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'It starts with the book no matter what.'

24 August 2015

‘The truth is, we spend so much of our time advocating internally for our books, making sure we have the right cover, the right subtitle, filling out forms and so forth, that we often don't have time to be entrepreneurial. But when a moment of clarity comes, it's fun to pursue it or to brainstorm with an agent about a client whose writing you really like...

I've learned that despite all the new bells and whistles, there's no substitute for giving the bookselling community time enough to read a book and get behind it... Despite all the things that we tell authors to do, there has to be a book that you want to recommend to five other people after you put it down. It starts with the book no matter what. Without that it doesn't matter how much you tweet. You'll get one wave of publicity and then it's over.'

Dawn Davis, founder of 37 Ink, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, in Poets and Writers magazine