Top 1200 Book Publishing Quotes & Sayings

Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea.

I had written a book. For various reasons, the publishing industry had decided that my book was going to be 'important.' The novel had taken me 12-and-a-half years to write, and after being with the book for so long, I had no real perspective on the merits or demerits of what I had written. I hoped it was good, but feared that it wasn't.

You know, in the old days, you might be able to slowly sort of build an audience for your work by publishing two, three novels before you hit it big. You know, now, there's much more of an emphasis in the publishing houses on making sure that every book makes money.

Book clubs are the best thing that has happened to the world of publishing.

Electronic distribution is more of a fall-back strategy for putting out a book that isn't deemed profitable enough to print. You hardly make any money publishing an electronic book.

You need to be naive enough to do things differently. No big publishing house would have allowed us to co-create a fully designed, four color business book in landscape format - because it was contrary to the publishing industry logic. However, we thought of Business Model Generation as a product, not just a book - similar to Apple products.

I've thought of publishing a book of my hate mail, but I don't own the rights to the letters.

Maybe self-publishing is going to be an extra step added to publishing. Maybe what's going to happen is you self-publish a book, someone notices it - an agent? - and it goes from there into the traditional sphere.

I learned that you have to respect how much time and work a writer has put into their book. I always give the writer I'm publishing a good deal of control in shaping the book and figuring out how it looks, but I'll make suggestions on how to make it stronger.

There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy.

I publish my own books, so there isn't a certain editor I owe the book to at a publishing house.

I got a couple of different contacts from publishing companies saying they'd be interested in a book about my work: not a kiss-and-tell book, which I specifically put in the contract. Just a book about my work and what I did.

I worked in publishing before I became an author, so I knew how a book gets made.

With the communication internet, whole industries have been disrupted. You're in the publishing industry, you understand that. Before, we had newspapers, magazines - now you're on the web. I'm in book publishing. I don't have to tell you what's happened to us. Television has taken a hit. The music industry. But, thousands of new businesses have emerged on this new communication revolution platform. Not just Google, Facebook, and Twitter. There are thousands of operations. Businesses that are doing the platforms, the apps. They're mining the big data. They're creating the connections.

Publishing is a business. Writing may be art, but publishing, when all is said and done, comes down to dollars.

I've always liked the tradition of publishing work serially in the comic-book 'pamphlet' format and then collecting that work in book form, so I've just stuck with it.

Publishing is the final step in making a book; if I was afraid to publish one, I wouldn't write it in the first place.

I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'

One of the great advantages of only publishing five books per year is that I get to be excited about every book.

To read a book, to think it over, and to write out notes is a useful exercise; a book which will not repay some hard thought is not worth publishing.

I wish that the act of publishing a book was less of a nerve-wracking experience.

In a way, publishing in 2005 was similar to publishing in 1950. Nobody kept blogs; that was still optional. I didn't even have a website then.

In 2008, when I wrote Book 1 and Book 2, the head of the publishing house suggested twelve books - one each month. For practical reasons, that didn't work out.

I maintain an ongoing survey of Internet Publishing and self publishing, so that it is now possible for any writer with a book to get it published at nominal cost or free, and to have it on sale at booksellers like Amazon.com.

I think that the economics of book publishing favor hits with long book runs. You make all your money on the last bunch of books, not the first.

Book publishing was never a heaven "run by editors", and it is by no means today a hell "run by accountants." If our "sole interest" was "instant profit," not only would we never do any number of the things we actually do every day, we probably wouldn't be in book publishing at all.

There's a lot more to publishing a book than writing it and slapping a cover on it.

If writing and publishing a book is like giving birth to a child, then book marketing is like rearing it.

What sells a book sells a book, same in traditional or self-publishing . You gotta shake your tail feathers.

A new regulation for the publishing industry: "The advance for a book must be larger than the check for the lunch at which it was discussed.

Australian SF book publishing has undergone a boom recently, and sometimes it's easier for new writers to sell a book to a local publisher first, which then makes a US edition more likely.

Go APE: Author a great book, Publish it quickly, and Entrepreneur your way to success. Self-publishing isn’t easy, but it’s fun and sometimes even lucrative. Plus, your book could change the world.

