One of the nice things about publishing with Amazon is that the window for marketing is much longer than with a traditional publisher because these titles are not coming off of shelves.
Publishing for me is a business, not an ideology.
I’m very privy to the way bookstores work, and I think a lot about the ecosystem that my books have been published in. I think it’s great to be aware of how publishing works.
In his 30 years of broadcasting and publishing fiction, Garrison Keillor has set the laugh bar pretty high.
The whole world of publishing is moving to electronic, but when you put a poem on a screen and you increase the type size, the shape of a poem changes.
With Instapaper, I can take a few months off. I can’t stop publishing ‘The Magazine’ for two months and work on something else.
The publishing industry stopped having new ideas out of respect for the untimely death of Ernest Hemingway in 1961 and has been doing everything the same way ever since.
The wheels of publishing never slow down.
Digitization is certainly challenging the old ways of doing things, whether that’s in publishing or politics. But it’s not the end. In many ways, it is just the beginning.
Writers can feel pretty powerless in the big corporate world of publishing, but sometimes our greatest power is the ability to say ‘no.’
People are very frightened in publishing at the moment. Nobody knows what sells. More so now because the market’s changing so fundamentally because of Kindle and electronic publishing. It’s a fundamental shift in the way stories are put out into the world.
I used to read music books when I was 13. My mom was working at a library. She’s a librarian. I would get my mom to check out any kind of books that had anything to do with the music industry. I read a lot about royalities, publishing, marketing, stuff like that.
With traditional publishing, books might be pulled due to plagiarism or libel – but rarely for content, and especially not without a widespread outcry.
I used to be with a publishing house called Roosevelt Music. A gentleman there told me he had seen Peggy Lee perform Fever in Las Vegas and I found out later she wanted to record it.
Most of the important secrets that I’ve known about, the real secrets that are known about aren’t worth publishing.
I began illustrating children’s books because of a growing disillusionment with the sort of work I was doing in the advertising industry. Book publishing offered me the chance to be far more creative.
I got signed to a development deal when I was 15. That fell through after about a year when the company merged with another label. Then I got picked up by Sony publishing. So I was writing professionally from 16 to 18. Then I started making my own records.
I worked in the book publishing business for nearly two decades before I turned my attention to writing, first with a couple ghostwriting projects, plus a crappy novel that absolutely no one wanted to publish. Then I moved to Luxembourg for my wife’s job and found the inspiration for ‘The Expats.’
I knew very early what I wanted to do, and I considered myself lucky to know that’s what I wanted, even in a place like Saint Lucia where there was no publishing house and no theatre.
Why on earth is the ‘New Yorker’ publishing puff pieces about pretty girls who go to parties? Does the ‘New Yorker’ ever run photos of cute boys just because they’re cute and they come from money and they go to lots of parties?
We need more people working in the publishing industry itself who are people of colour.
I think that writing texts, publishing texts, selling texts in a physical book store is one of the important tools for breeding this new generation.
At 18, I got a publishing deal, so I was like, ‘I can do this for real and not go to college.’ When I was a teenager, my parents dragged me to a lot of songwriting conventions.
The magazine was being started by a company that had no experience in business magazine publishing. It was a little difficult to get people to sort of buy into it and to join the staff, but we did.
New York publishing is about, ‘What’s the next Harry Potter? What’s the next Twilight?’ When I’ve approached people, I’ve asked, ‘What is the book you’ve been dying to do, but New York won’t do?’ I want the books that they think won’t sell – because I think they will.
The future of publishing is about having connections to readers and the knowledge of what those readers want.
With the movies, people are not going to wait around. The deadline is a deadline. In publishing it’s more a polite suggestion.
I see publishers bemoaning their fate and saying that this is the end of publishing. No! Publishers will recreate themselves. Some of that comes from my experience as a print publisher.
I’ve always felt writing is an art. Publishing is a business. I felt strongly if I was going to write, I would write what I wanted to, and if the ‘market’ didn’t respond, there was nothing I could really do about it.
The problem most people make with their media presence is they’re trying to craft a media presence as opposed to just consistently publishing who they are.
There are no categories in contemporary art. There are no rules. Artists are given the freedom to make and create whatever they please and call it whatever they please. I identify with that system, or lack of system, much more than I do the landscape of contemporary publishing.
Commerce is abusive. It’s very hobbling to always be saying, ‘Please let me put this out, this thing I’ve worked on for years.’ It’s like a nasty parent saying, ‘No! Now go to your room.’ As publishing companies got bigger, you felt even less significant.
The Nobel Prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world’s publishing industry to jump to their tune.
I’ve learned over the years that big-name writers might be treated fairly by the media conglomerates that dominate publishing today. But the average author isn’t.
As we have seen again and again, when Amazon doesn’t get the economic conditions from suppliers that it seeks, it simply goes its own way. In the book business, that has meant publishing its own titles under the various Kindle imprints. Now it’s making diapers.
Despite all the criticisms that have been leveled at the comics community, both in terms of fans and creators, I have always felt more comfortable and accepted in the comics community than I have in any other medium of publishing that I’ve had the pleasure of working in.
I worked in publishing before I became an author, so I knew how a book gets made.
Writers are stewards of the culture. Publishers, librarians, bookstore owners. We’re all in this together. To write books that are gripping, important, that people want to have, is to keep publishing alive.
Even though I got a late start, first publishing an essay when I was 50 years old, I’ve since written eight suspense novels.
As we’ve gotten more successful, there’s a gap between the speed of our publishing pipeline and the speed of our receiving submissions pipeline. Our pipeline of leaks has been increasing exponentially as our profile rises, and our ability to publish is increasing linearly.
We all have our notions of sport. If I’d wanted to make my living climbing mountains, I wouldn’t have gone into publishing. Most of the time, you’re sitting in a dark room reading a manuscript.
If you go to a big publishing house, editorial aside, it’s completely white.
When I was submitting my first novel, I had no idea that publishing scams existed. I never encountered any, but I could have – and knowing how easily I might have been taken advantage of makes me determined to protect others from falling into that trap.
The goal is to become the central hub of publishing, where we have all the written material – user-generated and professional. We want to be the place where people can publish instantly to their audiences… and to get there, it’s just about doing things step by step.
I got a publishing deal with BMG, they were supportive, and some money to record demos.
I am hoping to work with writers publishing books for first time, since I of course remember what that experience is like. It’s all a bit of a mystery for new authors who don’t know what to expect.
I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that ‘nothing succeeds like success.’
The best thing anybody has ever done is to advise me against publishing a poem that shows me at less than my best, such as it is. That’s the kind of advice most of us resist but really should relish.
At graduation, I assumed I’d be in publishing, but first I went to England and got a master’s degree in English Literature. And then I came back to New York and had a series of publishing jobs, the way one does.
I have no desire to write fiction. I did what I did, and it’s done. There’s more to life than writing and publishing fiction. There is another way entirely, amazed as I am to discover it at this late date.
Amazon is such a big player in publishing, but a lot of authors feel this connection to their publishing house and their editors who helped them get their books out there, so their loyalties tend to go that way.
For years I’d understood that publishing in paperback was the kiss of death.
Film will always be my main focus, but designing and publishing my own work is something I will also always do.
