Publishing is a business, but journalism never was and is not essentially a business. Nor is it a profession.
All of the changes in publishing since 1960 are significant. There are far fewer publishers.
I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success. '
I love the good old book with glue and binding, I really do, but that is just one way of experiencing text, and suddenly we have so many new ways, including our laptops, our phones, our watches. People in my generation agonize over this. People much younger than me don't agonize at all. They just go ahead and find ways to transform publishing.
The future of publishing is about having connections to readers and the knowledge of what those readers want.
Johnson Publishing offered me an opportunity to build back iconic brands like Ebony and Jet magazines.
So I'm leaving Sony, a free agent, owning half of Sony. I own half of Sony's Publishing. I'm leaving them, and they're very angry at me, because I just did good business, you know.
Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Frankly, I'd rather make a little bit less money if it means living in a better world for books and publishing in the future.
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.
I was publishing when I was 20, 21. And it really never stopped.
Bloggers and other flavors of lone wolf are publishing heart-wrenching photo-essays from the front line of the recovery effort. Newspapers and TV networks? They're writing about the temperature of the water in some part (they don't specify which) of some damaged reactor, illustrating it with video screen grabs of machinery they don't understand enough to explain.
Of course, people say maybe there are some self-published books out there that shouldn't be out there. Well, it's the same with conventional publishing.
Publishing is the final step in making a book; if I was afraid to publish one, I wouldn't write it in the first place.
I learned a lot of things about literature talking to people at the publishing company. Did you know that about 90 percent of celebrity autobiographies are ghostwritten?
I've been getting publishing royalties and stuff like that. I have just been lucky. They come in at the right time. Sometimes they don't, but I am not wealthy or anything like that. I just love to work. I would rather work three hundred and something days out of the year. I would rather be working. They don't know. I love playing. Then I can really get my music together.
The money can be decent, but I really don't recommend the work-for-hire route as an entry into publishing. Too many things can go wrong.
Getting your foot in the door with some publishing people can be important when you're starting out as a writer, but it's also not enough to get you where you need to be.
There's only one thing more frightening than being asked to do a book tour, and that's not being asked to do a book tour.
One of the things I like about publishing is that you don't promote the editor - you promote the book and the author.