"When it comes to my own work, I've long embraced piracy. I don't see piracy as any different than a friend borrowing a book from a friend, or a single book making its way through a household or a school classroom. To me, the value is in being read. The danger is in losing an audience."

"The time to start marketing is when you have lots of works to offer, or one of your works takes off, or you land a special deal somewhere with an agent or publisher or media outlet. Until then, the way to market is to be yourself and to put that self out there."

"What people SHOULD preface their rule-dispensing [for creative pursuits] with is something like this: 'Hey, this is the way it worked for me.  Maybe it'll work for you too?  And if not, no worries.  We're still pals.'"

"Only fantasy writers are virtually forced to begin selling at novel length because the market is so much smaller for fantasy."

"Find where your audience buys their books and sell there."

"The truly enduring stories, the narratives we encourage our friends to pick up and which happily make money for their creators over decades, the stories that outlast their creators, are the ones that reveal some core human truth."

"The only side you should fight on is the side of your audience. With weapons forged from the steel of Good Story."

"If you get inside the story and feel it, it doesn’t matter what age you are."

"Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship."

"Resist deep longing for approval.  One needs to write not what a public wants but what it needs.  The first kind of work is what your need for approval will generate; the second is what your struggle will bring forth."

"Even if you are a great poet, it doesn't mean the road is easy.  It's very hard and it might take a while to be recognized."

"Results [of the writing life] vary. Side effects range from obscurity to the Nobel Prize."

"When you do get to create something, and you put it out for the world to see, if it’s free you’ll get a bunch of people who hate it, and if it’s not you’ll be called money hungry."

"Free is not a price. Free is a promotional effort in which you offer a sample taste of your literary heroin in order to secure the addictive loyalty of new readers. Free is temporary. Do not price free in the long-term. If your book is always free, I assume that's its value: worth zero."

"These core two to four thousand readers will give new writers a shot. If the writer creates something unique, the aficionado will buy the next book too. And the book after that if the second one pays off too. This is how careers were made back in the day. Still are, even with the big publishing houses abandoning core Story categories for the big book."

"When writing fiction with high impact, there’s no subject matter too taboo, no character too eccentric, no emotional content too intense, no themes too difficult. It’s all in how you handle it. What overcomes all objections are characters who compel, stories that grip, and writing that amazes."

"I've never had much luck trying to please a specific audience.  I write for myself, in the hope that enough people will be interested and amused by the same things that interest and amuse me. ... I work for the audience, but the minute I treat them like my boss, the relationship falls apart."

"The problem is that America's record of translations is worse than any other western country.  Fewer than two percent of books published in America in a given year were written in a language other than English.  Fewer than two percent!  And some of those are textbooks.  If you come down to literature, it's a fraction of one percent.  And so it's very hard for American readers to even know about he work because that work is not translated or published in their language.  In England, it's not great either.  About five percent.  But in places in Western Europe, like in France, it's twenty-five percent and in Germany, it's more than thirty percent.  And so writers are able to be heard in those languages and readers are able to hear them."

"Write what you want to write.  Which is to say: Ignore the market.  Which is to say: Just because dystopian young adult fiction sells well, if that fiction doesn't light you up, write whatever does.  Which is another way of saying: Follow your bliss."

"Perhaps you feel the urge to be your own boss, to promote your own works, and you'd rather not have someone else earn royalties on your hard-won promotional efforts.  So you self-publish.  And you are delighted with that decision."

"It's optional.  Writers should only engage in social media if they want to.  If you don't want to or if you're doing it halfheartedly, it shows.  I think it's important for writers to not think in terms of platform.  It's not healthy. ... Yes, I have a platform, and it would be disingenuous to deny that.  But in terms of getting to that place, I was just myself."

"No one wants to buy a [self-help] book that proclaims such a measured, modest message from its cover.  To sell big, you have to over-promise."

"Magic is a fascinating and primal thing.  What's most interesting is the psychology behind it.  People are desperate to experience wonder.  We are desperate to find mystery in our lives.  I believe it's innate; it's so hard-wired into our brains that we can't escape it."

"In Hollywood, more often than not, they're making more kinds of traditional films, stories that are understood by people. And the entire story is understood. And they become worried if even for one small moment something happens that is not understood by everyone. But what's so fantastic is to get down into areas where things are abstract and where things are felt, or understood in an intuitive way that, you can't, you know, put a microphone to somebody at the theatre and say 'Did you understand that?' but they come out with a strange, fantastic feeling and they can carry that, and it opens some little door or something that's magical and that's the power that film has."

"We can use strategies derived from what we know about narrative to give our non-narrative essays more resonance."

"Readers don't have time for anything but the really good stuff, and the writer needs to deliver on page one."

