Best-Selling Advice: Publishing

“To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.”

—Allen Ginsberg

“The most important thing is you can’t write what you wouldn’t read for pleasure. It’s a mistake to analyze the market thinking you can write whatever is hot. You can’t say you’re going to write romance when you don’t even like it. You need to write what you would read if you expect anybody else to read it.

And you have to be driven. You have to have the three Ds: drive, discipline and desire. If you’re missing any one of those three, you can have all the talent in the world, but it’s going to be really hard to get anything done.”

—Nora Roberts

“Inevitably, you react to your own work—you like it, you don’t like it, you think it’s interesting or boring—and it is difficult to accept that those reactions may be unreliable. In my experience, they are. I mistrust either wild enthusiasm or deep depression. I have had the best success with material that I was sort of neutral about; I didn’t think it was the greatest thing in the world, nor did I think it was bad; I liked it, but not too much.”

—Michael Crichton

“One of my agents used to say to me, ‘Mack, you shouldn’t submit anything anywhere unless you [would] read it aloud to them.’”

—MacKinlay Kantor

“I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.”

—Harper Lee

“If you have the story, editors will use it. I agree it’s hard. You’re battling a system. But it’s fun to do battle with systems.”

—Bob Woodward

“Publishers want to take chances on books that will draw a clamor and some legitimate publicity. They want to publish controversial books. That their reasons are mercenary and yours may be lofty should not deter you.”

—Harlan Ellison

“It’s wise to plan early on where you’d like to go, do serious self-analysis to determine what you want from a writing career. … When I began, I thought I’d be comfortable as a straight genre writer. I just kept switching genres as my interests grew. I’ve since been fortunate that—with a great deal of effort—I’ve been able to break the chains of genre labeling, and do larger and more complex books. But it’s difficult, and few people who develop straight genre reputations ever escape them.”

—Dean Koontz

“There’s really a shortage of good freelance writers. … There are a lot of talented people who are very erratic, so either they don’t turn it in or they turn it in and it’s rotten; it’s amazing. Somebody who’s even maybe not all that terrific but who is dependable, who will turn in a publishable piece more or less on time, can really do very well.”

—Gloria Steinem

“There’s no mystique about the writing business, although many people consider me blasphemous when I say that. Whatever else my books are, they’re also products, and I regard and treat them as such. To create something you want to sell, you first study and research the market, then you develop the product to the best of your ability. What happens next? You market it.”

—Clive Cussler