“The only necessary parts of the book business are authors and readers. Everybody else has to figure out how to be useful and relevant in connecting those two groups.”— Russ Grandinetti, vanityfair.comTagged: Book Publishing, Against Gatekeepers, Amazon
“If you look at the books that are backlist classics now, they were almost invariably best-sellers when they were new. The Catcher in the Rye. The Sun Also Rises. The Great Gatsby. These books were not discovered by the academy over centuries. They were sensations! Even Virginia Woolf was a best-sell…”— Michael Pietsch, vanityfair.comTagged: What Makes A Classic Book, Immediate Success of Books
“It’s hard for writers to believe, but publishing is a big business. It’s not the oil business or the auto business or even the cell-phone business, but total book sales in the United States last year were $13.9 billion.”— Keith Gessen, vanityfair.comTagged: Book Publishing Economics, Book Publishing