publishing
Count yourself lucky…You’re still promising until your first book’s out.
Lit (New York: Harper, 2009), 68.
Thanks so much for your letter. I am very glad to hear you have a novel that will be out in November. I hope you won’t have as much trouble about keeping people from having parties for you as I am having. Around here if you publish the number of whiskers on the local pigs, everybody has to give you a tea. If you don’t send me a copy of your book, I will go to the extreme of buying one.
Letter to Robie Macauley, May 2, 1952, in The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor, ed. by Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 35.
Your local bookstore can’t survive as a showroom.
Letter to the editor, “Sunday Dialogue: Tumult in the Book World,” New York Times, August 17, 2013.
There’s no question but that much of what is published in this country is cotton candy and that this cluttering-up of the bookstores damages writers. To say nothing of what such a diet does to the brain’s stomach, if you’re a reader. But you can’t complain about this too much; it’s a pluralism that allows R. Crumb and Walter Benjamin and William Gaddis and Julia Child all to live in paperback heaven together.
Interview with J. O. O’Hara, in Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews (New York: Random House, 1997), 291.
The vast trove of Brontë juvenilia is larger than all their published works put together. Most of the material was recorded in nearly microscopic handwriting, on tiny folded sheets of paper—some only 2 inches by 1½ inches. These were stitched and bundled together, complete with title pages and back covers made from scraps of wrapping paper and bags of sugar.
Nom de Plume (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 5.
I’ve discovered that one’s “ideal editor” changes as one ages. At 83, with one eye gone and a lot of my hearing, my ideal editor is a young woman, preferably a pretty one, who doesn’t necessarily know anything about prose but who is a good driver and willing to take me on long journeys in my car.
Letters of E. B. White, rev. edition edited by Martha White (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), 664.
In the sea of words, the in print is foam, surf bubbles riding the top.
The Ecstasy of Influence (New York: Doubleday, 2011), xix.
(Twice this week I have been sent manuscripts of books that remind their editors, according to their covering letters, of my writing. Like a lot of writers, I can’t really stand my own writing, in the same way that I don’t really like my own cooking. And, just as when I go out to eat, I tend not to order my signature dish—an overcooked and overspiced meat—stewy thing containing something inappropriate, like tinned peaches, and a side order of undercooked and flavorless vegetables—I really don’t want to read anything that I could have come up with at my own computer. What I produce on my computer invariably turns out to be an equivalent of the undercooked overcooked stewy thing, no matter how hard I try to follow the recipe, and you really don’t want to eat too much of that. I’d love to be sent a book with an accompanying letter that said, “This is nothing like your work. But as a man of taste and discernment, we think you’ll love it anyway.” That never happens.)
“April 2004,” in The Polysyllabic Spree (San Francisco, CA: Believer Books, 2004), 66–67.
As part of my research for An Anthology of Authors’ Atrocity Stories About Publishers, I conducted a study (employing my usual controls) that showed the average shelf life of a trade book to be somewhere between milk and yogurt.
“Publisher’s Lunch,” in Uncivil Liberties (New Haven: Ticknor & Friends, 1982), 22.
Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.
“National Book Award for Patti Smith,” by Julie Bosman, The New York Times, November 17, 2010.
You can’t just write and write and put things in a drawer. They wither without the warm sun of someone else’s appreciation.
Locked Rooms and Open Doors: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1933–1935 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 44.
The first book is always the most fun, because when you write your first book you’re just a writer. Then you get published. Then you become an author, and once you’re an author the whole thing changes. You have a track record. You have a public. A certain literary persona. You can become very self-conscious and start to compete with yourself. No fun at all.
The Paris Review Interviews, vol. I (New York: Picador, 2006), 383.