Publishing Industry Quotes

“I enjoy self-publishing & sending publishers rejection letters. They're like, 'Who is this guy?' And I'm like, 'the end of your industry.”
― Ryan Lilly, Write like no one is reading

“He talked about the book industry as if it were a dragon that was chained in the basement, and would tear us limb from limb at any moment.”
― Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident

“Why don’t we approach literature like we approach music and the fine arts?”
― Hugh Howey

“First of all, please, please, don´t go publish until you are one hundred percent sure you are doing a great job, the best that you may deliver. For in this publishing media it´s easy to get it all wrong when you are just starting. Secondly, find a good editor, or at least a second opinion. You know, four eyes read better than two. You will regret later on for not having a good editor to go through your writing, or having a great artist to do the best cover for your book. Because if there is something I learned during these years in the publishing market it is to never ever underestimate the power of good editing. And my third piece will be to advice about a good image: the saying “never judge a book by its cover” was created by a lazy author who didn´t give much thought of what really works in the marketing of both fiction and nonfiction.”
― Ana Claudia Antunes, How to Make a Book

“Clothes were wonderful things; one ought always to wear a hat as saucy and pretty as mine before going to see an editor.”
― Gertrude Beasley, My First Thirty Years

“Indie publishing lets me feed my inner control freak.”
― Michelle M. Pillow

“Because all of us are so ready to talk about the world we live in. We are ready to have a publishing industry that is of that world.”
― Mira Jacob

“If you are working on a short story for a small online press, don't try to write a serious, world-changing, add-this-to-the-literary-canon masterpiece. Do your best work, but keep it all in perspective. Save the stress for when it is really called for, like facing a two-week deadline to rewrite a novel for a major house.”
― Victoria Lynn Schmidt, Book in a Month: The Fool-Proof System for Writing a Novel in 30 Days

“The pain of an unpublished manuscript is akin to the trauma of bearing an unborn.”
― Anurag Shourie, An Ode Towards Hope –

“Fantasy and science fiction are closely allied in publishing, since both categories posit worlds that are not reality. The SF editor is most often a fantasy editor as well. Yet the most useful view for the working editor is to consider fantasy as conservative and pastoral, and SF as radical, technological, urban. There is a spectrum of variations, especially considering that for at least the last half century, many of the same authors have written both, a legacy, again, of the pulp magazines, which published both in the early twentieth century, before the battle lines were clearly drawn.”
― David G. Hartwell, Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do

“For me, and other ‘first timers’ [debut authors] I’ve spoken to, the primary concern is whether the story is good enough. With your first book there is no objective bench-mark you can judge it by. I felt very protective of the first draft; are people going to laugh when they read it or just shake their head? It sounds strange but the book was part of me. (Jon Gliddon interview on sevencircumstances.com)”
― Jon Gliddon, Break in Communication: Raid on Porthcurno Telegraph Station, Cornwall during WWII

“編輯是全方位工作者，文字能力是基本要求，溝通協調是家常便飯，更重要的是優雅解決問題的能力、笑著面對挑戰的勇氣！／有能力的話就買書吧！買書是對作者、對編輯、對所有出版從業人員最大的支持／其實你可以幫任何一本書寫導讀，只要你找得到它特出的地方／這是一份失敗了檢討自己，成功了榮耀歸於他人的工作，如果想要肯定一本書，或是身為在幕後的編輯拍拍，最好的方式就是把書買回家／現代人，特別是出版從業人員，如果沒有自嘲和自娛的能力，要怎麼在這險惡的冰河時期，維持健全的心靈呢？”
― 許喻理（Yuli）, 編輯小姐Yuli的繪圖日誌：劇透職場，微厭世、不暗黑的辦公室直播漫畫

“Write to your reader. Market to your book buyer.”
― Hajni Blasko

“Think of your book’s title as a headline for a breaking news story. For as long as newspapers (and now internet news content) have been around, diligent scribes have been searching their thesauruses for the right combination of power words for headlines as a way to draw in readers’ curiosity…”
― Scott Lorenz, Book Title Generator: A Proven System in Naming Your Book

“In our age, the idea of intellectual liberty is under attack from two directions. On the one side are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy. Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution. The sort of things that are working against him are the concentration of the press in the hands of a few rich men, the grip of monopoly on radio and the films, the unwillingness of the public to spend money on books, making it necessary for nearly every writer to earn part of his living by hackwork, the encroachment of official bodies… Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed down from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth. But in struggling against this fate he gets no help from his own side; that is, there is no large body of opinion which will assure him that he’s in the right.”
― George Orwell, The Prevention of Literature

“Create all your marketing content with an Eye for Excellence!”
― Hajni Blasko

“Neither did the biblio...worthies themselves allege much tangible objection against the work offered to their acceptance,--which they yet seemed unanimous in rejecting; excepting that there was something new and queer about "the thing" they did not like! They could not say exactly what it was--but it was not written in the way Lady This, That, or the Other (it was the time of the supremacy of fashionable slip-slop) "wrote things!”
― Emma Robinson, Mauleverer s Divorce, Vol. 2 of 3: A Story of Woman's Wrongs