"In memoir, you have to be particularly careful not to alienate the reader by making the material seem too lived-in.  It musn't have too much of the smell of yourself, otherwise the reader will be unable to make it her own."

"From my own experiences I've learned that quirky, different, fringe projects that may only be cult, often travel a lot better internationally. Mainstream comedians and TV shows that might be the biggest thing, on say, UK TV for a while, often don't sell a sausage around the world. Comics selling out arenas in the UK often can't sell a ticket in America or many other places."

"Your first commitment [as a writer] has to be the experience of the reader.  Since fiction is something that's created by words on a page, the way in which you express your commitment to the reader is by using the words on the page to make an effective experience that someone else can have.  This may mean that it's enjoyable, stressful, intense, or something else.  It depends on what kind of writer you are."

"When you write a love poem, the happy love poem, readers might be thinking 'screw you, I don't care.'  When you write a love poem, there has to be the awareness of the fragility of life that you could lose this person at any moment, or this person could leave, or you could die.  You have to have some shadow to prop up the poem; otherwise, it becomes sentimental, and you don't want sentimentality.  You want sentiment but not sentimentality."

"I just remember getting bashed for them. But what is funny is that someone will bash them, then pick one out and say 'this one was the exception' and then another person will be bashing them and that won't be their exception, a different one'll be their exception. ... Some of those albums that people say were so bad are among my favorites."

"There's a cycle in science fiction that most writers follow. They break into the field by selling short stories and novelettes to the magazines until their names and styles become familiar to book editors. Then they sign a few book contracts, get some novels under their belts, and suddenly they don't have time for those $400 stories anymore. The magazines that nurtured them and gave them their starts watch as the novels flow and the short fiction trickles in. So the magazines are forced to search constantly for new talent."

"Most readers just plain don't care who publishes someone, whether it's you, a Random Penguin, or some magic coyote hobo."

"Who cares if you can’t be classified? The imaginations that matter are those glued to your pages."

"Magic is such a raw, emotional experience, and it can be used as a storytelling device.  Sometimes people scream and run away—what a profound effect!  There is no other art form that can do that.  You cannot make somebody gasp, scream, and run away by looking at a painting or watching a dance routine."

"I want people to like the work, not me."

"If you're playing a movie on a phone, you will never in a trillion years experience the film. You'll think you have experienced it, but you'll be cheated. It's such a sadness that you think you've seen a film on your fucking telephone. Get real."

"In the long run, then, whatever is published within the field of science fiction and fantasy is science fiction and fantasy, and if it doesn't resemble what science fiction and fantasy were twenty years ago or even five years ago, some readers and writers will howl, but others will hear the new voice and see the new vision with delight."

"I always urge young writers who feel the pressure to produce to spend more time browsing bookstores.  I urge them to check how many books any writer tends to have on the shelf.  Ours is a culture where it's lucky for a writer to be remembered for even one book, less three or four."

"Be interesting, and be interesting in the first paragraph."

"Today, there is an over-sharing of our lives. ... I'm not on Facebook and Twitter, and I'm actually a private person.  I don't engage in any social media.  To me, it's really interesting how we negotiate the private life, the private self, and what we make public.  For me, it's easier to make 'art' public than just the day-to-day, blow-by-blow ad nauseam of every day life."

"Your novel lies in your heart; it is a book about today, no matter in which era it is set, written for a contemporary audience to express a story that could only have come from you."

"For Lynch … His refusal to interrogate the images, sounds and ideas that make themselves known to him—often during the actual process of shooting—accounts not only for their uniqueness, but also for his occasional inability to articulate their precise meaning.  His desire is to 'speak directly' through the films, combined with a faith in the audience's own eyes and ears."

"What surprised me in my most recent reading?  Original subject matter, plot twists, character quirks, anomalous moments, unusual descriptive language, curious observations, sudden shifts in focus, psychological and emotional truth, the handling of time, and formal changes in approach."

"With its never-ending stream of reboots and sequels, modern culture has heightened the ideal that artists have a duty to capitalize on success."

"Writers are a pretty insecure bunch, but I've never met one who blames their sales on their bad writing."

"Most experienced performers will say that they don't get nervous.  I don't get nervous anymore because everything that can be go wrong in my shows has already happened.  I've knocked my table over.  I've had an audience volunteer start crying.  I've had props break.  I've injured myself.  Literally anything that can go wrong has gone wrong, and now I know what to do when it does."

"Conflicting feelings snare readers. They're a puzzle that demands solution, a cognitive dissonance that's too noisy to ignore."

"If you do something peculiar and remarkable it might not be for mass consumption in your own country but there are 7 billion people in the world. People everywhere in the world will recognize and appreciate its innovation. A world cult is many times bigger than a single country's mainstream hit. So in the long run, being different can make commercial sense as well as artistic sense."

