Steve Martin Quotes

I think of all media, television is the most powerful when it comes to selling books, because when you have a feature film, yeah, there's a rush. But then after that month is over and the movie goes out of release, that's it.

PR and marketing doesn't sell books. It gets attention for them. It sends readers to bookstores and websites to read a few pages.

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

The process of writing a book is so removed in my mind from the process of publishing it that I often forget for great stretches that I eventually hope to do the latter.

Obviously it makes a difference if an author has a public online profile of some sort, even just down to the level of having a moderately popular blog. Most books sell 5, 10, or 15 thousand copies. Most are midlist books. With those people, even a modest online presence can make a difference in sales.

Never index your own book.

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.

In 2008, when I wrote Book 1 and Book 2, the head of the publishing house suggested twelve books - one each month. For practical reasons, that didn't work out.

The TV audience is way bigger than a book audience, and no matter what I do, I'm always thinking if this will help people read my books.

Debut novels are difficult because nobody knows you... they just don't find a huge audience, because that's how the market works.

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.

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

When I talk to booksellers, they tell me how hard it is to hand-sell some of my books because I do keep popping around.

I honestly thought I probably did sell 100 million books. That doesn't seem out of the ordinary to me.

Having big audiences when you're on a book tour is like Valhalla if you're a person who used to sell Girl Scout cookies on the side. Because you want to give the reading that will sell the most books.

A writers' ring is where a group of four or five authors agree to promote each other's work on their own websites and via their social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter.

Once an ebook hits the Kindle Top 100, sales tend to snowball as new customers discover it in greater numbers.

No one knows why books do well.

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.

To move up to hardcover is a way of getting more attention for my books. It means a lot to me: It means my books are legitimate.

A blurb might bring a reader to a book, but then the book itself has to do the rest of the work.

The higher a book's sales ranks, the better chances it has of being noticed by Amazon's internal recommendations engine.

As a book editor, you need to pitch every one of your books again and again, dozens of times, for months on end. From a quick conversation with your boss or a letter that'll be read by just one person, to a five-minute speech in front of 50 colleagues or cover copy that'll be in front of millions of eyes.

People think writing is a very distinguished, cerebral thing, where all you do is write. It doesn't work that way. People have to see online promotions, see piles of your book in stores, and you have to make sure the guy recommends it!

I had 20,000 followers and I treasured that. People'd say, 'Oh that's nothing.' I said, 'What are you crazy? That's 20,000 people that wanna hear what I gotta say!'