I am the only living person in the English speaking world who didn't have the Narnia books as a child.
Once an ebook hits the Kindle Top 100, sales tend to snowball as new customers discover it in greater numbers.
I grew up in a house full of books.
Writers do not come out of houses without books.
PR and marketing doesn't sell books. It gets attention for them. It sends readers to bookstores and websites to read a few pages.
Librarians are like crack dealers when it comes to hooking small children.
I was brought up in a home where I saw my parents read and I was taken to bookshops and libraries, so I grew up feeling very comfortable around books. Also, Ireland is a country which has honoured its writers and poets, so when someone says they wanted to be a writer, its not mocked or looked down upon.
Don't hire anyone - no matter what they offer - who promises you they'll sell 'X' copies of your book. Every book is different. The best any marketing company or PR firm can do for your book is make potential readers aware of it.
I was so fortunate to be raised in a household filled with books and - as you might imagine to be the case in the Bush home - plenty of conversation.
I was lucky enough to have a mother who took me to the library - the public library - twice a week, Wednesdays and Saturdays. And also bought me books. And also read aloud to me.
Go, little Book! From this my solitude I cast thee on the Waters,--go thy ways: And if, as I believe, thy vein be good, The World will find thee after many days. Be it with thee according to thy worth: Go, little Book; in faith I send thee forth.
Publicity doesn't work for books. It really doesn't. All it does is get your name in front of a reader who might then glance at your book. Or not.
I grew up in a house full of books and parents who read, which led to me to reading from a very young age. And reading seemed to naturally progress to writing.
Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. and the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.
My father had inklings of my cultural aspirations. He would take me to the library, things like that. But he wasn't one of those dads who had read George Orwell and was a member of the Communist party. We had no books at home.
I've known since I was 12 that I wanted to write. My father was a teacher, and there were so many books around, it seemed natural to pick them up.
I'm constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read.
I don't have hard numbers about this, but the impression I get is that the amount of eyeballs you get from being on the humor shelf at Barnes & Noble - it is almost insignificant.
It is a terrible thing for an author to have a lot of people running about his book without any invitation from him at all.
