Publishers Quotes - Page 4

• The comedians all finished their acts with a song. They would get a certain amount of money from the song publishers and would use that money to pay the writers. None of them paid very much for their comedy material, but it all added up.

  Denis Norden

  Song, Comedian, Use

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• To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind; or, if not, should never be published at all. A message from the gods should be delivered at once. It is damnably blasphemous to talk about the autumn season and so on. How dare the author or publisher demand a price for doing his duty, the highest and most honorable to which a man can be called?

  Aleister Crowley

  Book, Autumn, Men

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• Don't write the book you think publishers want to commission. Plenty of other writers will be doing the same thing.

  Louise Brown

  Book, Writing, Thinking

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• I work continuously within the shadow of failure. For every novel that makes it to my publisher's desk, there are at least five or six that died on the way. And even with the ones I do finish, I think of all the ways they might have been better.

  Gail Godwin

  Thinking, Shadow, Might

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• The share of the sympathetic publisher in the author's success - the true success so different from the ephemeral - is apt to be overlooked in these blatant days, so it is just as well that some of us should keep it in mind.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Mind, Different, Ephemeral

  Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow (1958). “Letters of Ellen Glasgow”

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• Writers are always a great nuisance to publishers. If they could do without them, they would.

  Fay Weldon

  Nuisance, Ifs

  4 Copy quote

• There are two kinds of books in this world. One improves the mind, the other the bank balance. Sometimes they're the same -- but not often. Most publishers find combining the two is the only way to stay afloat.

  Paula Gosling

  Book, Two, Mind

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• Hollywood is a showman's paradise. But showmen make nothing; they exploit what someone else has made. The publisher and the play producer are showmen too; but they exploit what is already made. The showmen of Hollywood control the making - and thereby degrade it. For the basic art of motion pictures is the screenplay; it is fundamental, without it there is nothing. Everything derives from the screenplay, and most of that which derives is an applied skill which, however adept, is artistically not in the same class with the creation of a screenplay.

  Raymond Chandler

  Art, Class, Play

  Raymond Chandler (1995). “Later Novels & Other Writings”

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• No publisher will ever pay you enough to successfully sue them.

  Dave Sim

  Pay, Enough

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• A lot of publishers have close relationships with people in power. So the press, which used to speak truth to power, doesn't. The big result of that has been the erosion of trust.

  Craig Newmark

  Erosion, People, Speak

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• Novels are completed when they are finished, but the memoir changes its own conclusion by virtue of being written... I was not at all the same person, when I handed the manuscript to the publisher, as I had been when I began. A memoir may always be retrospective, but the past is not where its action takes place.

  Nuala O'Faolain

  Past, May, Action

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• My theory is that, just like with omitting a final comma in a list when not essential for meaning, publishers are trying to save paper and ink or pixels on-screen.

  Bill Walsh

  Trying, Pixels, Lists

  Source: live.washingtonpost.com

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• Your book may be a masterpiece but do not suggest that to the publisher because many of the most hopeless manuscripts that have come his way have probably been so described by their authors.

  Stanley Unwin

  Book, May, Way

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• Literary success of any enduring kind is made by refusing to do what publishers want, by refusing to write what the public wants, by refusing to accept any popular standard, by refusing to write anything to order.

  Lafcadio Hearn

  Writing, Order, Want

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• I wrote a little autobiography about how luck has to do with everything. It's called "My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business." A publisher came to me and said write a book so I did. I wanted to call it "Everybody Else Has Got a Book."

  Dick Van Dyke

  Book, Writing, Luck

  "Dick Van Dyke - At 87, Life is Better Than Ever!". Interview with Pat Gallagher, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 11, 2013.

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• After an author has been dead for some time, it becomes increasingly difficult for his publishers to get out a new book by him each year.

  Robert Benchley

  Book, Years, Comedy

  "Love Conquers All".

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• Publishers see free downloads as threatening the sales of the book.

  Paulo Coelho

  Book, Threatening, Downloads

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• Agents are essential, because publishers will not read unsolicited manuscripts.

  Jackie Collins

  Aquariums, Essentials, Agents

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• This sort of encouragement is vital for any writer. And lastly the publication of Touching the Flame, which was on hold for two years and went through a few publishers before finding a stable home.

  Paul Kane

  Encouragement, Home, Flames

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• If you want to publish two books a year under your own name and your publisher doesn't, maybe you need a different publisher.

  Dean Koontz

  Book, Years, Names

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• Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it.

  John Lennon

  Love, Life, Happiness

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• When a book comes from the publisher and you see it for the first time... Of course it's not remotely like seeing a baby for the first time, but I can remember with each book what room I was in when I opened it. That would be excitement, though, I think. Not pride.

  Colm Toibin

  Baby, Book, Pride

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• Before publishers' blurbs were invented, authors had to make their reputations by writing.

  Laurence J. Peter

  Writing, Reputation

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• How often we recall with regret that Napoleon once shot at a magazine editor and missed him and killed a publisher. But we remember with charity that his intentions were good.

  Mark Twain

  Regret, Editors, Charity

  Mark Twain (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Mark Twain (Illustrated)”, p.7132, Delphi Classics

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• I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Book, Years, Names

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