"Whether it's through an Instagram post or documentary film, the heart of the mission is constant: our job is to tell a story.  I'm eager to see what other avenues open up to tell those stories."

"There are gasps and shouts, even some violinistic cries. He has sent several people scurrying to the woods in fear, which is unfortunate, but it is the sort of thing that happens when one finds the words that truly come from within oneself."

"Like Cliffhanger.  More people have seen how they did the helicopter shot in that than people have seen the movie!  Magicians keep their secrets to themselves.  And they know that as soon as they tell, someone will say, 'Are you kidding me?  That's so simple."  It's horrifying to me, that they do that.  People don't realize it, but as soon as they hear or see that, something dies inside them.  They're deader than they were.  They're not, like, happy to know about this stuff.  They're happy not to know about it.  And they shouldn't know about it.  It's nothing to do with the film!  And will only ruin the film!  Why would they talk about it?"

"The best way to learn whether your Story is reaching people is to tally the number of them willing to part with their hard-earned cash to experience your work."

"Sharon Olds said that if you write down something and put it out into the world, it's a little murder.  It just is.  If you write down something and you put it in a drawer, it's a little suicide."

"To this day, the Slow Food movement wants diners and chefs to challenge themselves by taking their time and making every meal a hedonistic experience.  Should we ask any less from ourselves as writers—or from those who choose to read what we make?"

"If magic exploits our capacity to continuously, unconsciously modify events in the ongoing world to form a story, even at the expense of everything we know to be possible in the universe, then we are indeed master editors, tirelessly working to communicate to others and ourselves a meaningful tale."

"The broadest, most inoffensive, mainstream hits are so often the least 'talked about.' They just happen and wash over a disconcerting majority once a week. Again, this is fine if you just want commercial success but it's soul destroying if you have loftier ambitions."

"To give a sense of place, to me, is a thrilling thing. And a sense of place is made up of details. And so the details are incredibly important. If they're wrong, then it throws you out of the mood. And so the sound and music and color and shape and texture, if all those things are correct and a woman looks a certain way with a certain kind of light and says the right word, you're gone, you're in heaven. But it's all the little details."

"Francis Bacon is, to me, the main guy, the number one kinda hero painter.  There's a lot of painters that I like.  But for just the thrill of standing in front of a painting… I saw Bacon's show in the sixties at the Marlborough Gallery and it was really one of the most powerful things I ever saw in my life." (artist)

"I took a stance [with my art] about a couple of things. I thought I'd earned the right; that I knew enough about Life at this point, and had gone through enough where I thought stating an opinion about a thing or two would not be soapboxy or preachy but was just hard-won experience trying to communicate to other people."

"Nicki Minaj, for example, has 77,000,000 Instagram followers consuming her free social content. 77,000,000 followers, and her last album sold 800,000 copies.  That means that barely 1% of her followers actually purchased an album. The rest? Streaming it, YouTubing it, just following without buying.  If a mega star like Nicki Minaj has a conversion rate that low for actual sales, what does that mean for indie creators?"

"New writers are, if anything, even more welcome in the magazines. The appetite for new writers in the field of speculative fiction (science fiction and fantasy) is still enormous. If you write competently and if your story has any spark of life, you will sell it."

"Here's a difficult concept to grasp and I'm sure I'll go to my grave trying to explain it. Just because a book becomes a bestseller doesn't make it something to emulate. There are a myriad of reasons why some books become bestsellers and still don't work as Stories."

"I don't write for anyone else, but I'm aware of the fact—once I go to editing and polishing—that I'm asking people to shell out their hard-earned money."

"I always thought the ideal would be to write a novel that would be equally appealing to ... a bus driver and an English professor."

"You have to balance doing what you want with make a buck, which is hard.  But if you do what you love and keep that as a goal in your work, you'll find that people will eventually come to you for it.  Instead of you going to them for money, they'll come to you with money and hire you for who you are."

"Today's writer is expected to craft an online identity while churning out everything from literary snacks to full-course feasts that threaten to be labeled TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read).  It's an exhausting scenario and, to compensate, many writers resort to templates that allow them to ape what has come before."

"Graphic novels!  These books reach readers no other books can.  They're opening the doors of verbal literacy for visual learners and helping strong verbal readers become visually literate.  I LOVE them."

"Some of my favorite directors of the 1970s became rich and famous and lost touch with other human beings not like themselves.  [With social media,] I can now maintain a connection to other people, not just in the U.S. but all over the world.  It allows me insight into someone who's 15 in Thailand."

"I don't want to release something I don't think is ready. I feel I have one chance to hook readers, so I should show them my best."

"When an audience is so massive, do people even know why I write or what it means?'

"Fantasy is the most basic and longest-lived genre.  Shakespeare wrote fantasy.  Gilgamesh was fantasy.  The stories so important that they were passed down from mothers to daughters for millennia without being written down were fantasy.  The advantage of fantasy is that a reader can insert themselves and their own issues into the story."

