Quotes & Sayings About Publishing Industry

When I went into the publishing industry, many women talked about the difficulty they had in persuading their families to let them go to college. They educated the boys, and the girls had to struggle. — Toni Morrison

If you are working on a short story for a small online press, don't try to write a serious, world-changing, add-this-to-the-literary-canon masterpiece. Do your best work, but keep it all in perspective. Save the stress for when it is really called for, like facing a two-week deadline to rewrite a novel for a major house. — Victoria Lynn Schmidt

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. — Adam Mansbach

Male critics and men in the publishing industry want from their women writers what they want from their wives. I'm interested in presenting characters that are more challenging, threatening, complicated and unpredictable. — Kate Braverman

I hope that, whatever happens within the publishing industry, because of the increased control writers have of their own careers, better sales information and the advent of the internet, that ultimately this change in our working environment will be a change for the better. — Sara Sheridan

Not only are unpaid internships exploitative, they're one of the main forces keeping publishing in this country a primary white middle-class industry, which has a direct knock-on effect on what gets published and how. — Deborah Smith

I think the publishing industry is dismayingly like the movie business. It grows more corporate by the day. — Matthew Specktor

360 deals are the new things of the industry. It's not about selling records; it's about selling T-shirts, getting a piece of your publishing, getting a piece of your touring, and all these other kind of properties. — Lupe Fiasco

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. — Alexander Osterwalder

Despite what you hear about the publishing industry being a fixed game that you can only get in if you know somebody, I'm here in person to tell you it ain't so. If your stuff is really any good, sooner or later some editor will take a chance on you. — Kage Baker

It was after an incident such as this that my friends and family decided something must be done. They gathered for a confabulation and, having established that secure psychiatric care was beyond their means, they turned in despair to the publishing industry, which has a long history of picking up where social work leaves off. — Mark Forsyth

People will always tell stories. The publishing industry might vanish, but not stories. — Aleksandar Hemon

Determining the value of individual texts has been an ideological scuffle in literary criticism for centuries: but the environmental cost of printing them hauls this dispute from the ivory tower into day-to-day decision-making. Is it right to write? The publishing industry is slowly beginning to commit to using sustainably harvested trees. — Tristram Stuart

The publishing industry, unsurprisingly, is full of different people who love different things and express that love in different languages. Find the people, the editors and agents, with whom you share some language, and some sense of what makes literature worth reading. — Leslie Jamison

The publishing industry is stuck somewhere in the Jurassic era. — Vantile Whitfield

Publishing is a business and writing is an art. The two have to be crammed together despite the clearly different motivations behind them. — Michelle M. Pillow

But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. — David Frum

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. — Calvin Trillin

I think having power ingrains people with a conservatism. There's a tendency to hedge one's bets. (Which explains a lot, actually, about why the movie business is the way it is, and why the publishing industry is too.) — Matthew Specktor

If it weren't for received ideas, the publishing industry wouldn't have any ideas at all. — Donald E. Westlake

New York is the Hollywood of the publishing industry, complete with stars, starlets, suicidal publishers/producers, intrigues, and a lot of money. — Aleksandar Hemon

Sometimes writers say true things about the overall nature of publicity, promotion, and the publishing industry; but alas, not always. — Teresa Nielsen Hayden

The pain of an unpublished manuscript is akin to the trauma of bearing an unborn. — Anurag Shourie

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves - the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public - has stopped being a problem. — Clay Shirky

I think the online space can be a free space, in that we are not reliant online on the publishing industry or readers who just don't get it. — Kate Zambreno

Indie publishing lets me feed my inner control freak. — Michelle M. Pillow

I wrote my first novel-length story when I was 14 but had no idea what to do with it. Brisbane was a long way from the publishing industry then. Nowhere's a long way from the publishing industry now. — Nick Earls

Trade book publishing is by nature a cottage industry, decentralized, improvisational, personal; best performed by small groups of like-minded people, devoted to their craft, jealous of their autonomy, sensitive to the needs of writers and to the diverse interests of readers. If money were their primary goal, these people would probably have chosen other careers. — Jason Epstein

I was in the second year of my PhD when I first had the idea - I'd recently started working as a translator, which meant firstly that I was hearing about amazing-sounding books from other translators, and also that I was getting enough of an insider's view of the publishing industry to be aware of all the implicit biases that made it so difficult for these books to ever get published, especially if they weren't from European languages (harder to discover, editors can't read the original, lack of funding programmes, authors who don't speak English). — Deborah Smith

For a writer it's a genuinely interesting and hopefully profitable era that makes a variety of books available to a variety of readers, extending both what's available and who gets to read it. — Sara Sheridan

In 2011, I interviewed a skilful young manga artist who asked me not to reveal his name because he still needs to defer to his seniors in the industry. He has had some considerable publishing success, and explained that, although the competitions are in theory open, in practice he now feels he needs to work first for the company that has supported him, and this also influences his choice of subject matter. — Joy Hendry

I think publishing's strength is also its weakness. It's got such a rich and celebrated history as an industry. For the most part, publishing people are incredibly creative, business is done based on the strength of relationships, and the product being peddled is books. — Jennifer Gilmore

I feel like it's a good time to be a writer. I'm terminally optimistic. It seems like the publishing industry is in the middle of a big transition, and that the rules of the game are still sorting themselves out. — Brad Listi

But really it says everything that's wrong about the publishing industry, that a quarter of a million people bought and read a sex and shopping novel that wasn't even written by one of those footballer girlfriends, and yet most of the shortlisted titles on the Orange Prize, which is an award for women writers, don't even sell ten thousand copies. It's just not right. — Sarra Manning

Though the publishing industry swears the market is oversaturated, books written by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and by embedded journalists keep on coming. — Matt Gallagher

There is an enormous shadow industry of scammers and amateurs who prey on aspiring writers, who divert people from the real publishing industry into this shadow world of vanity publishing and fee-charging agents. — Victoria Strauss

Sometimes, I'll hear from other writers or folks in the publishing industry that my books are rule-breakers, which I take as a compliment. — Kristan Higgins

We all need each other in publishing to make publishing work for authors in a variety of formats now and in the future. Anyone who thinks publishers don't bring anything to the table has a very narrow view and lack of knowledge about the industry as a whole. — Robert Gottlieb

My belief that the publishing industry is run by prigs and cowards dates back to many years before I even had the idea for the book. — Jessa Crispin

It's interesting that the book publishing industry, on the iPad, has much more flexibility than the music industry had. — Edgar Bronfman Jr.