The trouble with the publishing business is that too many people who have half a mind to write a book do so.

I more seriously considered publishing it under a pseudonym than I considered publishing it as fiction. I think the decision to write it as nonfiction happened at the very outset of the process, because the overwhelming impetus for writing this book was to understand what the experience meant, and to override my own reductions and rationalizations, whatever story I had that was not true. It didn't sit well with me and I needed to answer that. That's sort of the reason I write everything.

God forbid that I should ever suffer the shame of publishing a book for money, or of having one of my family so demean themselves. How can one tell who might read it? No worthy book has ever been written for gain, I think.

What with the reviews of critics, the sarcasms of one's friends, the reproaches of one's own taste, there's precious little peace after publishing a book.

I think I'm gonna attach myself to the sinking ship that is book publishing.

I think book publishing is fun, but I also know I've been very lucky.

One of the best book marketing tips I can give you is simply building relationships - well that and publishing more books.

One of the greatest threats facing book publishing, and the entire country for that matter, is censorship.

Say you're an American novelist, published by the largest publishing house in the world. Their goal is to make as much money from you as possible, to have as many people read your book in as many formats as possible. How can you hope to speak intimately to the numbers of people that represent the book sales required?

Many writers hate the shilling process, and I understand that. However, it's really the only thing about the publication process you can somewhat control. You can't affect reviews. But you can try to find your book an audience. One of the problems with the book publishing industry is that their publicity efforts tend to be spent on people who already read, and know how to discover, literary fiction.

Children's publishing is the jewel in the crown of British publishing.

That is the person you want publishing your book. To be in it, you really have to believe in books and love whatever it is you're publishing. Both on the book side and especially on the magazine side, I've had editors that I did not get the same feeling from. That feeling of, "This is something I believe in, I don't care how long, I'm going to publish it" - that kind of passion and commitment means a lot to you.

Someone ought to publish a book about the doomsayers who keep publishing books about the end of publishing.

Now, almost twenty years since my last job in book publishing, I know that there are far more socially inept people in book than in magazine publishing. At the time, however, I just didn't feel I was enough: smart enough, savvy enough, well read enough, educated enough, charming enough. Much of this was probably because I was very naive, and didn't really know how to behave in an office. This made me a terrible assistant, which in turn made me a terrible junior book editor.

Book publishing would be so much easier without the authors.

Like a lot of small press founders I was looking for a way into publishing - as well as a way out of academia. Without moving to London, I couldn't see a way of working for a publishing house whose work I liked. Believe it or not, the simplest way for me to get into publishing was to start my own press.

I've never sold my publishing. I have 100% control of all of my publishing and that includes everything, every use of my songs.

It's so exciting when a book catches traction you didn't even expect (or completely did expect!), and so frustrating when a book never quite catches the traction you know it deserves. But either way it doesn't change the book, it doesn't change how much I love that book, or how thrilled I am to be publishing it.

I have my own publishing company called 'I Am McLovin Publishing.

I have students that I tell, "If your book doesn't sell or you can't publish it, write another book. Quit sitting around." The publishing world is a business, but it's not any big deal. An editor is not your guru. Your agent is not your guru.

Publishing a book is a very different thing than writing one.

Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word "publishing" means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That's not a job anymore. That's a button. There's a button that says "publish," and when you press it, it's done.

I have my own publishing company called 'I Am McLovin Publishing.'

I came into book publishing without any particular impulse to be in book publishing.

The creation is a very internal process, and publishing the book is a very external process. It is nice to see the book out in the world and people having the same reaction as when I created it. The point of all art is the emotional transference, and when that happens, the book has succeeded.

The publishing of a book is a worldwide event. The attempt to suppress a book is a worldwide event.

I know publishing now more as an author than with occasional peaks inside those elite offices than as an industry insider. It was difficult publishing a novel the first time around, while working behind the scenes, knowing all that has to happen to make a book a success and to still make the leap as an author.

Kindle Singles is publishing on skates. It prints like lightning; our book meets readers in hours. I've spent so many years waiting for publishers to consider whether they wanted to print a book of mine, making contracts, taking months to fit it into the Fall list or the Spring list, fitting it into an advertising plan.