"I believe that it is difficult to kill an idea because ideas are invisible and contagious, and they move fast."

"I started out writing novels—I wrote two bad ones before I ever touched a short story. ... Those failed novels taught me an immense amount about focus and about paying attention to my audience—essential skills for writing the short story.  Had I not written those bad novels I doubt I would have ever had any luck with short stories."

"It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It's better not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it's a very personal thing, and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for somebody else."

"There's a huge difference between writing for yourself (aka journaling) and writing for an external human audience.  If your goal is to be published, there's no getting away from caring about—at least a little—what other people want from your writing.  So at some point in your process, you need to attend to the needs of those readers."

"New writers are, if anything, even more welcome in the magazines."

"I see a lot of people who want the things that come along with being a musician or artist, but don't know what they actually want to represent.  When you don't have a vision for what you want to put out there, it can lead to being influenced by those around you.  Everyone is going to have an opinion and give you advice and tell you how to do things.  But if you really want to do your thing and be successful doing something that's unique to you, then you need to have a clear idea of what you want.  You will be influenced by others, but you should have the strongest sense of what you're putting out there."

"Have multiple expressions of your awesomeness available at a variety of value tiers. Have something free. Have something out there for a buck or three. Make sure folks can sample your work and still support you should they choose to do so. Be like the drug dealer: first taste is cheap or free, baby."

"I now knew the reason why this very talented writer kept getting to the one-yard line and was never able to score a touchdown—a working thriller. Instead of dedicating herself to nailing the form of the thriller/Story, she decided she was above it. She wanted the fruits of the labor (bestsellerdom) more than the labor itself (writing a brilliant and innovative hero at the mercy of the villain scene no matter if the book was ever published or not)."

"I've blocked a lot of self-published authors for this kind of behavior: you're not a sentient spam-bot. Quit with the auto-DMs. Don't sign people up for your bulk emails. Don't use social media to forcibly invite folks to some dubious online event based around your book. Your marketing efforts should be beautiful music that draws me nearer, not a hammer that clubs me where I stand."

"The showbiz of the authorial appearance—the writer as carnival barker—is everywhere.  God help the writer who is unpresentable." (artist)

"I think the creation of beauty is an uplifting act that can help people.  Creating beautiful images that people can see, share, and take solace in is a laudable social goal."

"I once asked a fan who was a homicide cop, 'Why do you even read this? Isn't it a busman's holiday?'  He said, 'Jon, I get the bad guy 70 percent of the time.  You get him 100 percent of the time.'  People like crime novels because they give a certain sense of—I hate to use the words, but—closure and finality.  To some extent that's why people latch onto forensics, and shows like 'CSI' are so popular.  DNA, whiz-bang science."

"A lot of people tell me their stories because they think they know mine, and in a way, it's very gratifying.  The more inward you become, the more universal you become."

"The movies have not undermined the influence of fiction.  On the contrary, they have extended its field, carrying the ideas which are already current among readers to those too young, too impatient, or too uneducated to read."

"Fake realism is the escapism of our time."

"Being a good photographer is about more than talent.  You need to know a lot about business as well."

"How I love the fun of a shocker, the I-had-no-idea-wouldn't-have-guessed-in-a-million-years surprise.  My jaded self reads the summary of a movie or book and thinks, 'Well, I know what that will be about.  No thank you.'"  How I love to be proven wrong."

"Self-publishing is not easier, as you will find yourself mucking about in covers and copyediting and distribution and marketing for more hours than you spend writing—and when you publish traditionally you find yourself losing a lot of control over your work timelines and visions for the book's marketing."

"Readers look for the surprises in your story the same way a child looks for the prize inside a box of Cracker Jacks.  If you don't surprise your audience, they walk away from your story wondering why they bothered."

"There is no iron that can enter the human heart with such stupefying effect as a period placed at just the right moment."

"A good story is a good story. If what I'm writing reaches you, then it reaches you no matter what title is stuck on it."

"I now have a better understanding of how to communicate my ideas, but I still struggle every single day.  As soon as I stop struggling, I'll be dead."

"In order to convince your reader that he is there, you must assault each of his senses, in turn, with color, sound, taste, and texture.  If your reader feels the sun on his flesh, the wind fluttering his shirt sleeves, half your fight is won." (artist)

"Go ahead, make something up!  Anything.  After all, this is fantasy, right?  Wrong.  The audience still wants to believe in your world—and believability comes from the recognition of an internally consistent system of logic.  If things are not consistent, they are (literally!) unbelievable."

"Whenever we do something to appease other people, it doesn't come across as genuine.  We want to make sure that we are constantly being ourselves, so we focus on developing our own work, and if mainstream outlets find us, then they have made a true discovery—we are not being pushed on them by a powerful PR firm."

