Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
One of the saddest things about publishing is how quickly it ages what it touches. The frenzy involved in getting books on shelves, and in putting the word out that they're there, moves at a speed that is not the speed of writing, let alone of reading.
Inevitably, most readers come to John Cheever's 'Journals' via his fiction. Whatever value they might have in their own right, their viability as a publishing proposition was conditional on the interest of the large readership of his novels and stories.
When I was submitting my first novel, I had no idea that publishing scams existed. I never encountered any, but I could have - and knowing how easily I might have been taken advantage of makes me determined to protect others from falling into that trap.
Commerce is abusive. It's very hobbling to always be saying, 'Please let me put this out, this thing I've worked on for years.' It's like a nasty parent saying, 'No! Now go to your room.' As publishing companies got bigger, you felt even less significant.
People are very frightened in publishing at the moment. Nobody knows what sells. More so now because the market's changing so fundamentally because of Kindle and electronic publishing. It's a fundamental shift in the way stories are put out into the world.
I think my very best work came out when I was about 60, not when I was 20. I was publishing all the time when I was in my 20s, and some of those poems I still like. And there were a few after 60, and in my 70s, that I like. But they became fewer and fewer.
I got signed to a development deal when I was 15. That fell through after about a year when the company merged with another label. Then I got picked up by Sony publishing. So I was writing professionally from 16 to 18. Then I started making my own records.
When I say 'publishing is the new literacy,' I don't mean there's no role for curation, for improving material, for editing material, for fact-checking material. I mean literally, the act of putting something out in public used to be reserved in the same way.
I walked into Relativity Records as a musician who could not be taken advantage of. That's why I wound up owning all my own publishing and making a deal that was quite advantageous for a new solo artist. But I really didn't think of myself as an entrepreneur.
We like to engage in a normal publishing effort, which is to act in a responsible manner and make sure the material is not likely to harm anyone, that it is properly investigated by quality news organizations, and by lawyers and human rights groups and so on.
Also, right at that particular time in the music business, because of people like the Beatles, people began owning their own publishing. I'll just say this really quickly - they used to divide the money for the music that was written in two, just equal halves.
I think I've read all of W.E.B. Du Bois, which is a lot. He started off with comprehensive field work in Philadelphia, publishing a book in 1899 called 'The Philadelphia Negro'. It was this wonderful combination of clear statistical data and ethnographic data.
As we have seen again and again, when Amazon doesn't get the economic conditions from suppliers that it seeks, it simply goes its own way. In the book business, that has meant publishing its own titles under the various Kindle imprints. Now it's making diapers.
I had the easiest publishing experience in the entire world. I sent out fifteen courier letters to agents, got five no replies, nine rejections and one I want to see it. A month later I had an agent. Another month later I had a three book deal with Little Brown.
Twitter is the ultimate service for the mobile age - its simplification and constraint of the publishing medium to 140 characters is perfectly complementary to a mobile experience. People still need longer stuff, but they see the headline on Twitter or Facebook.
I decided I was going to be an artist who wrote my own songs, and turned down the publishing deal. That meant that the first few years here were really tough financially. I didn't know if I was going to have gas to get home sometimes or could put gas in the car.
I think what human beings need is to be able to laugh at the absurd, hold on to ambiguity, and learn to love nuance, instead of making everything one or the other, and structurally, so much of the Internet and online publishing doesn't have room for any of that.
At Coinbase, our mission is to create an open financial system for the world. We believe that open protocols for money will create more innovation, economic freedom, and equality of opportunity in the world, just like the Internet did for publishing information.
I used to read music books when I was 13. My mom was working at a library. She's a librarian. I would get my mom to check out any kind of books that had anything to do with the music industry. I read a lot about royalities, publishing, marketing, stuff like that.
There are two ways to look at my publishing career. One is that I'm a novelist churning out books, who is eight into a series; the other way is that I'm a cartoonist, just starting out. Most cartoonists have long careers: Charles Schulz drew Peanuts for 50 years.
Just as the web democratized publishing and development, Bitcoin can democratize building new financial services. Contracts can be entered into, verified, and enforced completely electronically, using any third-party that you care to trust, or by the code itself.
Recasting fairy tales has become a publishing sub-genre in itself, and has been done both well and to the point of entropy. More interesting are those works where the structures of fairytales are abandoned but the world of 'fairy' is imported as a delicate spice.
We've been publishing the TechStars data fully since the beginning on TechStars.com. For every single company, you can see if it's a failure, success, how much they raised. Entrepreneurs deserve that sort of transparency from accelerators, and it's not hard to do.
It was immaterial to me that Elvis didn't write his own songs. Those were very different days, and he selected whatever suited him best from material supplied by publishing houses and teams of writers - all of whom were extremely conscious of his style of delivery.
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 didn't really know you could make a living in songwriting. I was just very fortunate to have the opportunity to play a few songs for a guy there named Jimmy Ritchey. Through that meeting, I met another couple guys and ended up getting a publishing deal in Nashville.
