Book Sales Quotes

Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat.

Barnes & Noble, along with other independent bookstores, are refusing to stock Amazon Publishing titles. They'll order books from the online retail giant if customers ask, but bookstores have so far declined to be 'showrooms' for Amazon.

Putting out a book is absolutely a lesson in vulnerability because it doesn't matter how much of an audience you have. Some people who have giant audiences can't sell books because those audiences don't feel like they need to give them their money.

If a book about failures doesn't sell, is it a success?

'The Da Vinci Code' is the most popular book of our times.

Anyway, several rewrites later, Del Rey Books did publish my first novel, and it did become the first work of fiction on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list.

Publishing a book is a very different thing than writing one.

Lemony Snicket. Now, I'm told - the books, of course, starting from the very first one, became hugely popular, selling millions and millions. And I understand that when you used to go around to talk to your very young fans, you would appear as Lemony Snicket's representative or agent.

I do that mostly because I believe that the fantasy business is in terrible trouble right now, for several reasons, not the least of which being the almost Democrat vs. Republican mentality of readers on the Internet.

I think Amazon has been great for readers.

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

It's great that in the German language I've sold almost 30 million books. Isn't that amazing?

Writing my first book, I think in hindsight I went into it saying, 'It's gonna sell.' I was earning enough to scrape by sometime around a book or two before 'Tell No One.' I moved up from $50,000 to $75,000, then $150,000 for each book. I had never thought I would be doing anything else. I had enough encouragement.

I never set out to do this - getting to No. 1 in the 'New York Times' bestseller list wasn't even a pipedream.

Always I'm working on some of book. That's the way I make a living.

I haven't the faintest idea what my royalties are. I haven't the faintest idea how many copies of books sold, or how many books that I've written. I could look these things up; I have no interest in them. I don't know how much money I have. There are a lot of things I just don't care about.

It's not like publishing is perfect. Far from it. The industry is struggling to adapt and survive, and it's incredibly frustrating trying to break in.

History has shown that the less people read, the more books they buy.

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

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.

My e-books sales have overtaken everything else, so I think all the marketing has become very much driven by the author now because of social media.

I have tons of fans in Canada. I've sold hundreds of thousands of books there.

My hardcover sales are 17% down in books but up 400% in electronics.

Liberals pretend to believe that when two random hoodlums kill a gay man in Oklahoma, it's evidence of a national trend, but when a million people buy a book, it proves absolutely nothing about the book-buying public.

Agnes was the worst prophet that's ever existed. Because she was always right. That's why the book never sold.