"I know the next decade will bring some wild changes—both personally and industry-wide—as the vehicles with which we consume content keep changing.  That directly informs what I do for a living, and my hope is not just to keep up, but to really engage with new channels, mediums, and people."

"I picked up a camera to use in gathering raw material for my paintings, but I quickly loved how much more social photography was: I could actually interact with humans on a real-time basis and have a conversation, which doesn't happen with painting."

"The thing that you need to never forget is that, when it comes to fiction, everything is made out of words.  What you end up with serves as a catalyst—it's a series of words that interacts with the mind of the reader to create something that feels like a real person to them." (artist)

"There are certain kinds of songs you write that are just fun songs—the lyric really can't survive without the music. But for most of what I do, the idea behind it was to try and bring a novelist's eye to it, and, within the framework of rock and roll, to try to have that lyric there so somebody who enjoys being engaged on that level could have that and have the rock and roll too."

"So after you build it, you have to move into it.  You have to look around, listen, taste, touch, smell, and feel what you have created—then report back, so the reader can feel it too."

"You always try to think in terms of what would be worse, what would be harder for these characters.  Because those are the moments when people really show their best selves.  Also, those are the things that people don't really talk about a lot, but they want to know about.  We're sort of afraid of it.  So as a writer, you go into those dark places, and I think that's what keeps the pages turning." 

"A good magic trick forces the spectator to tell a story that arrives at an impossible conclusion, and the clearer the story is, the better.  Normally, everything you need to solve the puzzle happens right in front of you, but you are made to care only about the parts that the magician wants you to.  When you join up those dots, so misleadingly and provocatively arranged, you are left with a baffling mystery.  A good magician might make the trick mean more, by elevating it beyond the mere disappearance or transposition of some props.  If it can be made to feel somehow relevant to you, rather than mere display of skill, then the story is likely to have more import and the trick more impact."

"The appetite for new writers in the field of speculative fiction (science fiction and fantasy) is still enormous. If you write competently and if your story has any spark of life, you will sell it."

"Making music and being an artist in any way, really, stems from an essentially self-centered place.  Some people will say that they make music or art to give something to the world, to share it with people, because they think people need to hear it.  I think most of that is bullshit.  You create things because they come from a place that is purely you.  It is very self-centered, which is not a bad thing—it is just the nature of creativity." 

"[My films] mean different things to different people. Some mean more or less the same things to a large number of people. It's okay. Just as long as there's not one message, spoon-fed. That's what films by committee end up being, and it's a real bummer to me ... Life is very, very complicated, and so films should be allowed to be, too."

"A Story either works or doesn't work. It either engages the reader or it doesn't. It's alive or it's dead, like our mongooses. And the last thing an editor wants to do is kill a living Story, no matter how mangy."

"I don't think there's anything wrong with writing or creating with an audience in mind.  That's smart as long as you feel like you're part of that audience and you don't change or go against your own intuition an about what you should create in order to make them happy."

"Every book is a billboard for your entire backlist. If that book is enjoyed, it will lead a certain number of readers to your other books."

"Finding readers is a crapshoot. Keeping readers is a crapshoot."

"In order to really hit a book out of the park, a writer/publisher needs to bring women to the party. The male writers who do count women as devoted readers write stories that often include a love Story within their overarching plot."

"Can you imagine William Faulkner [making a public appearance] in a bookstore?  He'd probably be blind drunk and would tell everyone to go fuck themselves."

"Our job in publishing is to keep creating many different kinds of books and then getting out of the way so that readers can pick their own."

"The more personality I put into my work, the more people respond to it.  I've realized that I don't have to only do what I think others expect from me or what I expect to get paid for."

"I decided that I wanted to have a record for my sons that would say, 'Wow, Mom really marveled at the world.  She really championed the good on Earth.'  That's how Lucky Fish partially came to be.  And I've never really written for a specific audience in mind until that particular book."

"As a playwright, your primary responsibility is to not bore your audience. It's not to improve them. This is already an arrogant art form."

"Readers love the sense of possibilities ... of hypothetical worlds that mimic and mirror our own.  Our actual lives have become fantastical in many respects, and the hybrid story of realism plus fantasy seems to be touching that tender spot."

"I don't want to say I have the common touch, but I am just a common person, and I have this one talent that I use."

"People listen to music and interpret it in their own way, but it's weird when a thing that has helped you through a hard time becomes your career."

"People want to read varied perspectives and a lot of publishers and agents who wouldn't take a chance before are finally responding."

"If you're a good writer, you will find an advocate who believes in your work."

"Empathy enlarges the writer's understanding, engages the reader, and widens the story."

"As designers, we go into another world, into the unknown, so it's important to be experimental and think outside of the box.  We've continued to evolve, and photography has now become a huge part of what we do.  I love it because you can capture the world around you, finding and sharing magic in the everyday.  That's what we're about."

