Having 'The Expats' not be 'wholesale-y' rejected by the world made it possible for me to write the second book and have a publisher buy it before it was entirely written. And it made it easier for me and my publisher to get 'The Accident' out into the world without trying to convince people to pay attention to it the way you do for a first novel.
I wrote a little autobiography about how luck has to do with everything. It's called 'My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business.' A publisher came to me and said, 'Write a book,' so I did. I wanted to call it 'Everybody Else Has Got a Book.'
I was never confident about finishing a book, but friends encouraged me. When I finished my first book, it was accepted by a publisher right away and became an instant bestseller. One male critic called it the most shocking book he ever read.
Wikileaks in its essence is a publisher, pure and simple. They were very much in the same position as 'The New York Times' and 'The Guardian.'
After being rejected for years, I found a publisher for 'Keeper,' and it won prizes, and then I had to write a second and a third book because I kept taking the money and spending it.
A publisher who writes is like a cow in a milk bar.
I was talking to my publisher, Jamie Ceretta, who's one of my closest confidants and allies when I'm working on new music. I feel like I can always count on his judgement because he'll tell me if he doesn't like something. It's sometimes hard to get people to tell you if they don't like something.
Someone told me there was a publisher that could find a good home for my songs, but I didn't want to give up my pursuit of a career in the business as an artist.
The fact must never be forgotten that no magazine publisher in the United States could give what it is giving to the reader each month if it were not for the revenue which the advertiser brings the magazine.
In a world where everyone is a publisher, no one is an editor. And that is the danger that we face today.
Booksellers are tied to publishing - they need conventional publishing models to continue - but for those companies, that's not the case. Amazon is an infrastructure company; Apple sells hardware; Google is really an advertising company. You can't afford as a publisher to have those companies control your route to market.
I assumed 'Freak the Mighty' was probably too weird and melodramatic to find a publisher. I certainly never expected the book to have a profound influence on my career as a writer, but indeed it has.
In junior high, I was still writing poems and stories. In college, I was a journalism major. When I got out of college, I went to work for an educational publisher, so I was still writing, developing curriculums.
Instead of taking a year off, I started 'Dreamers of the Day' exactly 36 hours after I sent the manuscript for 'A Thread of Grace' to the publisher!
I really do love 'Panama.' But I'd also have to admit that right now, if I were driven to write another novel like that, I wouldn't even try to find a publisher for it. It simply wouldn't be published. I'd be writing it to put in my closet upstairs.
'Sanctus' was done on speculation. I had no agent or publisher. I was being sensible, I suppose, by writing a standalone novel. I figured if that one didn't work, no one would be interested in reading a sequel.
I'm Marie Lightfoot, or at least that's the name my publisher puts on the covers of the books I write about true crime. In classic 'true crime' fashion, my latest one is titled 'Anything to Be Together.'
Authors need to decide if they want to keep forever to themselves, or share forever with a publisher who takes over half the cover price.
If your agent or publisher is jumping up and down at the thought of your novel, it's because they're picturing the movie poster on the side of the bus.
What makes a publisher decide to market a book to a particular audience is not the subject matter but the style.
If you're making a film about a band or a songwriter or whomever, there's a publisher, there's a record label, and there are people who are vested interests in that film. But with back-up singers, because they did stuff for everybody, there's no one party that has any vested interest in seeing the story told.
I remember a period where my publisher said to me, 'Look, your historical work is selling much better than your contemporary work, so please give us more historicals.'
Maybe just as many women writers as male writers could be billed as the next great American writer by their publisher. Maybe book criticism sections could review an equal amount of female and male writers. Maybe Oprah could start putting some books by women authors in her book club, since most of her audience is women.
I got Elliott Smith's photography book as a gift before. The publisher of that book's logo were glasses, and those glasses came to my mind when I was thinking of having a tattoo.
As a publisher, you should decide what content is free and what you'd pay for. You have to get the packaging right, but people will pay for content.
Putting out compilation records, buying the right to music is incredibly complicated. You have to find the writer of the song and the publisher of the song - not the singer - and make two separate deals.
The royalty any author gets is dependent on his track record and marketability and often on the price of his book, too. The higher you price a book, the more comfortable your publisher will be in paying you a higher royalty.
I think that the continuity of what I do as an editor with what I did when I started out 40 years ago is very direct. The delivery system is changing and will continue to, but the actual interaction between publisher and author is exactly the same.
I'll never forget a meeting with one publisher where they said, 'We don't publish books for teenage boys; teenage boys don't read.'
I've evolved in my writing to tell a more emotional story - my publisher, Random House, has urged that.
This never happens, but I was writing with my friend Ryan Hurd and Eric Arjes, and we wrote this song called 'Last Turn Home.' The next day, my publisher emailed it to Tim McGraw's label. He listened to it, and I think within the week, he went into the studio and recorded it. And that never happens.
If you're a publisher and you forbid deep linking into your site, or have a paid wall or registration requirement, then you're making it hard to 'point to' your content. When no one points to your content, your content is harder to find because search uses links as a proxy for popularity.
I began writing 'Matterhorn' in 1975 and for more than 30 years I kept working on my novel in my spare time, unable to get an agent or publisher to even read the manuscript.
Print-on-demand and electronic self-publishing options have made it easy for anyone to set up a business as a publisher whether they know what they're doing or not.
Authors by the hundreds can tell you stories by the thousands of those rejection slips before they found a publisher who was willing to 'gamble' on an unknown.
My father had a flourishing business as a publisher in North India.
