought of those of editors or publishers.
2
I think it is immensely difficult to get the U.S. interested in non-U.S. topics. I don’t think this is because the average American reader is disinterested, but more because of publishers playing it safe: if a thriller based in L.A. is a sure winner, why spend money plugging one based in Paris – or Bangkok?
3
I left for New York expecting to repeat my success, only to be turned down by almost every publisher in that city, till the Viking Press, my American publishers of a lifetime, thought of taking me on.
4
Authors can easily produce ebook versions of novels and shorter work which publishers don’t own.
5
The books are all very, very different so the publishers really had to be different too.
6
Third-party publishers, like everyone, face increasing risks associated with creating games, and you have to target your resources to the right places and the right platforms.
7
It is important to send your work to as many publishers as possible. For every one publisher who may show interest in your work, there will be at least five who will reject you.
8
Self-publishing has been a dubious challenge to traditional publishers, at best.
9
Writers want publicity all the time, and they are always nagging their agents and publishers to give them more publicity, but, when you get it, it’s kind of soul-destroying.
10
For inexperienced, small developers, getting funding from big game publishers can be a Sisyphean task.
11
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.
12
Ages ago, when I published ‘Amelia’s Notebook,’ I’d sent it to traditional publishers I’d been working with, but nobody knew what to do with it. Tricycle was this small publisher who didn’t know any better, and they took a chance.
13
When you’ve finished reading every last thing by a famous writer, literary convention holds that you move on to his or her letters, the DVD extras peddled by publishers.
14
It was all a back-handed blessing, and my friends were the ones who kept the faith, read my work, and urged me to submit it to publishers (by sending it out for me – they would not hear no for an answer.
15
The impossibility of a sequel ever recapturing everything – or anything – about its ancestor never stopped legions of writers from trying, or hordes of readers and publishers from demanding more of what they previously enjoyed.
16
When I started writing, the deal was that publishers gave you a grand or two as an advance to buy some sweets, with the promise that they would make a big putsch with your fourth book when you’d built up a bit of a following. But by the time my fourth book came out, previously unpublished authors were the new big thing.
17
Just why I sent it to the publishers would be hard to say, but when I had finished it I felt that it was literature, because it is real and because it was well written. And I know that the world wants such things.
18
Paper publishers are doing everything they can to slow the transition to eBooks because, in a digital world, paper publishers’ high hardback margins essentially disappear.
19
I make a good living selling hardback books through paper publishers, and I have many friends in the industry who will suffer as it changes, so on a personal level, the transition to digital isn’t something I welcome wholeheartedly.
20
I’ve worked with many large and small publishers, and nearly all of them love the value that Instapaper provides to their readers.
21
Barnes & Noble is able to publish price-reduced non-copyrighted works not so much because it saves the 10 percent to 15 percent of revenue that would go to the gruel-eating authors, but because it saves the 50 percent that would go to the publishers.
22
With the big publishers, they publish 50 books and promote five.
23
I think I’m from the 18th century, not even the 19th. I don’t even use a typewriter. I prefer longhand, and that’s how I submit my manuscripts to my publishers.
24
There were a lot of publishers that I loved, so the book went to auction. An auction is where you sit nervously by your phone and eat potato chips for two days waiting for your agent to text you numbers of the highest bid for each round. I ultimately went with Dervla Kelly at Rodale Books.
25
I don’t tend to do category fiction very well. One of my problems when I was starting off was that publishers were hesitant to handle my books because they were never sure what I was going to do next.
26
There were eleven publishers in New York City, and when it was all over, I think it went down to four or five, and then finally just the three of them, the Big Three.
27
Except for a few small presses, most publishers are north of Ground Zero.
28
People have bad things to say about publishers, but I think they still have services, and I want to see what they are. And if they end up not being any good, I don’t have to keep using them.
29
Don’t write the book you think publishers want to commission. Plenty of other writers will be doing the same thing.