"At the end of the day, we're probably not changing the world with most of the images we're making.  Instead, I think the main opportunity to contribute to the greater good is through the relational aspect of what we do as artists.  We meet and interact with people form all over the world, all the time.  The ability to go beyond the creation of images and to develop a camaraderie with people ... is important.  Those relationships will likely last longer than the typical lifespan of an image."

"The literature of the fantastic is about awakening that feeling of awe—and exercising it."

"I had firm convictions of the importance of popular art, and of its power to make life seem richer and better.  I knew in my bones that drama need not be elitist."

"The fun of most plays is seeing actors react to each other."

"Your job is to look for surprises in the world.  And share them."

"Something magical happened that night.  When I told that story, I felt an enormous listening coming from the audience, an enormous opening up.  I noticed that I could look into people's eyes more when I was speaking as myself as opposed to when I was speaking in character.  There was relating happening."

"Your goal, as a storyteller, is to evoke the sense of wonder in your audience.  You start by evoking the sense of wonder in yourself.  Where one person is awestruck, others are also likely to be amazed."

"Remember that pianist who said that if he did not practice every day he would know, if he did not practice for two days, the critics would know, after three days, his audiences would know.  A variation of this is true for writers."

"The most important factor in provoking readers to spread the word about a story is an effect that the Penn researchers call 'awe.' This they defined as an 'emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation in the face of something greater than the self.' It demands of readers 'mental accommodation,' meaning readers must see the world in ways they didn't before." (artist)

"The science fiction and fantasy audience ... is the best audience in the world to write for. They're open-minded and intelligent. They want to think as well as feel, understand as well as dream. Above all, they want to be led into places that no one has ever visited before. It's a privilege to tell stories to these readers, and an honor when they applaud the tales you tell."

"There is a great demand for novels that can be positioned at the top of the commercial list—thrillers and/or dramas that women will want to read. All of the big publishers (with a contracting list of exceptions) are on the hunt for a female friendly literary/commercial commodity."

"To write a story that truly surprises the reader, turns the reader's (and the writer's) preconceived notions inside out, requires unconditional empathy—the courage to imagine not just your hero's virtues but also his flaws in all their grotesque and destructive truth."

"Ask readers what they love about great novels and most often they mention great characters."

"The thriller is the dominant Story form today because it serves the largest segment of society, those overwhelmed by the threats of modern life."

"There are certain kinds of songs you write that are just fun songs—the lyric really can't survive without the music. But for most of what I do, the idea behind it was to try and bring a novelist's eye to it, and, within the framework of rock and roll, to try to have that lyric there so somebody who enjoys being engaged on that level could have that and have the rock and roll too."

Worlds of Wonder

"Ultimately, the question 'Who's the target reader, and why?' must be answered by everyone in the publishing chain (writer, editor, marketer, publicist, publisher). Identifying the audience (the people who will buy your book) defines which of these two cultures 'Literary' or 'Commercial' you belong to."

"If when we least expect it, you surprise us with ourselves, that impact is huge. When a setting is outside our experience yet also feels like our native land, that impact is lasting."

"Technologies come and go. The story remains constant. More to the point, our need for stories remain constant. Storytellers and writers aren't going anywhere. They may need to bend with the wind. They may need to find new ways to thrive. But they—we—will always have a place. The audience will be there."

"Just because they have a wide audience that will buy whatever they write does not mean they wrote a Story that worked."

"I was used to uniting an audience with humour; this time, I wanted to unite an audience with humanity."

"Estimates reach as high as 70% of the entire book buying market being women."

"To infuse a novel with a significance that speaks to many requires, paradoxically, that you ignore what the public wants and focus instead on what matters to you."

"It's more exciting to touch people than to make them laugh. ... If you manage to make laughter and emotion work side by side, it can be transcendent."

"Male writers with female readers also feature strong female characters in their novels."

"Skip the dull set up. The audience craves the compelling parts, even likes the quick mental work of filling in the gaps."

"Literature does not occur in a vacuum. It cannot be a monologue. It has to be a conversation, and new people, new readers, need to be brought into the conversation too."

"The more sudden are the turns, the steeper the climbs, and the most astounding the vistas, the more readers will connect to the landscape. The trip you take them on is one they'll take inside. It will feel like a memory, even though you invented it at the keyboard."

"A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."

"Conflict is all. Watching combat—dialogue back and forth—transfixes an audience like a tennis match. They won't have time to get bored."

"The so-called Stanislavsky Method rests on two principles: that the actor's body is an instrument that must be supple, strong, and prepared; and that craft is always secondary to the truth of emotional connection."

"Share your Must, and in so doing, lift the lives of others. ... When you choose Must, you inspire others to choose it, too."

