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.
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.
Many’s the dead author whose body of work has been marred by overzealous publishers or family members. If this happens to me, I vow to seek out the responsible parties and haunt them to the point of death.
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.
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.
When I started writing, the deal was that publishers gave you a grand or two as an advance to buy some sweets, with the promise that they would make a big putsch with your fourth book when you’d built up a bit of a following. But by the time my fourth book came out, previously unpublished authors were the new big thing.
Writers generally get into writing because they want to write, not because they want to be independent publishers, and you can’t really fault someone for saying, ‘What I’m doing right now works, so there’s no reason to change it.’
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.
Forget market or publishers or whatever. Just write with fire and joy, and in my own experience, those are the stories of mine people have wanted to read.
Agents and publishers only want one thing – good writing.
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.
It was all a back-handed blessing, and my friends were the ones who kept the faith, read my work, and urged me to submit it to publishers (by sending it out for me – they would not hear no for an answer.
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.
My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria.
The biggest mistake is to assume that another writer’s successful strategy will work for you, too. Publishers’ marketers – and even freelance publicists who cost mega bucks – tend to do the same basic things for all books.
Most times with vanity projects, publishers don’t believe in the work; they just believe in the name.
But if I worried too much about publishers’ expectations, I’d probably paralyze myself and not be able to write anything.
It is important to send your work to as many publishers as possible. For every one publisher who may show interest in your work, there will be at least five who will reject you.
My publishers find me really challenging, as a lot of the time, I don’t even know what I’m going to be writing about until I sit down to do it.
Once publishers got interested in it, it was a year in developing, and it was launched, I think, in 1960. But Willie Lumpkin didn’t last long – it only last a little better than a year, maybe a year and a half.
As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
Think of ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.’ It is equally intoxicating for children and adults. All this ‘crossover’ talk is something publishers are using as a selling device – a kind of post hoc rationalisation of what was happening already.
Every famous writer was once an unknown writer. If publishers never published new writers, they wouldn’t be publishing anyone at all after a while.
Everywhere, publishers are being squeezed out.
Sally Gardner must drive her publishers to distraction: no sooner have they worked out how to market one brilliant book than she delivers another that is just as brilliant but totally different.
I don’t even like showing my stuff to publishers and editors much.
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.
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.
Companies with aspirations to be larger publishers – Kabam, Kixeye, even Zynga – are moving aggressively off the Facebook platform to mobile and the open Web. Publishers aren’t convinced that the costs of being on Facebook are worth it.
Publishers just want you to write the same book over and over again. But why would I want to do that? It would be like putting on a threadbare dressing-gown day after day.
The challenge of writing books for teenagers is walking the fine line between truth and what the publishers, parents, and the more conservative librarians want to hear.
I had several publishers, and they were all the same. They all wanted salacious. And everybody is writing autobiographies, and that’s one reason why I’m not going to do it. If young Posh Spice can write her autobiography, then I don’t want to write one!
The requests for blurbs seem to come in waves. I’m not sure what precipitates them. I think it must be excruciating for editors to draft those elaborate letters asking for a blurb, and I know it’s torturous for us writers to ask directly. But publishers encourage us to. Rock and a hard place.
The things that have really gotten confusing to me is how you balance the desires of your publishers to produce things on a schedule, and people are always sort of giving you ideas on what you should follow up with or how you should proceed next and things like that.
I was given the ability to create stories and characters. That’s my part of the long chain of writers, publishers, agents, booksellers, librarians, and a host of others who eventually deliver literature to the world. I want to do for others what Eudora Welty did for me.
When I left the Senate in 1979, there were several publishers who had approached me about writing an autobiography, and I knew that politicians write books for many reasons, but at that time, I just thought I wasn’t ready and my story wasn’t over, and I knew I had a new life ahead of me.
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.
If I were to take five comic books, from four different publishers and Marvel, and lay them out, even if you didn’t know the characters, you would be able to take a look at that Marvel comic and go, ‘That’s Marvel.’ There’s something unique about the way the story is presented.
And books that were published in much larger numbers than Selfish, Little are hard to find. And publishers who wanted to publish my last few works have them stuck in limbo while new distribution ideas and legal issues and fears are blown away.
That’s why editors and publishers will never be obsolete: a reader wants someone with taste and authority to point them in the direction of the good stuff, and to keep the awful stuff away from their door.
Most publishers seem very reluctant to publish short story collections at all; they bring them out in paperback, often disguised as novels.
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.
After being Turned Down by numerous Publishers, he had decided to write for Posterity.
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.
I suppose there must be idiots who dream of signing deals with publishers while fully intending to drink martinis in cool bars or ride around on skateboards. But the actual writers I know are experts in neurotic self-torture. Every page of writing is the result of a thousand tiny decisions and desperate acts of will.
There’s a reason publishers don’t build on top of social platforms: publishers are an independent lot, and they naturally understand the value of owning your own domain. Publishers don’t want to be beholden to the shifting sands of inscrutable platform policies.
Publishers are born connectors; they bring like-minded people together. They are also conversationalists of the first order. They foster the interaction between the three key parties in commercial media: the audience, the author/creator and the marketer.
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.
While some of the big publishers might give out 200,000 advances, if your book does not hit some of the lists in the second week, they stop paying attention to you.