30
Roku collects money two ways: by selling hardware, which it calls ‘players’; and by selling advertising and taking a cut of revenues from the video publishers on its platform.
31
According to New York publishers, Bill Clinton will get more money for his book than Hillary Clinton got for hers. Well, duh. At least his book has some sex in it.
32
Every famous writer was once an unknown writer. If publishers never published new writers, they wouldn’t be publishing anyone at all after a while.
33
Apple doesn’t need to maximize book sales. It simply needs to keep publishers happy enough to maintain an impressive-sounding inventory of titles while waiting for entirely new forms of publishing to develop.
34
Publishers often push women in a subtle way to focus on fantasy and paranormal writing.
35
The digital revolution has wrest a little control away from corporate publishers and white, male, middle-aged critics, but the financial value put on the job of the writer and the misconceptions around that make it extremely difficult to enter the profession.
36
Nintendo has been a very unique company because it’s not just hardware but also one of the major software publishers. Because it is in a unique position, it’s given us a unique advantage.
37
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.
38
The requests for blurbs seem to come in waves. I’m not sure what precipitates them. I think it must be excruciating for editors to draft those elaborate letters asking for a blurb, and I know it’s torturous for us writers to ask directly. But publishers encourage us to. Rock and a hard place.
39
I’ve stopped reading about the death of books because it’s wasteful and morbid and insulting to the authors, agents, publishers, booksellers, critics, and readers that keep the world community of fiction interesting.
40
Most publishers seem very reluctant to publish short story collections at all; they bring them out in paperback, often disguised as novels.
41
When I first started editing a ‘Year’s Best’ volume in the ’70s, the job was pretty straightforward – there were three or four monthly magazines to read and a few original anthologies from trade publishers every year.
42
Publishers can use realtime ad technology to build their brand on the realtime web. Realtime ad technology gets their hottest content in front of users seconds after it is published, ensuring that their content gets shared and becomes viral before their competitors.
43
Publishers are very risk-averse, so they lean towards licenses and sequels. But the fact is that even those are not guaranteed hits. So, if ‘playing it safe’ does not guarantee hits, they might as well leave it up to the really creative, risk-taking people, because they couldn’t do any worse.
44
Sure, the labels and publishers get the rights for songs to be remade into a ringtone. So part of what we do is to work with those content owners to make sure that there are rights in place for every piece of content to be made into a ringtone.
45
Books on horse racing subjects have never done well, and I am told that publishers had come to think of them as the literary version of box office poison.
46
We’d love to do Space Ace 3D. It has a lot of potential. But, it is really up to the publishers.
47
My first novel was turned down by about twenty publishers over a period of two and a half years. Because my name is Irish and would not be familiar to English editors, one of them said: ‘If she writes anything else, do let us know.’ Slowly, very slowly, the books began to sell and be noticed.
48
Agents are essential, because publishers will not read unsolicited manuscripts.
49
The things that have really gotten confusing to me is how you balance the desires of your publishers to produce things on a schedule, and people are always sort of giving you ideas on what you should follow up with or how you should proceed next and things like that.
50
The digital apocalypse continues to blight the lives of television producers, music-industry executives and newspaper publishers, all of whom are scrambling to figure out how to reconfigure their business models in such a way as to allow them to make an honest buck.
51
Publishers, editors, agents all have one thing in common, aside from their love of cocktail parties. It’s an incredible taste and an ability to find and nurture authors.
52
I think in daily newspapers, the way comic strips are treated, it’s as if newspaper publishers are going out of their way to kill the medium.
53
I try to keep all my novels in print. Sometimes publishers don’t agree with me as to their worth.
54
Publishers see free downloads as threatening the sales of the book.
55
I believe I’m a better writer now than I was when I started. I’m grateful that I had good guidance because you don’t make it in this business without good editors and a lot of support from your publishers.
56
In general, when I’m writing, I concentrate on the story itself, and I leave it to other people, such as agents and publishers, to work out who it’s for.
