'Fallen Too Far' was my first NYT bestseller. That changed my life.
Abbi Glines
Advances have fallen, generally, for everything except the biggest potential bestsellers. Given all the changes, both economic and technological, SF hasn't done too badly.
Alan Dean Foster
If you can pay enough people to buy your .99 ebook and review it positively, and crack one of Amazon's bestseller lists, readers are going to check it out. Especially at a low price point like .99. Customers are suckers for the fallacy that the cream rises to the top.
Andrew Shaffer
You can look at the New York Times Bestseller List and you can be pretty sure that the writers on that list don't know each other very well.
Anne Rice
You don't need to be able to string a sentence together in a way that is elegant or even vaguely meaningful to produce a bestseller - as Dan Brown has demonstrated time and again.
Anthony Horowitz
My self-publishing adventure led to my work being picked up by a traditional publisher and eventually hitting the bestseller lists. That led to two more bestselling novels.
Ashwin Sanghi
I've always been fascinated by books. When I was young, my grandfather used to hand out a book - which would be anything from a biography to a classic - to me every week and ask me to write a piece on what I thought about it. On the other hand, my mother used to love reading thrillers and bestsellers.
When I wrote 'The Rozabal Line,' I had no preconceived notions of what a commercial bestseller should be. I have always viewed 'The Rozabal Line' as my first love and probably my best work. The fact, however, is that it is my least read work.
It'll take a while for all those strange old books that I love to show up on digital: books that aren't current bestsellers but aren't public-domain freebies, either.
Barbara Hambly
'To Kill a Mockingbird' appeared to highly favorable reviews and quickly climbed to the top of bestseller lists, where it remained for more than eighty weeks. In 1961, the novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. A film adaptation was released in 1962, starring Gregory Peck, and received three Academy Awards.
Charles J. Shields
When I was on the bestseller list with the first book, everyone who knows me knows that every week it continued to be on the list was a very dark week for me. Everyone knows that all I wanted was to be off that list.
Dave Eggers
We partner with movies that stand for more than the latest bestseller.
David A. R. White
For a wide-ranging look at literary matters, the 'Book Review Podcast' from the 'New York Times' is still one of the best. Presented by Pamela Paul, each episode has an interview with an author - recent guests have included Neil Gaiman and Sana Krasikov - plus a roundup of the uppers, downers and hanging-arounders on the U.S. bestsellers chart.
David Hepworth
When' Voyager', the third book of the series, hit the 'New York Times' bestseller list, they very honorably redesigned the covers and started calling them fiction.
Diana Gabaldon
I never set out to do this - getting to No. 1 in the 'New York Times' bestseller list wasn't even a pipedream.
E. L. James
When you start a new job or a particular journey, you really don't know what to expect. I mean, you hear about your name being on the bestsellers list, but it doesn't really mean anything. Like, really, what does that translate to?
Eric Jerome Dickey
If I'm writing books, I'm a 'New York Times' bestseller - how do I do it all? I don't know.
Farrah Abraham
There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
Flannery O'Connor
The New York Times Bestseller 'The Amateur,' written by Ed Klein, former editor of the 'New York Times Magazine,' is one of the best books I've read.
Fran Tarkenton
When 'Catch Me If You Can' was published back in 1980, I never dreamed that it would become a bestseller, much less a major motion picture and now a big Broadway musical. What's amazing about the book is that it has never gone out of print.
Frank Abagnale
I just wrote the book and was amazed and astounded that it became a bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize. It still hasn't sunk in.
Something happened when the memoirs of so-called ordinary people, like myself, suddenly hit the bestseller list.
'The Mortal Instruments' is based on a series of novels by Cassandra Clare; it has been a New York Times bestseller, so it is pretty popular.
Writing itself is a dream. There are days of self doubt and deadlines and wondering how you're going to pay the bills until you write that bestseller. But it's still the best job I've ever had. I've also been able to help a lot of people and even inspire a few and that feels great.
