Publishers Quotes

Writers rush in where publishers fear to tread and where translators fear to tread.

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.

The Dancing Girls of Lahore was offered to dozens of British publishers and was turned down by everyone. It is still on offer in the U.K., but I'm not confident there will be any takers.

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.

Now that I'm being very successful, publishers are trying to mainstream me, but I'm unabashedly genre. It's what I like to read, what I like to write.

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.

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.

Coming into the business, you'd pass through these little agencies until you got to understand what was happening in the business, unless you were really able to have a style strong enough to go directly to the publishers.

Textbook publishers don't even bother to advertise at their conventions.

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.

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

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

The books are all very, very different so the publishers really had to be different too.

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.

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.

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

Three publishers came to me at the White House after George lost and said, 'We would like to publish your book.' I said, well, I don't have a book, and they said well it's a well known fact that you have kept diaries.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.

Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it.

If you look at the publishers I've worked with, generally, they're a great bunch. Creation is unlike any other publishing house you can think of. The people I've worked with have integrity and intelligence and, almost always, less money than ideas.

As a writer, you can't allow yourself the luxury of being discouraged and giving up when you are rejected, either by agents or publishers. You absolutely must plow forward.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Agents are essential, because publishers will not read unsolicited manuscripts.