57
People really love editorial cartoons, and I think publishers understand that.
58
I do see an interest in writing for Twitter. While publishers still do love the novel and people do still like to sink into one, the very quick form is appealing because of the pace of life.
59
Many’s the dead author whose body of work has been marred by overzealous publishers or family members. If this happens to me, I vow to seek out the responsible parties and haunt them to the point of death.
60
For years, I’ve pushed the idea of a column compilation book mainly because it would be easy – I could just staple ’em all together. But publishers have been resistent, feeling the material dates.
61
After an author has been dead for some time, it becomes increasingly difficult for his publishers to get a new book out of him each year.
62
Think of ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.’ It is equally intoxicating for children and adults. All this ‘crossover’ talk is something publishers are using as a selling device – a kind of post hoc rationalisation of what was happening already.
63
Comics fans want new stuff that looks exactly like the old stuff. It is hard for the publishers, and even the audience, to change something.
64
I don’t even like showing my stuff to publishers and editors much.
65
Any anxieties publishers have about putting a child on the front cover of a book who isn’t white is very old fashioned.
66
I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels.
67
When I left the Senate in 1979, there were several publishers who had approached me about writing an autobiography, and I knew that politicians write books for many reasons, but at that time, I just thought I wasn’t ready and my story wasn’t over, and I knew I had a new life ahead of me.
68
When there are fewer and fewer publishers of scale, it’s just not good for authors.
69
There’s so much published by so many different publishers. Most of the time, I don’t have to confront that, but walking into a conference center filled with books – and people buying them or not buying them, being interested or not interested in them – that’s just overwhelming to me now.
70
Are companies like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter open technology platforms or publishers with curated content? For years, Big Tech giants have tried to have it both ways, exploiting special legal protections to enrich themselves while behaving like publishers without the liabilities.
71
I’m delighted about the track’s success in the sports world, but the frustrating thing is, I don’t think I got rich on it. The labels and publishers did very cheap deals on our songs.
72
We are forced by the major publishers to include electronic rights in the contracts we make with publishers for new books. And there’s very little we can do about that.
73
I’ve been asked to write a book several times; I’ve had several publishers come to me and offer me book deals. Especially right after I left Dream Theater and Avenged Sevenfold, there was a lot of drama going on in my life, so the book companies came at me thirsty for blood and gossip. And I turned down all the deals.
74
There is huge money to be made – by candidates, by book publishers, by merchandise peddlers – from small-dollar conservative consumers who are as enraged by their own party’s establishment as they are the Obama White House.
75
I always figured it was best if I write my songs, take them to my publisher and just lay back. There used to be so many things going on – getting to the artist, getting to the publishers – you know, politics. I just didn’t want to get mixed up in all of that.
76
I’m not a great shopper but I do buy a lot of books. I’m the publishers’ friend – I buy a hundred books a year and read four.
77
Journalists always want publishers or editors to leave. They’re creative troublemakers – that’s why you hire them.
78
Forget market or publishers or whatever. Just write with fire and joy, and in my own experience, those are the stories of mine people have wanted to read.
79
I’m like an actor who obnoxiously says he doesn’t watch his own TV show. It is extremely rare for me to read my own comics and have asked publishers to please stop sending them to me.
80
There’s a reason publishers don’t build on top of social platforms: publishers are an independent lot, and they naturally understand the value of owning your own domain. Publishers don’t want to be beholden to the shifting sands of inscrutable platform policies.
81
But if I worried too much about publishers’ expectations, I’d probably paralyze myself and not be able to write anything.
82
I wonder if too frequently publishers and developers are so caught up with going after new, untapped audiences that they can forget to care for the largest, most loyal and reliable audience there is – the current gamer.
83
I like every individual editor, designer, marketing and publicity person I deal with, but I don’t like what publishers, corporately, are doing to the ecology of the book world. It’s damaging, and it should change.
84
Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it.
85
Originally I was going to write a fashion style guide, but then my publishers suggested I write a novel instead.