"When the values underneath your story make us uncomfortable but also somehow sit well with us, that impact is deep. "

"What matters to me is that they have the books and they love them. ... And they'll tell people about them."

"To explain things clearly, you connect the unknown to what your audience already knows.  Stories draw on common human knowledge and experience, and link those knowns to the unknown, or the old to the new."

"I will sign anything. ... If they can't afford a new book, I'll give them something to read and enjoy in the meantime. They'll pass it on to their friends."

What is success in the 21st century? It's novels that invent their own unique form, spring from a personal place, enact a passionate intent, and prove it by reaching a broad readership. It's both great reviews and great sales. It's moving hearts and changing minds. It's winning accolades and winning the devotion of readers. It's finding a way through your fiction to convey what you alone see, yet we all come to accept as the truth.

"Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes."

The minute you try to think about what people want, you're dead.

"Wear your heart on the page, and people will read to find out how you solved being alive."

"Just write the stories you want to write.  If you are writing about authentic characters, we (agents, then editors, then readers) will care."

"I believe in sending characters down fearful paths.  Stories pushed beyond the limits of comfort stick in readers' imaginations."

"I'm inspired when I literally can't put a book down.  I'll leave the dishes in the sink.  I'll bore friends and family talking about people they don't know and situations they've never read.  In short, I'm pitching to everyone around me.  If a book connects with me to that extent, it will connect with others.  The biggest seller of books is still word of mouth, and the most successful books are those people can't stop talkinga about, agents included."

"Don't talk to me in market speak.  Tell me about your characters and the crisis they are trapped in, and make it seem serious, big."

"I don't think an author should try specifically to write a series (or a stand-alone) due to any idea of the market.  A concept either cries out to be written over the course of several books with a story arc big enough to support it—some threads that tie up satisfyingly in each book with others that demand more time and effort to resolve—or it doesn't.  Writing two books where one is called for or three where a duology would do only means there's a sagging middle somewhere."

"Writers seeking to break in are often so concerned with sounding salable that they put it before craft.  It's off-putting.  The more the writer seems focused on selling, the less genuine the craft tends to be.  Talk to me about your ideas, your characters, your worlds: That's how to excite me."

"Act like a pro and charge money for your words or build your audience on social media where the only one profiting from your awesomeness is you, not some super-wealthy media mogul that's too cheap to pay writers."

"You don't need to line someone else's pockets to show off your writing skills.  It's easy enough to set up your own blog and display your talents there or to write carefully crafted pitches that make editors want to assign you stories even if you are a newbie.  (That's how I got my start.)"

"Even my publisher will say they just want more thrillers.  That's what feeds my family.  But I feel like if I did that, I wouldn't be being true to myself."

"Keep writing.  Publishing new work keeps your brand fresh and gives you regular opportunities to connect with new readers.  Never get so wrapped up in trying to sell your work that you neglect the passion to keep writing."

"Being a photographer is making people look at what I want them to look at." (artist)

"I'm happiest and most productive when I shut out all the chatter about 'the business' and focus on what I do best: writing."

"Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia."

"Readings are social events.  I think poetry is written in isolation and is best understood in isolation.  I want readers; I don't want listeners."

"I say this with great honesty: I always approach a book by writing about the thing that keeps me up at night.  What is really waking me up or keeping me from falling asleep?  What am I grappling with?  And then I think, I cannot be the only one on this planet thinking about this right now.  I can't be the only one worried about this.  I start with whatever that experience is, and I just keep peeling it until it's more of the raw experience, and that's where I think fiction steps in."

"No matter where you are in your career, keep listening to your readers about what they want from you."

"You have to write what is in your heart and your mind and your imagination, and that's the place where it has to come from.  I don't think that looking at what sells is the way to start a novel or a work of nonfiction.  I get about 200 books a week at my house.  I'm always waiting to be surprised or bowled over.  You don't want to be bored."

"I am convinced this helped bring in the readers.  There are no secret tricks.  Just solid dedicated work and then more dedicated work."

"Do what you're best at. Don't make yourself miserable doing what you think you should be doing, do what you enjoy doing.  Utilize your time where it's best spent.  If you have a talent and passion for blogging: Do that.  If you enjoy Twitter and know the ins and outs: Do that.  If you are a great public speaker and love attending writers' conferences: Do that.  There's no one way to promote a book."

"Tone is the atmosphere you the author creates and mood is the atmosphere the audience feels."

"I should like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart."

"Once a writer has sent her work out into the world, it takes on a life of its own.  The writer should let go."

"Utilize your time well and remember at the end of the day the whims of fate and word of mouth are more powerful than any marketer."

"Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience."

"Try not to please anyone or any particular audience.  Find out what the real work is inside of you, then find the courage to do it well."

