“The only updates you need to send an agent reading your query is if you've received an offer of representation or the Nobel Prize. Everything else irrelevant.”— Kate McKean, twitter.com
“It's merely this: no matter your reasoning for piracy, publishers don't print box sets or extras without the numbers on paper. Not about me.”— Maggie Stiefvater, twitter.com
“Publishing houses are masters at physical, retail distribution. They do that very well. They're also critical for worldwide branding and marketing (e.g., translations, releasing a book across many territories/countries).”— Jane Friedman, 0s-1s.com
“Mainstream publishing is a Rube Goldberg machine of perverse economic incentives, in which large numbers of mostly idiotic self-help guides, diet books, and airport thrillers subsidize an ever-shrinking number of mostly money-losing literary novels and books of poetry.”— Michael Bourne, themillions.com
“There’s something about a bookstore that requires you to slow down. Spend time with the very act of browsing a shelf.”— Aaron Hicklin, dveightmag.com
“But the publisher has a book-by-book relationship, not an assured ongoing relationship, with authors so investing for a longer-term gain is not structurally encouraged.”— Mike Shatzkin, idealog.com
“Most print formats had an outstanding year, with hardcover up 5.4%, trade paperback up 4%, and board books up 7.4%. Mass market has been on the wane since the introduction of e-books, and its slide continued in 2016 with a 7.7% drop in unit sales.”— Jonathan Segura, publishersweekly.com
“As a rule of thumb what defines the bestseller is bestselling. Nothing else.”— John Sutherland, amazon.com
“Remember that the bestseller rate in the book industry as it stands is less than one-half of one percent. That’s a lot of gambling before a big win.”— Jodie Archer, Matthew L. Jockers, amazon.com
“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.com
“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.com
“If the Kindle didn’t have any books on it, guess how many Kindles would be selling? None. They want the books, and they want the publishers’ profits, too? They should get nothing. Zero.”— Andrew Wylie, vanityfair.com
“If Amazon succeeds, they will lower the retail price—$9.99, $6.99, $3.99, $1.99. And instead of making $4 on your hardcover, you’ll be making 10 cents a copy on all editions. And you will not be able to afford to write a book. No one, unless they have inherited $50 million, will be able to afford to…”— Andrew Wylie, vanityfair.com
“You probably aren’t aware of this, but the majority of your favorite authors can’t make a living off their book sales alone.”— Writers and Readers, change.org
“If a big Barnes & Noble had 150,000 books in stock, Amazon had a million! And if Barnes & Noble had taken its books to lonely highways where previously there had been no bookstores, Amazon was taking books to places where there weren’t even highways. As long as you had a credit card, and the postal…”— Keith Gessen, vanityfair.com
“Barnes & Noble’s lone literary-fiction buyer, Sessalee Hensley, could make (or break) a book with a large order (or a disappointingly small one). If you talked to a publisher in the early 2000s, chances are they would complain to you about the tyranny of Sessalee. No one used her last name; the most…”— Keith Gessen, vanityfair.com
“You have to understand, if you have a good book, offering it to an agent appeals directly to their self-interest. Does anyone ever say: How will I ever find a real estate agent? Of course not.”— Ryan Holiday, thoughtcatalog.com
“The real conflict online is between the media companies that fund much of the entertainment we read, see, and hear and the technology firms that want to distribute their content—legally or otherwise.”— Robert Levine, amazon.com
“Book publishers needed only to listen to Jeff Bezos himself to have their fears stoked. Amazon’s founder repeatedly suggested he had little reverence for the old 'gatekeepers' of the media, whose business models were forged during the analogue age and whose function it was to review content and then…”— Brad Stone, amazon.com
“A corporate headquarters, like Random House's imposing skyscraper at 1745 Broadway in New York, may look to the casual observer like the house of a well-ordered bureaucracy where all procedures have been formalized and standardized, but in reality it is more like a conservatory that houses a plurali…”— John B. Thompson, amazon.com