86
I don’t chase publishers. Publishers chase me.
87
Kickstarter eliminates the risk that publishers and booksellers face. They have limited resources and limited shelf space, and Kickstarter is proof to them that something is going to work.
88
Publishers like their authors to take advantage of publicity opportunities.
89
As large publishers turn into monopolies, and the MBAs who are running them – maybe editors used to run them before – are steadily tightening the screws, they feel more and more that they get to call the shots.
90
My first novel was rejected by some of the most eminent publishers in the world. Starting again was a real wrench.
91
Companies with aspirations to be larger publishers – Kabam, Kixeye, even Zynga – are moving aggressively off the Facebook platform to mobile and the open Web. Publishers aren’t convinced that the costs of being on Facebook are worth it.
92
I think it would be a shame for any writer to let their publishers in any way corral them into a single genre.
93
Like most new writers, I could only hope that one day one publisher might agree to publish one of my books; I couldn’t imagine several publishers all wanting to buy the first book I’d written.
94
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.
95
The comedians all finished their acts with a song. They would get a certain amount of money from the song publishers and would use that money to pay the writers. None of them paid very much for their comedy material, but it all added up.
96
Writers keep writing and publishers publishing – it never grows boring.
97
There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor.
98
When I first started with ‘Twilight,’ I didn’t have any experience. I didn’t know what I was doing. So I was pretty intimidated by the editors and the publishers, and I felt like I was a kid in school with the principal telling me what to do! It was hard for me.
99
The walls are the publishers of the poor.
100
I’d been sending out demos and CDs for years. I knew my stuff was good enough, but I was getting nowhere. Then, three people – my future manager and two publishers – happened to send one of my tracks to EMI publishing in the same week. All of a sudden, they were interested!
101
Textbook publishers don’t even bother to advertise at their conventions.
102
As soon as I finish a book, I sell the paperback rights to different publishers and that’s where I recoup my money.
103
Publishers give you deadlines for those last phases of production that are perfectly comfortable for them. So, to whatever extent I can, I like to push those to give me a little more time, and make it so that they’re as uncomfortable as I am.
104
As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
105
I submitted manuscripts to publishers. This was not so much a feeling that I should be published as a wish to escape the feared and hated drudgery of normal work.
106
Kindle Singles is publishing on skates. It prints like lightning; our book meets readers in hours. I’ve spent so many years waiting for publishers to consider whether they wanted to print a book of mine, making contracts, taking months to fit it into the Fall list or the Spring list, fitting it into an advertising plan.
107
There are a lot of bottlenecks to getting published. Publishers are only one of them. Having the time is another one. Feeling entitled is another one.
108
Unfortunately for me, most of the books I’d want to reprint were written for savvy publishers like Harlequin and Berkley who have held on to electronic rights. But I do have another option: Publish new e-books myself.
109
There are a lot of global decisions that you can make as a co-publisher, and only publishers can make those kind of decisions. At the same time, there are some things you can do only as a penciler or creator. I want to keep my hands in both pots, so to speak.
110
Publishers are looking for blockbusters – all the world loves a megaseller.
111
In the past the publishers I’ve worked with have been extremely generous. And in almost every case, have been people who believed in the work rather than the sales and marketing.
112
Doris Lessing really doesn’t care what the critics say. In fact, she orders her publishers not to send her the reviews and gets cross with them if they do because she doesn’t want that in her head. She’s going where she’s going, and that’s where she wants to go.
113
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.
114
I think the screen size chosen for the iPad is perfect for publishers to render content beautifully, for games to be played.
115
We knew when we started the Daily Muse, we wanted a recruiting-focused business model rather than an advertising-focused one. We felt like publishers were being forced to go to more and more extreme lengths to monetize through advertising.
116
Advertising’s always been a considerable pressure on publishers.
117
Brave plays the long game on behalf of users first, and also publishers, to win a better Web with fast, safe browsing, anonymous micropayments, and user control over data.