"I think books should be cheaper.  I want books to be accessible.  If books are precious (and as a result, expensive), then publishers win, readers lose, and by proxy, writers lose, too."

"Write the kind of stories that you'd love to read, not what you think will please other people or the market in general.  If you love it, there's a good chance that others will too, and those readers will tell their friends."

"Give them a character they love.  You have to have a character that people empathize with.  And then you have to have one of those moments of universal emotion." (on the key to great story that gets people talking)

"As an artist, you want as many people to see your work as possible with no compromise.  .... I don't want to .... have it watered down, and follow a soap opera, and have all the edges filed down and have someone interfere.  ....  Delivering the exact thing that I made ... that's so important to me, you know, that's, I said, the ideal of the most beautiful and purest thing. And it's how little it can be ruined from your brain to the observer. And that's the way you do everything yourself, really, because, you know, I've probably only produced and directed to protect my writing, the idea, you know?"

"Do only as much marketing as you find fun and interesting, then go back to writing your next story."

"Don't censor yourself.  Don't chase trends.  Write whatever is in your heart.  If it's honest, you will find an audience."

"Why am I getting critically reviewed, a lot of award nominations, a lot of recognition, but [not] selling?  What I started realizing was, I wasn't branded.  I just didn't have a big enough audience."

"You're aiming for satisfaction for the audience, not happiness for the characters. They may coincide. They may not."

"The reason I deal in taboo subjects is because it's more exciting, and because I also think that a comedian's job isn't just to make people laugh, it's to make them think. And I think that if you take them through territory they haven't been before, they're quite nervous, but when they come out the other end, 'Wow,' you know, they had the best rollercoaster ride ever because it was a bit scary and they didn't die. And that's the lovely thing, you know? (Laughs.) That's better than a gentle ride that you knew you weren't going to die on, but it wasn't that good either."

"Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes."

"The only side you should fight on is the side of your audience. With weapons forged from the steel of Good Story."

"The audience should never know that—or, rather, should never feel that you're talking to them. They want to feel like they're witnessing something, that they're looking in a forbidden window. The audience doesn't want to feel told. Or lectured to."

"That critical fan base comes as you write more ebooks, continually learn and offer something new with each book.  Deeper emotion, more twists, a new high concept or more raw gut appeal."

"As long as I can get exactly what's in my head with minimum compromise, I don't care where it's going. I don't care if, in five years' time, they've discovered telepathy, that I can just have ideas and blink and people get them all around the world. You know, we don't know what the medium's going to be, so I'll have whatever delivers the purest idea that I have to the most people."

"That was actually quite liberating.  ....  I could write the exact story that I wanted to write.  I didn't think about how anybody would receive it."

"If you do care about having a go at this writing thing as a proper career, do not write for exposure. Exposure cannot be measured, and you might as well write for any number of invisible things: the dreams of sleeping kittens, perhaps, or mystical unicorn turds. You should always be getting something measurable for your writing."

"I don't see any reason to think that the particular kind of literary writer who's dedicated to entertaining as well as to writing without cliché would not continue to have a shot at finding a commercial-sized audience. And the possibility of that larger audience is important."

"I like to believe that my readers are as smart as the writers I hang out with, and they will rise to the challenge.  We teach our readers how to read our books in the first paragraph, in the first word.  We set up a contract with them."

"You just have to say, 'This is who this [character] is.  And I'm going to write it the way I see it and the way she feels it, and have faith that readers will follow."

"You just have to say, 'This is who this [character] is.  And I'm going to write it the way I see it and the way she feels it, and have faith that readers will follow."

"There are too many people trying to sound like someone else.  Be uniquely you, and your work will always find a home."

"While running your own publishing business can certainly take quite a bit of time and energy, never forget that writing your next book is the very best way to spend the bulk of your time.  Whether you are self-publishing or working with a traditional publisher, the best way you will ever connect with both your current—and future—readers is by writing and releasing your next book.  And then the next.  And then the next.  And then the next."

"I do believe that making one's book free remains an effective way to reach new readers who might not otherwise take a chance on your book.  I've had a number of positive reviews from readers who said they liked my book but would never have downloaded if it weren't free.  I do not agree with the argument that an author who makes his book free is inviting bad reviews from those readers who are trying a novel that is not in their preferred genre and may be less inclined to like it.  I believe a good book is a good book, and anything you can do to attract a new reader is worthwhile."

"No one's appeal is universal."

"If your readers aren't .... using words like, 'wow,' 'incredible' and 'amazing,' then you're probably not taking the reader to an emotionally satisfying extreme.  Extreme joy and pleasure is a required reading experience if you want to turn readers into fans, and turn fans into super fans.  Wow books turn readers into evangelists."

"The best advertisement for your writing is your writing. Write a book that people want to read. Then another. Then another. Keep at it until the world can't ignore you anymore."