If you want to take something more seriously, do it publicly. Publishing an article pressures you to think clearly. Competing in a race pressures you to train consistently. Presenting on any topic pressures you to...

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

You can’t judge a book by it’s cover but you can sure sell a bunch of books if you have a good one.

If the novel is dead, I’m a necrophiliac.

He wondered fleetingly how many people who sat alone for hours as they scribbled their stories practiced talking about their work during their coffee breaks….

A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.

Like Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake and Robert B. Parker and oh so many others, I want to die with my boots on, facedown on my keyboard if possible, in the middle of a sentence.

Note to the wise: whenever someone insists that he wants to buy something from you, but tells you there’s no real value in it yet, two things are happening: he’s lying, and you’re being taken.

But just understand the difference between a man like Reardon and a man like me. He is the old type of unpractical artist; I am the literary man of 1882. He won’t make concessions, or...

Three carefully stringed words are worth more than a book of gibberish. It’s not the word count but the impact of those words that counts.

I’m a professional writer and I consider it part of my job to publicise my work and these days part of that job is done online.

Nowadays, the Internet decides if you’re good, not the big man in the big office. No matter how important that man thinks he is, everyone else knows that he’s not important anymore, and the Internet...

In the end, what makes a book valuable is not the paper it’s printed on, but the thousands of hours of work by dozens of people who are dedicated to creating the best possible reading...

Don’t simply dream, create. Don’t simply create, ship. Don’t simply ship, dream.

you may be right. But, no. It would seem as if I were lending support to what ought never to have been published in the first place.

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public eye with his pants down.

Some writers aren’t writers, they are mere escapees’ and refugees’ on an exile from the jungle of thoughts.

Only a few short years ago, the average stay-at-home mom spent her relaxation time reading Jackie Collins and staring at the pool boy. Now, half of them are outselling Jackie Collins writing porn about the...

By their very nature, idiots do not have the intellectual capacity to identify genius. All that idiots are mentally equipped to recognize are other idiots.

I have my own publishing company called ‘I Am McLovin Publishing.’

Writing the same kind of material is no guarantee you’ll be working from the same ethos so that writers from different fields are just as likely to have an understanding of each other’s work as...

It began to falter not when the book publishers who loved books gave way to those who preferred profits to reading. It happened when publishers and editors cut back on their drinking. If there is...

Write from the heart. A book without a pulse is like a person without a spirit.” Linda Radke, President of Five Star Publications

I have to declare in all candor that no one interested in being published in our time can afford to be so naive as to believe that a book will make it merely because it’s...

It is proper Netiquette to post pictures with status updates to make them more engaging.

It can be depressing when no one takes interest, and a lack of response makes the writer question why they’re writing at all. To have one’s writing rejected is like you, yourself, are being rejected.

Every time you publish a book, be prepared to eat a fresh slice of humble pie.

The big trinity of publishing: mystery, thrillers and romance. If you can combine all three, then it’s a winner’s trifecta and you’ll be rich beyond your dreams.

Who is better off? The one who writes to revel in the voluptuousness of the life that surrounds them? Or the one who writes to escape the tediousness of that which awaits them outside? Whose...

Writing is such a solitary occupation that it takes a long time to build up a group of professional peers with whom you genuinely identify.

Between my first book tour, in 2003, and the next one, in 2009, many of the places I visited had undergone a significant transformation or vanished: Cody’s in Berkeley, seven branch libraries in Philadelphia, twelve...

It wouldn’t happen… There hasn’t been one publication by a monkey

Confidence is going after Moby Dick in a rowboat and taking the tartar sauce with you.

Not everyone will like what you write but there’s a certain group who’ll love what you write. Keep WRITING for them.

I’m working on my own work, my own publishing company.

You were right the first time, Cathy. It was a stupid, silly story.Ridiculous! Only insane people would die for the sake of love. I’llbet you a hundred to one a woman wrote that junky romantic...

Anybody can write a book. But writing it well and making it sell – that’s the hard part.

it takes a village to build success in publishing a book – it takes friends that are willing to help – it takes hours upon hours of no’s to get to a yes, it takes...

As it stands there is a very strong argument that as the book trade becomes increasingly corporate it’s our literary heritage that is at risk – a vital part of our culture.

I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to...

Before Gutenberg, libraries were small — the Cambridge University library had only 122 volumes in 1424, for instance; after Gutenberg literacy became widespread.

NEWSPAPER: What great paper is the Earth; what a typeface is the Day; what ink is the Night! – Everyone prints, everyone reads; no one understands.

Publishers are notoriously slothful about numbers, unless they’re attached to dollar signs – unlike journalists, quarterbacks, and felony criminal defendants who tend to be keenly aware of numbers at all times.

Sometimes, I’m brave.Sometimes, I’m just stubbron.

News is not just about information from media, it’s the current revelation of the two changing worlds of the good and the dark worlds.

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

Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity.” Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal. New York Times, 10/16/2011

It may take a village to raise a baby, but hell! it takes an army to produce a book.

Turning a manuscript into a book is easy; getting the manuscript ready to become a book is hard.

I’ve been willing to go for years without publishing. That’s been my career.