New York publishing is about, 'What's the next Harry Potter? What's the next Twilight?' When I've approached people, I've asked, 'What is the book you've been dying to do, but New York won't do?' I want the books that they think won't sell - because I think they will.
The goal is to become the central hub of publishing, where we have all the written material - user-generated and professional. We want to be the place where people can publish instantly to their audiences... and to get there, it's just about doing things step by step.
Given the current state of publishing, I think it helps to have a brand name on the cover of your book. Comedians are proven commodities with built-in audiences. They may not have the writing chops of a Dave Eggers, but they're salacious and funny and self-reflective.
WikiLeaks, for me, has not only that element in it of journalism publishing, but also the way in which it does it, with its - the concept we have of scientific journalism, I find very important and really appeals to me, that all of the source documents should be there.
I remember going into a bookshop, and the only book I saw with a black child on the cover was 'A Thief in the Village' by James Berry, and I thought, 'Is this still the state of publishing?' Then I thought, 'Either I can whine about it or try to do something about it.'
There is a lot of talk in publishing these days that we need to become more like the Internet: We need to make books for short attention spans with bells and whistles - books, in short, that are as much like 'Angry Birds' as possible. But I think that's a terrible idea.
I think publishing's strength is also its weakness. It's got such a rich and celebrated history as an industry. For the most part, publishing people are incredibly creative, business is done based on the strength of relationships, and the product being peddled is books.
I think there's a great homogenizing force that software imposes on people and limits the way they think about what's possible on the computer. Of course, it's also a great liberating force that makes possible, you know, publishing and so forth, and standards, and so on.
Despite all the criticisms that have been leveled at the comics community, both in terms of fans and creators, I have always felt more comfortable and accepted in the comics community than I have in any other medium of publishing that I've had the pleasure of working in.
The publishing industry, unsurprisingly, is full of different people who love different things and express that love in different languages. Find the people, the editors and agents, with whom you share some language, and some sense of what makes literature worth reading.
'Harry Potter' opened so many doors for young adult literature. It really did convince the publishing industry that writing for children was a viable enterprise. And it also convinced a lot of people that kids will read if we give them books that they care about and love.
To the extent that '60s guys own things, yes... but I don't have the publishing, just like most '60s guys, and that was an error, you know... part ownership in publishing was the kind of era that started a little bit later, when real businessmen started to manage artists.
I hadn't meant to do the pattern of publishing short stories and then a novel. I thought, 'I'm a novelist. I know it.' But you have to kind of write a lot of bad novels before you can write a good one, I think, so I did that. But meanwhile, I loved the short stories I did.
As we've gotten more successful, there's a gap between the speed of our publishing pipeline and the speed of our receiving submissions pipeline. Our pipeline of leaks has been increasing exponentially as our profile rises, and our ability to publish is increasing linearly.
How advertising is handled has always been a key distinction between low and high order publishing. The higher you stood, the more separate you were from advertising, and, in the logic of snobbery, the greater a premium price the top brands would pay to be in your company.
My novel, which I had started with such hope shortly after publishing my first book of stories, wouldn't budge past the 75-page mark. Nothing I wrote past page 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing. Which would have been fine if the first 75 pages hadn't been pretty damn cool.
The real important thing about Digital-Original publication goes beyond the fact that authors make more money off each sale than through traditional publishing. It's that we get to bypass a system of gatekeepers who have more than 'quality' as criteria for what they choose.
Three centuries after the appearance of Franklin's 'Courant', it no longer requires a dystopic imagination to wonder who will have the dubious distinction of publishing America's last genuine newspaper. Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive.
I am always making sketches of how information should look or mapping out a marketing campaign. When I present my notes, people start responding to them. Desktop publishing makes everything look slick. When you present sketches, it helps start the dialogue and collaboration.
Google helps us sort the Internet by providing a sense of hierarchy to information. Facebook uses its algorithms and its intricate understanding of our social circles to filter the news we encounter. Amazon bestrides book publishing with its overwhelming hold on that market.
Getting a beginner publishing deal really helped me gain the skills. I just kept writing and writing. You just take everything out of life and turn it into an idea or a melody or a song and find the best writers you can to write with that fit you and know what you want to do.
From my teenage years on, I sought out Native elders from many tribal nations and listened to their words. I also started a small press, The Greenfield Review Press, and became very involved with publishing the work of other American Indian authors, especially books of poetry.
I know that 'The Accident' is not a completely accurate reflection of the reality of the book publishing world, which, like nearly any other business, consists mostly of people sitting in small offices staring at computer screens or reading or trying to stay awake in meetings.
There are no categories in contemporary art. There are no rules. Artists are given the freedom to make and create whatever they please and call it whatever they please. I identify with that system, or lack of system, much more than I do the landscape of contemporary publishing.