Top 100 Quotes About Publishers
#2. Great editors do not discover nor produce great authors; great authors create and produce great publishers.
John Farrar
#3. Writers are always a great nuisance to publishers. If they could do without them, they would.
Fay Weldon
#4. Don't cry for publishers, paper books ain't dying.
Declan Conner
#5. Payment and reserved copyright are at bottom the ruin of literature. Only he who writes entirely for the sake of what he has to say writes anything worth writing. It is as if there were a curse on money: every writer writes badly as soon as he starts writing for gain.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#6. It can be depressing when no one takes interest, and a lack of response makes the writer question why they're writing at all. To have one's writing rejected is like you, yourself, are being rejected.
Elizabeth Clements
#7. 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.
Barbara Bush
#8. 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.
Nicholas Royle
#9. 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.
Richard Curtis
#10. Publishers don't nurse you; they buy and sell you.
P.D. James
#11. 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.
Tim Schafer
#12. 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.
Otis Blackwell
#13. Seventeen publishers rejected the manuscript, at which time we knew we had something pretty hot.
Kinky Friedman
#14. A. Critics: people who make monuments out of books. b. Biographers: people who make books out of monuments. c. Poets: people who raze monuments. d. Publishers: people who sell rubble. e. Readers: people who buy it.
Cynthia Ozick
#15. Alan's publishing company was in the Brill Building, and of course, the Brill Building was where all the songwriters hung out because that's where all the publishers were.
Johnny Rivers
#16. Leopold, one of the reporters who broke the Enron story, is now breaking his own story: how he got addicted to cocaine, committed grand theft, cleaned himself up and found happiness as a 'news junkie.' This scrappy memoir ... might become required reading for aspiring journalists.
Publishers Weekly
#17. I think most new writers are better off going with traditional publishers who will actually, at a minimum, edit your work, package it well, and market it for you.
Ellen Datlow
#18. I got signed with the songwriting deal when I was sixteen and they were really great - my publishers, who to this day are still my publishers and are like my musical family, my second family - they took me in and taught me what a good song is.
Lights
#19. I object to publishers: the one service they have done me is to teach me to do without them. They combine commercial rascality with artistic touchiness and pettishness, without being either good business men or fine judges of literature.
George Bernard Shaw
#20. Postal inspectors have been given advanced warning that Publishers Clearinghouse is sending packets of laundry detergent that could be mistaken for anthrax. Oh, good timing. What genius came up with this promotion? What's next - a ticking alarm clock? Let's put that in a box.
Jay Leno
#21. My wife, Caroline Spector, and I pitched some comic ideas to various publishers back in the '80s, but nothing ever came of it.
Warren Spector
#22. When I was growing up the publishing world seemed so far away. When my mother wrote a book, she would look up the address of publishers on the backs of the books she owned and send off her manuscript.
Kiran Desai
#23. 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.
George Bernard Shaw
#24. 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.
Laurell K. Hamilton
#25. Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it.
John Lennon
#26. We believed in the existence in this country of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price and staked everything on it.
Allen Lane
#27. As publishers focus on blockbusters, they steadily lose interest in little-known authors from other countries.
Stephen Kinzer
#28. The original idea was to make it easy to publish content on the Web and find an audience. What we learned from publishers is that the thing they want the most is more readers and more revenue.
Trip Adler
#29. The effect of prizes on one's career - if that is what to call it - is considerable, since they give one more clout with publishers and more notoriety among journalists. The effect on one's writing, however, is nil - otherwise, one would be in deep trouble.
John Banville
#30. My publishers will make any kind of a beautiful book I design and send in to them, but ... For poetry they have less use than a rooster would have for skates.
Gene Stratton-Porter
#31. The first book I did - the first successful book - was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.
Bill Bryson
#32. 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.
Barry Eisler
#33. 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.
Amish Tripathi
#34. You can get a subjective and highly factual dossier on most anyone in the public realm almost instantly. It's why publishers don't worry about author photos any more; people just Google a person and get on with things.
Douglas Coupland
#35. 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.
