Book Sold Quotes

#1. The dirty little secret of publishing is that, all along, each book sold has had an average of 5 readers. That's an 80% "piracy" rate if you insist on looking at it in those terms.

Charles Stross

#2. The first thing I did when I sold my book was buy a new wedding ring for my wife and asked her to marry me all over again.

Nicholas Sparks

#3. A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well because it was selling well.

Daniel J. Boorstin

#4. I really want people to read the book, and bookstores never sold an issue of Eightball because nobody knew what it was.

Daniel Clowes

#5. What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold.

John Updike

#6. I'm very much against photographs being framed and treated with reverence and signed and sold as works of art. They aren't. They should be seen in a magazine or a book and then be used to wrap up the fish and chucked away.

Antony Armstrong-Jones

#7. There is nothing like books - of all things sold incomparably the cheapest, of all pleasure the least palling, they take up little room, keep quiet when they are not wanted, and, when taken up, bring us face to face with the choicest men who ever lived, at their choicest moments.

Samuel Palmer

#8. There can hardly be a stranger commodity in the world than books. Printed by people who don't understand them; sold by people who don't understand them; bound, criticized and read by people who don't understand them; and now even written by people who don't understand them.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

#9. In 2004, I wrote 'What We've Lost,' a book about the Bush administration. It sold only reasonably well, in part, I think, because the book was a horrific downer, an unrelenting account of the administration's actions, bungles, deceptions, half-truths, untruths, and downright corruptions.

Graydon Carter

#10. How is your book doing?" or "How many copies have you sold?" are the questions for a salesman. To a writer, you better ask "What did you write today?".

Shubham Choudhary

#11. Despite the promise of four days of sun and overly sweet wine, Richard was sporting a sour puss. But then that was to be expected - he sold books for a living, after all.

Charlie Hill

#12. I had just turned 28 and sold my first book, a travel guide for vegetarians, but I'd tell people about the day job that I didn't care about instead - I placed banner advertisements on the web for a search engine company.

James Bernard Frost

#13. Wal-mart started selling "Vampire Home Defense Kits", including holy water, crosses, stakes, mallets, and a book of quick blessings to bar vampires from your door. The fact that these kits were generally useless didn't bother me nearly as much as the idea of holy water being sold at wal-mart.

Molly Harper

#14. Contribute to charitable projects like the printing of spiritual books so that they can be sold at a lower price. Poor people will then be able to buy and read them. In this way we can help to cultivate spiritual culture in them also.

Mata Amritanandamayi

#15. He was described as the literary leader of the age, but had never written a book that sold more than three thousand copies.

Ayn Rand

#16. When I sold my first book, 'A Conspiracy of Tall Men,' it was part of a two-book deal. It wasn't hugely lucrative, but it was enough money for me to quit the paralegal job I had in San Francisco.

Noah Hawley

#17. Agnes was the worst prophet that's ever existed. Because she was always right. That's why the book never sold.

Neil Gaiman

#18. I have sold more books on physics than Madonna has on sex.

Stephen Hawking

#19. The lady in the liquor store sold me a fifth of whiskey and the landlord's name without taking her eyes off the book she was reading.

Andrew Cotto

#20. Even if I never sold another book, I'd keep writing, because the stories are here, in my head. Stories that just need to be told. I love watching a plot unfold, and feeling the surprise when the unexpected happens.

Tess Gerritsen

#21. I'd sold the book first. Actually to a paperback publisher. I had nothing. I just had the idea.

William Peter Blatty

#22. Butler's novel 'Kindred' may be the book most widely read by readers outside science fiction; it has been assigned as a text in classrooms and has sold steadily since its publication in 1979.

Karen Joy Fowler

#23. Paperbacks weren't considered real books in the book trade. Up till then it was just murder mysteries, potboilers, 25-cent pocket books sold in newsstands. When the New York publishers started publishing quality paperbacks, there was no place to buy them.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#24. Writing, and especially writing a novel, where you get to sit in a room by yourself with either a pen and a paper or a computer for a couple of years, is a very solitary occupation. You can read sales figures - a hundred thousand books sold, half a million books sold - but they are just numbers.

Neil Gaiman

#25. When I was first writing 'Feed' - which was the first book I published as Mira - I talked about it very openly on my blog, on Twitter, that I was writing this book, and it wasn't until after it was sold that I said 'Mira Grant' wrote this book. And the reason there was really purely marketing-based.

Seanan McGuire

#26. I've sold too many books to get good reviews anymore. There's a lot of jealousy, because [reviewers] think they can write a good novel or a best-seller and get frustrated when they can't. I've learned to despise them.

John Grisham

#27. In college, I wrote newspaper articles and songs. Then, on my 21st birthday, I sold my first book. It was a nonfiction book about women pirates - 'Pirates in Petticoats.' After that, I was a book writer for good.

Jane Yolen

#28. In the timeless and universal manner of authors conversing in public places, he did not fail to mention its title, Volume III of Principia Mathematica entitled, The System of the World, available shortly, where books are sold.

Neal Stephenson

#29. I had bill collectors chasing me. We were skipping from town to town, not leaving forwarding addresses. The agent couldn't find me when he sold my book. He finally found me.

Daniel Woodrell

#30. A lot of books are sold and given away as presents. But who actually reads and enjoy reading?

John Gimlette

#31. I asked my publisher what would happen if he sold all the copies of my book he'd printed. He said I'll just print another ten.

Eric Sykes

#32. 'Out' was my real breakthrough, the novel that became a hit in Japan and sold a lot of books, so it was sort of an obvious choice for being the first book to be translated into English.

