We as artists are actively encouraged - by other authors, your agent, publisher, and society - not to think about money, strategy, how to manage your career, how to create a brand, because we're supposed to focus on the art.
It seemed to me then that to have published a book - any kind of book - would be the greatest possible happiness I could ask from life.
Avoid the RTP Syndrome. When you rush to Publish, you rush to mistakes and chaos. Guaranteed.
You had to admire a guy who called his own new book a classic before it was published and anyone else had a chance to read it.
I want to type one of my books into a free online translation website, and convert it from English to German and then publish the results as an exercise in the absurd.
I want to publish a book on toilet paper—not only about toilet paper, but actually print it on toilet paper. That way nobody will be surprised by how shitty my book is.
Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It's elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best.
Scientists in different disciplines don't speak the same language. They publish in different journals. It's like the United Nations: You come together, but no one speaks the same language, so you need some translators.
The press doesn't stop publishing, by the way, in a fascist escalation; it simply watches what it says. That too can be an incremental process, and the pace at which the free press polices itself depends on how journalists are targeted.
I do one Xanth novel a year, because at the moment that is all that publishers will accept; they don't want any other type of fiction from me, so Xanth pays my way.
I think it's a shame that something as creative and vital to the nature of the human species as story-telling is largely controlled by the soulless cretins known as publishers.
The impossibility of a sequel ever recapturing everything - or anything - about its ancestor never stopped legions of writers from trying, or hordes of readers and publishers from demanding more of what they previously enjoyed.
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.
And you probably remember all of those papers and documents that they had published in the newspapers. And, you know, when you look at that, it really was their own little jihad that they had going. It just wasn't taken very seriously then.
I had no idea I'd end up writing four books when I completed 'Mortal Engines.' I didn't even think it would find a publisher.
When I stopped performing for 16 years and lived in Michigan and was married and raising my children, I wrote about four or five books. I haven't published them.
I continued writing the bad plays which fortunately nobody would produce, just as no one did me the unkindness of publishing my early novels.
I have to declare in all candor that no one interested in being published in our time can afford to be so naive as to believe that a book will make it merely because it's good.
I'll tell you, I think that the Internet has provided an enormous boost to film criticism by giving people an opportunity to self publish or to find sites that are friendly.
I certainly was performing before my writing was published, because I was performing when I was very young. And the thing is I'm very comfortable on stage, so a large portion of my act did come from ad-libs.
Well it is certainly the case that the poems - which were in fact published during Shakespeare's lifetime - are weird if they began or originated in this form, as I think they did, because the poems get out of control.