James Surowiecki
#36. When I'm writing a song, it's just me and the songwriters. Then when the song is done, there are publishers that hear it, then people in my management, then my wife and my boys and my friends, and if they're all lovin' it, it's kind of withstanding all the criticism I need.
Luke Bryan
#37. When I finally find that one willing agent, I'll have found my prize in the Cracker Jack box.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#38. Well, it wasn't really a decision on my part although you always hope as an author that a book that goes out of print somehow winds up back in print. These days publishers like to put out-of-print books into e-book form, but I really wanted to do an update.
Bob Colacello
#39. I've worked with many large and small publishers, and nearly all of them love the value that Instapaper provides to their readers.
Marco Arment
#40. Writers are essential. Readers are essential. Publishers are not.
J.A. Konrath
#41. All indies self-publish but not all self-publishers are indie.
Orna Ross
#42. 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.
Matt Groening
#43. Each of us has a vulnerability like Edmund's that Satan is eager to exploit. It may be something addictive like drugs or alcohol, or it may be something seemingly harmless and perhaps even good like food, friendship, or work.
Discovery House Publishers
#44. What we publishers think is that our function is to bring everything out into the open, on the theory that we have an adult population that knows values, or can learn them, and let them decide.
Maxwell Perkins
#45. Publishers of course have you altogether in their grip; if they say you must do a thing you have jolly well got to do it.
Rose Macaulay
#46. adamant. 'They would be the wrong publishers for you.' Later, after
Salman Rushdie
#47. 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.
Anais Nin
#48. When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.
Doris Lessing
#49. Traditional publishers require an author to submit a manuscript six months in advance, and if pressed, no later than two or three.
Heather Brooke
#50. Every author knows what a stimulus it is to have an understanding publisher.
Gisela Richter
#51. 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.
Jeff Lemire
#52. When I left art school and went in search of work, visiting publishers and showing them my drawings and illustrations, I was met with a polite and sometimes enthusiastic response but no commissions.
Chris Riddell
#53. 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.
Ruth Glick
#54. When in public poetry should take off its clothes and wave to the nearest person in sight; it should be seen in the company of thieves and lovers rather than that of journalists and publishers.
Brian Patten
#55. After being turned down by numerous publishers, he decided to write for posterity.
George Ade
#56. Prior to 2009, when publishers scoffed at the ebook market, they offered writers contracts which gave us half of the money they made off ebook sales.
Michael A. Stackpole
#57. 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.
Terri Windling
#58. I like to have projects that belong completely to me. If done right, it can also pay better. But the majority of my projects are still destined for publishers.
Jeremy Robinson
#59. The idea that comics stores, distributors and publishers simply 'give the customers what they want' is nonsense. What the customers wanted they didn't get - and they left.
Scott McCloud
#61. Very much on the defensive, I admitted that I liked to read.
"Sure," Sammy said, "I never said I had anything against reading books ... "
"The publishers will be relieved to know that," I tried to insert, but Sammy was too quick for me and was already rounding the bend of his next sentence.
Budd Schulberg
#62. We all need each other in publishing to make publishing work for authors in a variety of formats now and in the future. Anyone who thinks publishers don't bring anything to the table has a very narrow view and lack of knowledge about the industry as a whole.
Robert Gottlieb
#63. 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.
Tim Armstrong
#64. 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.
Colm Toibin
#65. There are two kinds of books in this world. One improves the mind, the other the bank balance. Sometimes they're the same
but not often. Most publishers find combining the two is the only way to stay afloat.
Paula Gosling
#66. I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
#67. 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.
Michelle Paver
#68. Spotify has paid more than two billion dollars to labels, publishers and collecting societies for distribution to songwriters and recording artists.
Daniel Ek
#69. I failed, many times in my life. One failure that I always remember was when my second book was rejected by 36 publishers. Many years later, I watched HuffPost come alive
Arianna Huffington
#70. The big publishers want someone they can send on the Jewish book circuit, somebody the old ladies can see marrying their granddaughters.