Natsuo Kirino

#33. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if the first book had not sold ... doesn't bear thinking about, but I suppose we'd have made it work somehow.

Bernard Cornwell

#34. Remember, despite the fact that this book is being sold as a 'fantasy' novel, you must take all of the things it says extremely seriously, as they are quite important, are in no way silly, and always make sense.
Rutabaga.

Brandon Sanderson

#35. He promised to write a book later about the trip. He sold the rights to the motion pictures and still photographs that would be taken, and he agreed to give a long lecture series on his return. In all these arrangments, there was one basic assumption - that Shackleton would survive.

Alfred Lansing

#36. Five minutes in an old book quickly reveals that most of what is being sold today as new insights into human behavior is merely the rediscovery of knowledge we have had for centuries.

Roy H. Williams

#37. A book should be made like a watch and sold like a sausage.

Oliverio Girondo

#38. Capitalism has been really good to me. I'm very fortunate: I have written books and my books have sold.

Marianne Williamson

#39. In 2007, I sold my first book, 'Grimspace.' It says it's SF on the spine. I believe it to be SF, though it's certainly written differently. I write in first person, present tense, and the protagonist is a woman with a woman's thoughts, feelings, and sexual desires.

Ann Aguirre

#40. When I told my friends I was planning to write a book, they said it wouldn't sell. They were right. I only sold the following 250.

Daniel Marques

#41. ...you are a writer the moment you start writing, not when you've sold your first book.

Rob Bignell, Editor

#42. Tom Paine was a great American visionary. His book, Common Sense, sold a couple of hundred thousand copies in a population of four or five million. That means it was a best seller for years. People were thoughtful then. Hope is one thing. But you need to have hope with thought.

Studs Terkel

#43. The reality of truth is not to be bought, to be sold, to be repeated; it cannot be caught in books. It has to be found from moment to moment, in the smile, in the tear, under the dead leaf, in the vagrant thought, in the fullness of love.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

#44. This book, 'Stupid White Men,' has sold now over four million copies worldwide. Probably about half of that may be in the U.S. and Canada, and the rest, overseas.

Michael Moore

#45. I had forgotten until I looked up old notes that I sold the film rights of my first book, a life of Mary Wollstonecraft: there was a lunch, a contract, a small sum of money, then nothing.

Claire Tomalin

#46. Selling one's book to Hollywood is rather like selling someone your house. After it's sold, it isn't yours anymore. They can paint it a different color, tear it down and build something new, or do anything they want.

Rick Riordan

#47. All the proliferating falsifications of what I and everyone I know experienced once in what it is now so convenient to call the "fifties" or "sixties," as if life was really measured or lived in arbitrary decades, when the history books are sold like comix.

Lester Bangs

#48. When reading a book, you are sold what some writer thought. When reading a newspaper, you are sold what someone did, and, what some advertiser made.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#49. 'Coraline' is Neil Gaiman's book, it sold a lot, it has a big fan base. It was originally conceived to be live action, but I never really wanted it to be. I always thought that it would work better as an animated film.

Henry Selick

#50. Seriously, when you see a new book fresh on the stand and in big letters it says "A Million Copies Sold," did you ever wonder who bought them?

Stanley Victor Paskavich

#51. There was a time when a book could be sold purely because its author had been to distant climes and had returned to tell of the exotic sights he had seen. That author was Marco Polo, and the time was the thirteenth century.

Howard Mittelmark

#52. Only another writer, someone who had worked his heart out on a good book which sold three thousand copies, could appreciate the thrill that overcame me one April morning in 1973 when Dean Rivers of our small college in Georgia appeared at my classroom door

James A. Michener

#53. One generation's pleasure became a burden for another. Hence, entire collections from father to son were sold for a song, and the vendors, knowing nothing about literature, would place a price on the books. (about secondhand literature book)

Murzban F. Shroff

#54. Renee: "You know what I did when I finished Moby Dick?"
David: "You harpooned the guy that sold you the book?

John C. Stipa

#55. Imagine what our culture would be like if Americans sold ideas, words, and books with the same creativity we use to sell designer jeans, shampoo, and rock stars. Why, we might end up with people whos attention span for the printed word is longer than the time it takes to read a T-shirt.

Jim Trelease

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

Jack Canfield

#57. My book is very wild. But you know during the period of BATMAN, that there were thousands of Batman and Robin costumes sold and these weren't just for kids.

Burt Ward

#58. I came in on the decline. Phil Elliot was in first, he got his book out, he sold thirteen thousand, I think he got two issues out before I got mine in, this was March '87. He was out in December '86.

Eddie Campbell

#59. To have been able to write the books I wanted to write, on demanding subjects like war and the history of psychiatry, and for them to have sold in the numbers they have - and then go around saying: 'Actually, I'd also like to have won the Costa Book of the Year?' That would be ridiculous.

Sebastian Faulks

#60. In the case of 'Goon Squad,' which sold slowly for a long time despite the good reviews, those 'best of 2010' lists were pivotal, and made the book really sell.

Jennifer Egan

#61. I can always track my career by the children - I started writing right after the 14-year-old was born, and sold my first book just in time to pay for the birth of the 12-year-old.

Heather Graham Pozzessere

#62. I sold a book six years after I left an MFA program. In between, there was a lot of endurance of poverty and a lot of fighting off doubt. It's all a part of the process of being or becoming a writer.

Chad Harbach

#63. With 'California,' editors were reading it, and fast, and others were emailing my agent to request it. Ultimately, there were a few editors interested in the book, and it sold at auction about two weeks after the submission process started. I couldn't believe it!

Edan Lepucki