Bookshops are at the coalface of our industry. — Sara Sheridan

There's a bizarre prejudice that exists in the New York publishing establishment that any work outside the tri-state area is being done by trained chimpanzees, that geography screens out sensibility. There's an idea that all Los Angeles writing is about the movie industry, that it's vulgar, shallow and banal. — Kate Braverman

It really gets me when the critics say I haven't done enough for the economy. I mean, look what I've done for the book publishing industry. You've heard some of the titles. 'Big Lies,' 'The Lies of George W. Bush,' 'The Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.' I'd like to tell you I've read each of these books, but that'd be a lie. — George W. Bush

In TIME June 7, 2010
On the sustainability of the publishing industry, in the Chicago Tribune:
"I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea. We live in a literate time, and our children are writing up a storm, often combining letters and numbers ... The future of publishing: 18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood relatives. Average annual earnings: $175." - 5/26/10 — Garrison Keillor

People in the newspaper industry saw the web as a newspaper. People in TV saw the web as TV, and people in book publishing saw it as a weird kind of potential book. But the web is not just some kind of magic all-absorbing meta-medium. It's its own thing. — Paul Ford

I loved publishing; I loved working in the book industry, but I've been writing pretty much nonstop since I was 19. I realized very early on that I would need a day job, and I wanted one that was in books. — Garth Nix

'Harry Potter' opened so many doors for young adult literature. It really did convince the publishing industry that writing for children was a viable enterprise. And it also convinced a lot of people that kids will read if we give them books that they care about and love. — Rick Riordan

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. — Jennifer Gilmore

Good journalist. I rattled off things that would make students keenly aware of newsroom labor models, the ad industry and publishing — Anonymous

This is what happens when the discourse of publishing, defined and driven by spoken and written language, is talked about in exactly the same vocabulary and syntax as any widgetmaking industry. Books are reformulated as 'product' - like screwdrivers or flea-bombs or soap - and the majority of writers are perceived as typists with bad attitudes. — Suzette Haden Elgin

It's not like publishing is perfect. Far from it. The industry is struggling to adapt and survive, and it's incredibly frustrating trying to break in. — Jim C. Hines

Because all of us are so ready to talk about the world we live in. We are ready to have a publishing industry that is of that world. — Mira Jacob

Why don't we approach literature like we approach music and the fine arts? — Hugh Howey

There's been a growing dissatisfaction and distrust with the conventional publishing industry, in that you tend to have a lot of formerly reputable imprints now owned by big conglomerates. — Alan Moore

I enjoy writing. Publishing ... not so much. I've been lucky to work with some very talented people in the publishing world, and the print industry has allowed me to write full time. — J.A. Konrath

In the industry, trying out new genres is not always encouraged but what I've discovered is that as a writer, a jaunt outside my comfort zone generally brings new skills to the main body of my work. — Sara Sheridan

Publishing is the only industry I can think of where most of the employees spend most of their time stating with great self-assurance that they don't know how to do their jobs. "I don't know how to sell this," they explain, frowning, as though it's your fault. "I don't know how to package this. I don't know what the market is for this book. I don't know how we're going to draw attention to this." In most occupations, people try to hide their incompetence; only in publishing is it flaunted as though it were the chief qualification for the job. — Donald E. Westlake

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. — Graeme Base

I thought, 'Okay, what's going to be my edge, and how am I going to define what I'm doing differently?' Once I had that key idea of the software developer as an artist, once I had that idea, a whole bunch of other ideas flowed from that, because I realized that I need to go study the music industry, I need to study the book publishing and Hollywood and figure out how they do things, why they do them that way, and then I need to borrow, and rearrange, the things that they're doing to fit my industry so that I can invent and create this new industry. — Trip Hawkins

We need more people working in the publishing industry itself who are people of colour. — Malorie Blackman

The self-addressed stamped envelope. The representation of everything that was wrong with the old publishing industry. — Alexei Maxim Russell

There's almost no author alive who isn't weathering the tumultuous changes in the publishing industry. — M.J. Rose

The publishing industry is an archaic and inefficient industry. — J.A. Konrath

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. — Juicy J

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. — Doris Lessing

One of the things that's great about New York is that it is not a one-industry town. It has education, academia, the service industry, arts, publishing, theater, politics, fashion, finance, as well as movie-making. — Sarah Jessica Parker

The publishing industry has always wanted to make books as cheaply and as ephemerally as they could; it's nothing new. — Ben Katchor

Hatori: "SHIGURE ... I WILL TELL EVERYONE IN THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT YOU, STARTING FROM WHEN YOU WERE FOUR YEARS OLD ... "
Shigure: "Sorry, Tohru-kun. My lips are sealed! — Natsuki Takaya

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. — Akhil Sharma

And to improve access to the UK publishing industry - I'm hoping to set up an internship or work experience for someone from a low-income background, as soon as we have the funds. While we don't have the funds, we won't have an intern. — Deborah Smith