I really told my story as I saw it in 'Cross to Bear,' and I was pleased - and a bit surprised - by how well it was received and how it sold. No. 2 on the 'New York Times' bestseller list? I'll take that any day, my man!
There has always been interest in certain phases and aspects of history - military history is a perennial bestseller, the Civil War, that sort of thing. But I think that there is a lot of interest in historical biography and what's generally called narrative history: history as story-telling.
The business model - where books can be returned, and where a 50% sell-through is considered acceptable - is archaic and wasteful. Writers get small royalties, little say in how their books are marketed and sold, and simple things like cover and title approval are unheard of unless you're a huge bestseller.
I was never confident about finishing a book, but friends encouraged me. When I finished my first book, it was accepted by a publisher right away and became an instant bestseller. One male critic called it the most shocking book he ever read.
I know the bestseller 'Gone Girl' doesn't need an ounce of support from me, but that book was as sharp and witty as they come.
I had always presumed that my first book would be published, but I never dreamt that I would write 15 bestsellers and have this wonderful life in America that I have entirely built for myself.
'Bag of Bones' was a big, distorted yet wonderfully entertaining novel that rode high on the bestseller lists in 1998.
When my plans to become a world-famous rockstar didn't pan out, I decided to try being a lesbian instead, didn't pull that off either, and wrote my second book, the national bestseller, 'The Straight Girl's Guide To Sleeping With Chicks.'
If you write chick lit, and if you're a New Yorker, and if your book becomes the topic of pop-culture fascination, the paper might make dismissive and ignorant mention of your book. If you write romance, forget about it. You'll be lucky if they spell your name right on the bestseller list.
Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction.
I felt really lucky that 'Hairstyles Of The Damned' and 'The Boy Detective Fails' were both bestsellers, and I thought that donating the money from 'Demons' was a good way to respond to that. My favorite artists are the ones that are willing to experiment, even if it means a smaller audience.
Peter Breggin, an American psychiatrist, had been criticising SSRIs since the early 1990s. He wrote 'Talking Back to Prozac' (1995) to repudiate psychiatrist Peter Kramer's 'Listening to Prozac' (1993) - a bestseller which claimed that Prozac made patients 'better than well.'
Bookstore operators tell us that the books which head the bestseller list are books on peace and happiness.
'The Rap Year Book' is really great. Shea Serrano wrote it, and it became this huge phenomenon where he sold out everywhere and made the bestseller list just on the strength of his fans on Twitter wanting him to succeed.
It's somewhat disquieting that the same parents and educators who are horrified by the notion of child soldiers have bestowed upon 'The Hunger Games' a double mantle of critical praise and global bestsellerdom.
Don't do a hard sell or try to tell the agent that you're going to be a bestseller or the next John Grisham. This goes down very badly. If your work is good, then they are skilled enough to know this within a few pages.
I had a history for starting something and maybe getting halfway done. Then I'd see the same thing I was doing on the bestseller list! My ideas were right, but I hadn't done them fast enough.
The Fiction Writer's Co-op has 51 members, from celebrated NYT bestsellers to promising newcomers, and a waiting list.
B is for bestseller.
Negative books can be bestsellers, but seldom classics.
Human beings have kicked around the concept of what individual happiness means for centuries, from the Bible to the ancient Greeks to the 1859 bestseller 'Self-Help.'
I've been bragging for over 25 years that my first New York Times bestseller was a book I copied from the U.S. Government Printing Office!
I didn't make 'The New York Times' bestseller list until 'Charmed Thirds,' and then again for 'Fourth Comings.' It gave me a certain validation, and it certainly helps position me for future books, but it's not something I think about on a daily basis.
'Game Change,' the infamous bestseller written by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, has plagued anyone directly associated with the 2008 election cycle.
The bestseller list is the tip of the iceberg.
I'm always astonished when I go into Barnes & Noble at the number of people buying books, of course, but also at the variety of books they do buy and the extent to which they are not the big bestsellers.
