Charles Lamb Quotes

If I'm on the road for Random House, I'm presenting a book with the hope people will buy it.

It's really hard to get a book published, even a good book, but the better the book is the better chance it has of eventually catching someone's attention.

If you're looking for a book that will spike in sales and then go away and then spike again when it comes out in paperback, your normal model, I definitely won't give you that.

Making books has always felt very connected to my bookselling experience, that of wanting to draw people's attention to things that I liked, to shape things that I liked into new shapes.

I'd like to sell a lot of books.

Thousands of books are published every year in India, and it's becoming more difficult to stand out and get people to buy the books. The only way to get people notice the book is to create a buzz much before it's released.

Not all new books carry endorsements, and I wouldn't say that blurbs are indispensable for marketing.

There is nothing quite like having your book read and truly understood. It's all the better when it's someone who knows how to go out there and sell it.

Most new books drop immediately into the oblivion they so richly deserve.

As part of my research for An Anthology of Authors' Atrocity Stories About Publishers, I conducted a study (employing my usual controls) that showed the average shelf life of a trade book to be somewhere between milk and yoghurt.

A book tour is, first and foremost, an exercise in humility.

A book reviewer is usually a barker before the door of a publisher's circus.

A successful self-publisher must fill three roles: Author, Publisher, and Entrepreneur—or APE.

Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea.

I'm really bad at describing my books. Journalists like to have things like "It's The Terminator Meets the Seven Dwarfs." And I can't do that with my books. If I could, I probably wouldn't write them.

Not only do I recommend Wendell Berry to anyone who will talk to me for more than seven seconds, but I buy his books in quantity and send them to people. I bought a few dozen of his newest, "Our Only World."

Best-sellerism is the star system of the book world. A "best seller" is a celebrity among books. It is a book known primarily (sometimes exclusively) for its well-knownness.

I should be sorry to think it was the publishers themselves they got up this entire little flutter to enable them to unload a book that was taking too much room in their cellars, but you can never tell what a publisher will do. I have been one myself.

Always I'm working on some of book. That's the way I make a living.

I'd be surprised if non-fiction writers hate to be interviewed. We all hate them, because there's really nothing to say except "Read the book." Right? At least with non-fiction, you can kind of convey some information, and people can decide for themselves whether they want more of that kind of information. But with a novel, what am I going to do?

The perfectly natural thing to do with an unreadable book is to give it away; and the publication, for more than a quarter of a century, of volumes which fulfilled this one purpose and no other is a pleasant proof, if proof were needed, of the business principles which underlay the enlightened activity of publishers.

Publishing is the final step in making a book; if I was afraid to publish one, I wouldn't write it in the first place.

The best time to start promoting your book is three years before it comes out. Three years to build a reputation, build a permission asset, build a blog, build a following, build credibility and build the connections you'll need later.

I am so glad I was writing while on my last book tour, which was really meta, but I think a fascinating look inside the reality of what that whole madness is about.

For any leftover inventory, publishers must have a program to maximize the sale of a book.