118
I’m really interested in independent publishers and memes and mini comics. But even before that, I was interested in Japanese manga and anime.
119
When I started in the business, there was a thing called adult fantasy, but nobody quite knew what it was, and most publishers didn’t have an adult fantasy list. They had science fiction lists, which they stuck a little bit of fantasy into.
120
I was given the ability to create stories and characters. That’s my part of the long chain of writers, publishers, agents, booksellers, librarians, and a host of others who eventually deliver literature to the world. I want to do for others what Eudora Welty did for me.
121
Writers are stewards of the culture. Publishers, librarians, bookstore owners. We’re all in this together. To write books that are gripping, important, that people want to have, is to keep publishing alive.
122
When I write, I tend to be quite cut off from the world. At that point of time, I’m not thinking about editors, publishers or readers. I write the story the way it comes to me.
123
The big publishers want someone they can send on the Jewish book circuit, somebody the old ladies can see marrying their granddaughters.
124
I see publishers bemoaning their fate and saying that this is the end of publishing. No! Publishers will recreate themselves. Some of that comes from my experience as a print publisher.
125
My agent and I put out my proposal one Thursday afternoon in August, 1998. Publishers started bidding immediately, and that process progressed for a few days.
126
That’s why editors and publishers will never be obsolete: a reader wants someone with taste and authority to point them in the direction of the good stuff, and to keep the awful stuff away from their door.
127
I suppose there must be idiots who dream of signing deals with publishers while fully intending to drink martinis in cool bars or ride around on skateboards. But the actual writers I know are experts in neurotic self-torture. Every page of writing is the result of a thousand tiny decisions and desperate acts of will.
128
Everywhere, publishers are being squeezed out.
129
I think when you’ve had success, publishers and reviewers and readers are willing to let you try something new if you’ve already proven yourself. They’re excited about what you’re doing, you have people interested in it, and actually waiting for it. It’s empowering.
130
No agent/publisher is in a position to create across a spectrum of media and distribution what major publishers can accomplish for authors.
131
Publishers like a good buzz, and negative responses sell books just as well as positive ones.
132
I don’t like ‘graphic novel.’ It’s a word that publishers created for the bourgeois to read comics without feeling bad. Comics is just a way of narrating – it’s just a media type.
133
When my book was first sent out to publishers, my agent told me to buy a lot of ice-cream and wait. So I bought a gigantic amount of ice-cream, and huddled by the freezer eating it and shaking, hoping someone would like it.
134
Authors will make far more on those ebooks through direct sales than publishers are offering. There is no incentive for authors to sell those rights to traditional publishers which means, in the fairly short term, publishers run out of material to sell.
135
I tend to turn down books originally published as e-books. As for selling books directly to e-book publishers, I would do so only if all traditional publishers had turned them down.
136
Publishers just want you to write the same book over and over again. But why would I want to do that? It would be like putting on a threadbare dressing-gown day after day.
137
What I like least is dealing with publishers who simply don’t want collaborations regardless of their merit.
138
There are a lot of people who really abused sampling and gave it a bad name, by just taking people’s entire hit songs and rapping over them. It gave publishers license to get a little greedy.
139
Most times with vanity projects, publishers don’t believe in the work; they just believe in the name.
140
Publishers are born connectors; they bring like-minded people together. They are also conversationalists of the first order. They foster the interaction between the three key parties in commercial media: the audience, the author/creator and the marketer.
141
In September 2005, I was three things: the media blogger for ‘FishbowlNY,’ a maniacal Daily Show fan, and the only person to smuggle a tape recorder and camera into a big Magazine Publishers of America event featuring Jon Stewart interviewing five hotshot magazine editors in an unbelievable bloodbath.
142
Brand marketers don’t believe that ad-tech companies view brands as true partners. Ad-tech companies think brand marketers are paying attention to the wrong things. And publishers, with a few important exceptions, feel taken advantage of by everyone.
