A Quote by Daniel J. Boorstin
Best-sellerism is the star system of the book world. A "best seller" is a celebrity among books. It is a book known primarily (sometimes exclusively) for its well-knownness.
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Being known primarily for their well-knownness, celebrities intensify their celebrity images simply by becoming widely known for relations among themselves. By a kind of symbiosis, celebrities live off one another.
Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.
A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well because it was selling well.
The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.
The point is that if a book that had been published three years ago started to sell twice as many all of a sudden it probably wouldn't even get noticed. People wouldn't be tracking it. The system has cleaned up its act an awful lot but the best-seller list system is not an entirely foolproof thing.
I signed my first book contract without paying much attention to what it said. I didn't know at the time that the book would be a best seller or that it would one day inspire a Netflix series. I just needed the money.
God is the celebrity author of the world's best seller. We have made god into the biggest celebrity of all, to contain our own emptiness.
I think there's a difference between having a bestselling book - meaning through marketing, PR and buying that first wave of customers - and writing a bestselling book. The second implies that the product propels itself to the best seller list.
It is true that the discerning intellect of the world is always much in advance of the creative, so that there are competent judges of the best book, and few writers of the best books.
'The Battle of Dorking' was reprinted as a book and became a best-seller.
When I wrote the first Betsy book, 'Undead and Unwed,' I had no idea, none, that it would be a career-defining, genre-defining book, the first of over a dozen in the series, the first of over 70 published books, the first on my road to the best-seller list, the first on my road to being published in 15 countries.
I think what's happening with book advances is something that most of the world just doesn't fully appreciate, especially when it comes to nonfiction, because writing a book of investigative journalism is an expensive endeavor, and the system works best if you have publishers making bets on authors.
The book I am best known for, or only known for, is a novel I am prepared to repudiate: written a quarter of a century ago, a jeu d'esprit knocked off for money in three weeks, it became known as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify sex and violence. The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me till I die. I should not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation.
We couldn't predict what would happen with 'Roots.' You knew there were powerful moments that were going to affect people. We were making the film while the book was being completed. We were fortunate because the hardcover book was out and on the best-seller list. The heat was still on.
My understanding is that a book becomes a best seller only when it is pirated, sold on footpaths and at traffic lights.
In the twentieth century our highest praise is to call the Bible 'The World's Best Seller.' And it has come to be more and more difficult to say whether we think it is a best seller because it is great, or vice versa.
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