William Boyd Quotes

What I tend to get from America is very enthusiastic letters and e-mail from librarians and schoolteachers, the gatekeepers, though I hesitate to use that word. I've never been a huge seller.

Each new book that comes out kind of pulls up the old ones a little bit. The new releases are always going to bolster the old releases.

I know publishing now more as an author than with occasional peaks inside those elite offices than as an industry insider. It was difficult publishing a novel the first time around, while working behind the scenes, knowing all that has to happen to make a book a success and to still make the leap as an author.

The hardest thing in the world for a writer is to amass a readership. So many good books come out, and so many good books disappear.

There's so much published by so many different publishers. Most of the time, I don't have to confront that, but walking into a conference center filled with books - and people buying them or not buying them, being interested or not interested in them - that's just overwhelming to me now.

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.

Each new book that comes out kind of pulls up the old ones a little bit.

The point is that if a book that had been published three years ago started to sell twice as many all of a sudden it probably wouldn't even get no­ticed. People wouldn't be tracking it. The system has cleaned up its act an awful lot but the best-seller list system is not an entirely foolproof thing.

Actually, I love trying to figure out why certain books become hits while others, which may be just as good, have trouble finding an audience.

There's almost no author alive who isn't weathering the tumultuous changes in the publishing industry.

One of the saddest things about publishing is how quickly it ages what it touches. The frenzy involved in getting books on shelves, and in putting the word out that they're there, moves at a speed that is not the speed of writing, let alone of reading.

To make a bestseller, there are more customers than just your customers: Selling to the end-user is just one piece of the puzzle. In my case, I needed to first sell myself to the publisher to get marketing support and national retail distribution.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

I think it's a fallacy to say that a good book sells itself. It doesn't happen. I'm a voracious reader and I can give you a long list of books which should have been best sellers but they aren't. How can you buy a book if you haven't heard of it?

And books that were published in much larger numbers than Selfish, Little are hard to find. And publishers who wanted to publish my last few works have them stuck in limbo while new distribution ideas and legal issues and fears are blown away.

It's hard selling books in general: companies are merging, editors being laid off, bricks-and-mortar bookstores closing, large chain bookstores squeezing out independents, and online retailers squeezing out chain bookstores.

The shelf life of the average trade book is somewhere between milk and yogurt.

I've always viewed myself as a brand. When I started 10 years ago, that was very controversial. 'Marketing' and 'PR' were dirty words for the literary world, but that has changed. Once the book is finished, I want as many people as possible to read it.

All those people whose faces decorate the shopping bags of Barnes and Noble, with a few exceptions, would never get published today.

No, my publisher has always done the marketing.

According to my royalty statements, 'The Green Progression' sold 392 copies in hardcover.

As for indie writers, a lot of them don't realize that they're in the hurry-up-and-wait business, not the wait-and-hurry-up business. They work really, really, really hard at goosing the first-month sales, and then getting disappointed when those sales either go down or never happen in the first place.

I think there's a difference between having a bestselling book - meaning through marketing, PR and buying that first wave of customers - and writing a bestselling book. The second implies that the product propels itself to the best seller list.

I've got a publicist at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt who's been working little miracles for me, but it's true the budgets aren't what they once were in terms of advertisement and book tours.

Publishing is a very mysterious business. It is hard to predict what kind of sale or reception a book will have, and advertising seems to do very little good.