Among my books, the ones that sell best are for readers between the ages of 8 and 12. According to a study by the Association of American Publishers, the largest area of industry growth in 2014 was in the children and young adult category.
There’s so much published by so many different publishers. Most of the time, I don’t have to confront that, but walking into a conference center filled with books – and people buying them or not buying them, being interested or not interested in them – that’s just overwhelming to me now.
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.
Agents and publishers are always looking for something ‘different,’ a fresh viewpoint and a new voice, not just re-hashed versions of stuff that’s gone before.
Writers keep writing and publishers publishing – it never grows boring.
I think writers have to be proactive: they’ve got to use new technology and social media. Yes, it’s hard to get noticed by traditional publishers, but there’s a great deal of opportunity out there if you’ve got the right story.
I believe that all brands will become storytellers, editors and publishers, all stores will become magazines, and all media companies will become stores. There will be too many of all of them. The strongest ones, the ones who offer the best customer experience, will survive.
Writers want publicity all the time, and they are always nagging their agents and publishers to give them more publicity, but, when you get it, it’s kind of soul-destroying.
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.
Advertising’s always been a considerable pressure on publishers.
We’d love to do Space Ace 3D. It has a lot of potential. But, it is really up to the publishers.
I think it is immensely difficult to get the U.S. interested in non-U.S. topics. I don’t think this is because the average American reader is disinterested, but more because of publishers playing it safe: if a thriller based in L.A. is a sure winner, why spend money plugging one based in Paris – or Bangkok?
The publishers, as I remember at the very beginning of my career, wrote letters with their fountain pens. A letter is different from a phone call or fax. It’s a different kind of intimacy. That pervaded the entire business of writing and publishing.
Journalists always want publishers or editors to leave. They’re creative troublemakers – that’s why you hire them.
When I write, I tend to be quite cut off from the world. At that point of time, I’m not thinking about editors, publishers or readers. I write the story the way it comes to me.
My memoirs were written, and a portion of them already in the hands of the publishers, when the startling news came which has thrilled all Europe and filled her inhabitants with horror – the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States.
People really love editorial cartoons, and I think publishers understand that.
The digital apocalypse continues to blight the lives of television producers, music-industry executives and newspaper publishers, all of whom are scrambling to figure out how to reconfigure their business models in such a way as to allow them to make an honest buck.
My biggest concern about the market is the force that acts to drive down price, because I think that’s destructive to authors as well as publishers. Our biggest battle is to underline the value of intellectual property.
I think publishers need to be the ones that publish the books and control that process: finding writers, helping them with their work, finding readers. I think writers need that.
More and more readers are finding important and interesting content through platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and now Medium rather than traditional publishers.
Agents are essential, because publishers will not read unsolicited manuscripts.
Apple doesn’t need to maximize book sales. It simply needs to keep publishers happy enough to maintain an impressive-sounding inventory of titles while waiting for entirely new forms of publishing to develop.
Big publishers want you to change this and change that. I’d rather go to a little publisher – who needs the tsuris.
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.
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.
There were eleven publishers in New York City, and when it was all over, I think it went down to four or five, and then finally just the three of them, the Big Three.
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.
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.
Publishing can be a cliquish and incestuous business; it is not uncommon for writers from the same agencies and publishers to review each other.
From that moment on, the newspaper became a highly lucrative investment for those with a talent for making money or for publishers wanting to gain a fortune.
One of the things I think has been important for Blizzard is maintaining the direct relationship with our players. Having a platform that we owned and controlled was important for that strategy, and also to not be dependent on other publishers.
For inexperienced, small developers, getting funding from big game publishers can be a Sisyphean task.
‘Fahrenheit’ was a very difficult product to sell to publishers initially because no-one believed in storytelling or emotion.
I left for New York expecting to repeat my success, only to be turned down by almost every publisher in that city, till the Viking Press, my American publishers of a lifetime, thought of taking me on.
I will not buck to pressure of delivering to publishers.
