J. A. Konrath Quotes

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

Buying new books supports the writer by providing both a royalty and an audience; a writer whose book sells well has a better chance of selling another.

Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.

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

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

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.

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.

It has always been very difficult for writers to survive commercially in India because the market was so small. But that's not true at all any more. It's one of the world's fastest growing and most vibrant markets for books, especially in English.

You know, in the old days, you might be able to slowly sort of build an audience for your work by publishing two, three novels before you hit it big. You know, now, there's much more of an emphasis in the publishing houses on making sure that every book makes money.

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.

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

When I started writing, the deal was that publishers gave you a grand or two as an advance to buy some sweets, with the promise that they would make a big putsch with your fourth book when you'd built up a bit of a following. But by the time my fourth book came out, previously unpublished authors were the new big thing.

We, the authors, want people to buy books. That is the only way we can earn - from our royality.

One, I have a wonderful publisher, Black Sparrow Press; as long as they exist, they will keep me in print. And they claim they sell very respectable numbers of my books, so I guess, and it's true, every place I go, my books are in libraries and on bookshelves.

I've never seen a worse situation than that of young writers in the United States. The publishing business in North America is so commercialized.

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

I wrote a novel, Ghost Road Rules, and as soon as it was done and polished, I began reaching out to agents. I ignored the frequent advice to 'shoot low and try for a low-level agent because they're the only ones that will take a flyer on a new author.' That sounded like bad advice to me.

I don't think about who the audience is for my books.

For years I'd understood that publishing in paperback was the kiss of death.

The fact is that in this day and age I don't think any novelist can assume that a book will get attention.

The moment I said I'd finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who'd got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I'd written Harry Potter. That would have been why.

You know, it's sort of common wisdom among New York publishers that short story collections don't make money.

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

I'm very privy to the way bookstores work, and I think a lot about the ecosystem that my books have been published in. I think it's great to be aware of how publishing works.

Contrary to popular belief, editors and agents are gagging for good books.