Joshua Cohen
#72. I don't know why the world has changed so much that writers are now expected to appear in public and talk about their work. It's something I find very difficult. And yet, one does have some sense of responsibility towards one's publishers, to the people trying to sell the book.
Jonathan Lethem
#74. 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.
Jay McInerney
#75. Bookstores will not disappear but will exploit digital technologies to increase their virtual and physical inventories, and perhaps become publishers themselves.
Jason Epstein
#76. We'd love to do Space Ace 3D. It has a lot of potential. But, it is really up to the publishers.
Don Bluth
#77. 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.
Teresa Medeiros
#78. Agents are essential, because publishers will not read unsolicited manuscripts.
Jackie Collins
#79. Thanks to the comic book publishers. Batman and Captain Marvel were responsible for my learning to read at least a year before I showed up at school. They got me interested in writing. Started my first novel at about eight. The title: 'The Canals of Mars.'
Jack McDevitt
#80. When I turned thirteen and took a typing class, with typical early teen enthusiasm and total lack of critical ability, I started sending my stuff to publishers once I'd babysat long enough to earn the postage.
Sherwood Smith
#81. I should be sorry to think it was the publishers themselves they got up this entire little flutter to enable them to unload a book that was taking too much room in their cellars, but you can never tell what a publisher will do. I have been one myself.
Mark Twain
#82. Be sure that your reward systems actually reward what you say you value. Many organizations preach cooperative effort but reward only individual effort -
Hawthorne Publishers
#83. KEEP BOOKS DANGEROUS
Support small press
publishers, writers,
& artists.
Hosho McCreesh
#84. 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.
Denis Norden
#85. Most publishers seem very reluctant to publish short story collections at all; they bring them out in paperback, often disguised as novels.
John Sladek
#86. Publishers see free downloads as threatening the sales of the book.
Paulo Coelho
#87. 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.
Denise Mina
#88. My fears are the obvious ones: that marketplace-minded publishers - all four of them - will shy further away from literary fiction, international authors, poetry, and the other marginal but hugely important regions of the book world.
David Edelstein
#89. Books are savaged and careers destroyed by surly snots who write anonymous reviews and publishers can't be bothered to protest this institutionalized corruption.
Warren Murphy
#90. 'Star Wars,' 'Doctor Who,' 'Forgotten Realms,' even 'Firefly' and 'The X-Files' have shared world novels and other media. I can't help but notice these settings have large shelf space in bookstores, so their publishers and authors are getting something right.
David Conyers
#91. Publishers have realized that, unlike the previous time period, American teenagers are both smarter and require more topical material than they had been giving them before that. For one thing, they'll read thicker books. Besides, has anybody looked at the news or read the newspapers recently?
Tamora Pierce
#92. Publishers always clamour for the books that no one has ever written, and turn a cold shoulder on them as soon as they're written. If St Paul were living now they would pester him to write an Epistle to the Esquimaux, but no London publisher would dream of reading his Epistle to the Ephesians.
Saki
#93. As part of my research for An Anthology of Authors' Atrocity Stories About Publishers, I conducted a study (employing my usual controls) that showed the average shelf life of a trade book to be somewhere between milk and yoghurt.
Calvin Trillin
#94. 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.
Phil Schiller
#95. There were two primary distributors of books at that time, Ingram and Baker and Taylor, so a new retailer wouldn't have to approach each of the thousands of book publishers individually.
Anonymous
#96. It wasn't the Supreme Court that expelled God from our public school classrooms. It was the textbook publishers.
James J. Kilpatrick
#97. 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.
Lois Lowry
#98. Popular success is a palace built for a writer by publishers, journalists, admirers, and professional reputation makers, in which a silent army of termites, rats, dry rot, and death-watch beetles are tunnelling away, till, at the very moment of completion, it is ready to fall down.
Cyril Connolly
#99. Publishers are notoriously slothful about numbers, unless they're attached to dollar signs - unlike journalists, quarterbacks, and felony criminal defendants who tend to be keenly aware of numbers at all times.
Hunter S. Thompson
