Publishing Struggles Quotes

Nobody told me how hard it was going to be to get published. I wrote four novels that nobody wanted, sent them out all over, collected hundreds and hundreds of rejection slips.

I wrote one book, signed with a good agent, and sat back and waited for the phone to ring. I was sure that the great news would come at any moment. Four books later, I finally got that call.

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.

That and the fact that I knew that nobody was going to publish my work at Dark Horse or DC or anywhere.

I started out as a writer of fiction, but nobody wanted to publish my work as a young man. So I decided to put my interest in the narrative writing of biographies.

Now, I'll tell you something that might interest you. Casino Royale was the first Bond book that Ian Fleming ever wrote. And he couldn't get anybody to touch it, to publish it - he couldn't do anything about it at all. Nobody wanted to know.

My first novel took almost six years to sell and was rejected 37 times in the interim, and then finally sold for the smallest amount of money my literary agent had ever negotiated for a work of fiction.

It’s being ready to accept rejection. You can work on a book for two years and get it published, and it’s like you may as well have thrown it down a well. It’s not all champagne and doing interviews with The New York Times.

I'd written my first novel for adults, which was called Basic Eight and was set in a high school, and we were having a devil of a time selling it. It ended up in the hands of an editor of a children's publishing house, for which it was entirely inappropriate. She said, "Well, we can't publish this, but I think you should write something for children," which I thought was a really terrible idea.

I enjoy the hell out of writing but don't like what follows: promotion and publicity, which I always strive to keep to a minimum, sometimes to my publisher's dismay.

Do you realize what would happen if Moses were alive today? He'd go up to Mount Sinai, come back with the Ten Commandments, and spend the next eight years trying to get published.

People will tell you that writing is too difficult, that it's impossible to get your work published, that you might as well hang yourself. Meanwhile, they'll keep writing and you'll have hanged yourself.

I think they thought it was very arrogant of me to write the end of my seven books series when I didn't have a publisher and no-one had heard of me

'A Wrinkle in Time' was almost never published. You can't name a major publisher who didn't reject it.

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

My only requirement for that first story was that there had to be a fight or an explosion on every page. Naturally, no one wanted to publish it, but I liked the character, did a few stories to keep my hand in.

As for collaboration - I have done a lot, 26 books, and found publishers increasingly resistive to them. It's not that the books are bad; editors won't even read them.

I lived through a classic publishing story. My editor was fired a month before the book came out. The editor who took it over already had a full plate. It was never advertised. We didn't get reviewed in any major outlets.

I had a period where I thought I might not be good enough to publish.

My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.

A whole bunch of agents and editors looked at my stories, and they all said, in effect, 'You're a pretty good writer and you should probably get these published; when you grow up and write a novel, get in touch.'

I was a book editor for nine years. I'm familiar with the opposite experience, bracing myself for the likelihood that no one would want to publish my book.

In the '60s, I was teaching humanities at a college in upstate New York and trying to publish a novel I'd written in graduate school. But nothing was happening. So I moved to New York City and got a job as a messenger at a place that made movies.

I worked in the book publishing business for nearly two decades before I turned my attention to writing, first with a couple ghostwriting projects, plus a crappy novel that absolutely no one wanted to publish. Then I moved to Luxembourg for my wife's job and found the inspiration for 'The Expats.'

I was very naive, and I thought it was just a matter of writing my first book and sending it in, and for the rest of my life I would be writing books and collecting royalties. Nobody told me how hard it was going to be to get published.