A Quote by Lydia Davis

I started with small-press publishers, who were willing to publish all sorts of forms. I didn't move to the larger presses until they knew what they were getting in for.

Lydia Davis

Quote Topics

Forms Getting Knew Larger Move Press Presses Publish Publishers Small Started Until Were Willing

Quote Author

Lydia Davis
American - Novelist
Born: July 15, 1947

When I started publishing - my first novel came out in 1990 - there were no options for publishing science fiction in Canada. There were no small presses, and the large presses simply would not touch it at all.

Robert J. Sawyer

Most novels put out by small or corporate presses don't really sell that well - usually a thousand copies or so. Working with a small press, you have to be willing to book reading tours, plan events, make contacts with other small press authors, and find new ways of getting word about your new work out there.

Joe Meno

[Mid-list writers are now] less greed on the part of both publishers and chain booksellers. It is easier for them to publish and sell only blockbusters and leave the real work to small presses.

W. P. Kinsella

Memoirs are going to be problematic sells for a while, though, because even if memoir means "based in memory," right now, in the collective mind, memoir means "recovery." When my agent and I started looking at small presses the possibility for my book, I realized most small presses were not publishing memoir, because they don't want to be associated with the genre that Mary Karr calls, half-facetiously, "literature's trashy cousin."

Debra Monroe

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.

Peter Sotos

I was not afraid of the press or the militants. It was uncomfortable, but I was not afraid. With respect to the press, I knew I knew more than they knew about city matters. With respect to the militants, I understood it. I mean, everybody believed in those days that they were being screwed, you know, that somebody was getting ahead of them.

Ed Koch

In the early '70s - a very good time for children's books and their authors - editors and publishers were willing to take a chance on a new writer. They were willing and able to invest their time in nurturing writers with promise, encouraging them.

Judy Blume

We were really professional by the time we got to the States; we had learned the whole game. When we arrived here we knew how to handle the press; the British press were the toughest in the world and we could handle anything. We were all right.

John Lennon

I think a lot of awesome stuff is coming out with smaller presses. Small presses don't have to have huge board meetings to talk about how to market their books or what to publish - they can take more chances. They can help new authors grow in a healthier, often more artistic way.

Kevin Sampsell

Except for a few small presses, most publishers are north of Ground Zero.

Richard Curtis

My wife and I were poor when I started but we struggled along until things happened for me in my thirties. I knew I was doing what I loved even if I wasn't getting paid for it, so I think I'd still be doing it.

Denis Leary

I think the press mistakenly thought that all of these 'mumblecore' filmmakers were banded together in a similar ideology, but the truth is that we were all just using the same digital camera and helping each other make our movies because we were broke, and we were the only idiots willing to do it.

Jay Duplass

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.

Doris Lessing

I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.

George Bernard Shaw

When I was in high school in the early 1970s, we knew we were running out of oil; we knew that easy sources were being capped; we knew that diversifying would be much better; we knew that there were terrible dictators and horrible governments that we were enriching who hated us. We knew all that and we did really nothing.