Publishers Quotes

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.

What I like least is dealing with publishers who simply don't want collaborations regardless of their merit.

As for collaboration - I have done a lot, 26 books, and found publishers increasingly resistive to them. It's not that the books are bad; editors won't even read them.

Most writers can write books faster than publishers can write checks.

Except for a few small presses, most publishers are north of Ground Zero.

From that moment on, the newspaper became a highly lucrative investment for those with a talent for making money or for publishers wanting to gain a fortune.

No author is a man of genius to his publisher.

Bookstores will not disappear but will exploit digital technologies to increase their virtual and physical inventories, and perhaps become publishers themselves.

Great editors do not discover nor produce great authors; great authors create and produce great publishers.

Publishers see free downloads as threatening the sales of the book.

After an author has been dead for some time, it becomes increasingly difficult for his publishers to get out a new book by him each year.

Your turn Imagine that the world had no middlemen, no publishers, no bosses, no HR folks, no one telling you what you couldn’t do. If you lived in that world, what would you do? Go. Do that.

I work with a lot of different editors at different publishers and magazines and so on, and having a system of shared folders makes keeping track of things a snap.

As soon as I finish a book, I sell the paperback rights to different publishers and that's where I recoup my money.

No publisher will ever pay you enough to successfully sue them.

Advice from this elderly practitioner is to forget publishers and just roll a sheet of copy paper into your machine and get lost in your subject.

Never quit. My book, Chicken Soup for the Soul, was turned down by 33 publishers. It's since sold millions of copies.

Agents and publishers only want one thing - good writing.

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.

What the short story needs above all is for one of the big publishers to get an equivalent series up and running and to support it and promote it.

I don't relax. My main relaxation is meeting illustrators and publishers in restaurants and bars.

An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile.

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.

There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor.

I'm not saying all publishers have to be literary, but some interest in books would help.

My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria.

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.

I love the fact publishers are still publishing unprofitable material. It's a challenge to the powers that be. It's saying there is a real literature in this country and we will keep publishing it.

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.

I am a failure as a writer. The publishers won't publish me, the bookshops won't carry my books, the critics won't write about me. I am excluded from all anthologies, and completely ignored.

Publishers never tell writers anything. They're all crazy and they drive me crazy.

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.

My theory is that, just like with omitting a final comma in a list when not essential for meaning, publishers are trying to save paper and ink or pixels on-screen.

We are not only a civilization of amateur photographers; we are amateur curators, editors, and publishers.

Publishers love to compartmentalize, and Second Chance was not an easy novel to define.

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.

If the big publishers are doing so well, why do they require writers to send return postage with their manuscripts?

For any leftover inventory, publishers must have a program to maximize the sale of a book.

Sometimes many publishers prefer that you write the same book every time, but I have a low boredom threshold so that isn't going to happen.

Every writer has his own voice. Other than that I'm always trying to do change-ups and publishers haven't always been happy about that.

I've had good publishers and bad publishers, and you've got to learn when the advice is sensible and when it's not.

Yet one new trend I do like coming from mainstream publishers right now is memoirs tied to research that explores the narrator's dilemma.

No, no, there must be a limit to the baseness even of publishers.

I think it would be a shame for any writer to let their publishers in any way corral them into a single genre.

Writers are always a great nuisance to publishers. If they could do without them, they would.

Never use 'submit' as a verb for sending work to magazine or book publishers; say 'offer,' and never, ever submit. Keep your knees unbent. Be brave.

As 99 per cent of English authors and 100 per cent of American ones [authors] are just such imbeciles, managers and publishers make a practice of asking for every right the author possesses.

The Penguin books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them.

You see what stupid folk my publishers are; but they are all alike.

Most times with vanity projects, publishers don't believe in the work; they just believe in the name.