143
In the early ’70s – a very good time for children’s books and their authors – editors and publishers were willing to take a chance on a new writer. They were willing and able to invest their time in nurturing writers with promise, encouraging them.
144
Writers generally get into writing because they want to write, not because they want to be independent publishers, and you can’t really fault someone for saying, ‘What I’m doing right now works, so there’s no reason to change it.’
145
You know, it’s sort of common wisdom among New York publishers that short story collections don’t make money.
146
I had a wonderful and very successful career in New York and had the privilege of working with some of the best editors and publishers in the business.
147
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.
148
Writers are essential. Readers are essential. Publishers are not.
149
Publishers send me a lot of first novels because my first novel was the defining novel of my career, and I guess a lot of people want my benediction or something.
150
Again, we turn down most books that have been self-published unless they have a special track record. We have taken a small number on, however, and sold them to major publishers for a nice sum. But that is an exception to the rule.
151
I was always interested in art at school, and after year twelve, senior year, I spent three years studying graphic design at college. I worked in advertising for two years but didn’t like it much, then began doing a bit of illustration work for various publishers.
152
Publishers and record companies love a broken heart.
153
I think what’s happening with book advances is something that most of the world just doesn’t fully appreciate, especially when it comes to nonfiction, because writing a book of investigative journalism is an expensive endeavor, and the system works best if you have publishers making bets on authors.
154
We tried to just convince big publishers like EA or other people to make games like ‘Cloud’… It’s just almost impossible.
155
I think publishers need to be the ones that publish the books and control that process: finding writers, helping them with their work, finding readers. I think writers need that.
156
By the mid-noughties, I found that I was no longer the only openly gay person in every setting. At one point, a couple of Moscow magazine publishers even got the idea that they should actively headhunt gay and lesbian staff.
157
Publishers, naturally, loathe used books and have developed strategies to depress the secondhand market. They bring out new, even more expensive editions of popular textbooks every three to four years, in a classic cycle of planned obsolescence.
158
Marvel books also feed into the smaller publishers and the fact that this is happening in the same month we’re launching Ultimate Fantastic Four is no coincidence.
159
One of my graduate school professors, to whom I started sending poems when I started writing again after a 10-year hiatus, suggested I prepare a book manuscript which he could send to publishers for me.
160
Whenever I go to work I wear a jacket and a tie, because I’m inherently quite lazy, and my books take so long to do, and my publishers don’t bug me, so it’s so easy to fool yourself into thinking you’re working harder than you really are.
161
I know most publishers probably don’t let their authors write on Wattpad all the time, but mine are pretty open about it.
162
Until the company believes in itself, AOL didn’t have its own space and identity in the marketplace. The opportunity is to get out from under the negative history and figure out the value AOL offers for consumers and for publishers and advertisers.
163
I think instead writers and publishers and readers need to go to the places where people are, and make the argument that there is great value to the quiet, contemplative process of reading a novel, that reading great books carefully offers pleasures and consolations that no iPad app ever can.
164
All of the changes in publishing since 1960 are significant. There are far fewer publishers.
165
Self-publishing worked for me. Being able to put your work in print, even if it’s a tiny print-on-demand print run of a dozen or so copies, shows publishers and editors a completed piece of work and that you can follow through on a project.
166
Science should belong to scientists and not the publishers.
167
When I’m writing, I am lost in my book. Except family and close friends, I don’t care about what critics, publishers or readers might think.
168
My memoirs were written, and a portion of them already in the hands of the publishers, when the startling news came which has thrilled all Europe and filled her inhabitants with horror – the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States.
169
My books have been translated into various languages and sold in other countries, but I never have any contact with the foreign publishers and am so disconnected from that process that it seems almost imaginary. With ‘How to Save a Life’, I worked closely with Usborne editors and have been involved in the publicity.
170
Once upon a time, gatekeepers were newspaper publishers and magazine editors and people who ran radio stations and news networks. And they decided what went above the fold and what went on page A10.
