Jennifer Gilmore Quotes

I am hoping to work with writers publishing books for first time, since I of course remember what that experience is like. It's all a bit of a mystery for new authors who don't know what to expect.

My first YA novel, not many people have read. It's a fickle business. There's a degree of timing and luck involved.

Early in my publishing career, someone told me I'd need to have five books in print before I could quit my job as a journalist. Turns out it was closer to 10 books. It also turns out that while it's great to see my titles on bookstore shelves, my best customers are schools and libraries.

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.

Some books and authors are best sellers, but most aren't. It may be easier to self-publish than it is to traditionally publish, but in all honesty, it's harder to be a best seller self-publishing than it is with a house.

The idea is to become a best-selling author first and then the rest of my books will be slam dunks.

The first version of The Beautiful Room Is Empty was the first mss. I'd ever submitted to New York editors.

I came into book publishing without any particular impulse to be in book publishing.

The big bestsellers aren't being created by Barnes & Noble.

Writers aren't in competition with one another. It isn't a zero sum game. If you have a good book, a good cover, a good product description, and a low price, you can sell well.

How lucky am I? Quite often I speak at book festivals, and people ask me how I got published. There's people who have been working on a book for as long as ten years, and I feel like such a cow.

My first two books did nada. I ended up paying the publishers.

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

I want to write a best-selling book.

No one was interested in picking up a midlist series, even though I have a decent fanbase and respectable numbers.

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.

While some of the big publishers might give out 200,000 advances, if your book does not hit some of the lists in the second week, they stop paying attention to you.

When I was growing up the publishing world seemed so far away. When my mother wrote a book, she would look up the address of publishers on the backs of the books she owned and send off her manuscript.

For a lot of people, becoming an author is a change in occupation... they are coming from something that totally has nothing to do with this. If they are expecting to come into a room full of people praising them, then they are in the wrong place.

At a time when there's younger writers starting up and it's inevitable that you're becoming less fashionable, at a time when the industrial pressures apply more and more to books, how do you keep a book you wrote 28 years ago selling well year on year? Because it really is getting harder.

I know some authors who have gotten $25,000 advances and put it all into marketing, others who allocate $5,000 or $1,000.

Sometimes writers say true things about the overall nature of publicity, promotion, and the publishing industry; but alas, not always.

I didn't make 'The New York Times' bestseller list until 'Charmed Thirds,' and then again for 'Fourth Comings.' It gave me a certain validation, and it certainly helps position me for future books, but it's not something I think about on a daily basis.

Writing one's first novel, getting it sold, and shepherding it through the labyrinths of editing, production, marketing, journalism, and social media is an arduous and nerve-wracking process.

If you're going to write a book that might, in its very best accidental career, sell 30,000 copies, you've got to have a day job.