With a poetry book I can send 100 copies out to reviewers and other people, and even do it in advance and get their response. It's difficult with iPad: how do you send it out for free, and how do you even disseminate it before it goes into their store?
If a kid is reading a book about someone who looks like them but doesn't talk like them, we stunt their growth by dissing them.
The ecological impact of book manufacture and traditional book marketing - I think that should really be considered. We have this industry in which we cut down trees to make the paper that we then use enormous amounts of electricity to turn into books that weigh a great deal and are then shipped enormous distances to point-of-sale retail.
He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate one's gaze.
When it was suggested that I write a memoir I said, 'I'm not old enough. I'm not distinguished enough.' But I went home and sat down to write, and the material for the book just came flooding into my hands.
Everyone in the book's ecology, starting with the author and including the publisher, the distributor, the booksellers, the libraries, and ending up with the reader, should benefit from a healthy book trade.
For my new book 'Pirate Hunters', I follow John Chatterton and John Mattera, two world-class scuba divers, who teach themselves to think and act as pirates while searching for what would be only the second pirate ship ever found and positively identified.
The Book of Mormon offers so much that broadens our understandings of the doctrines of salvation. Without it, much of what is taught in other scriptures would not be nearly so plain and precious.
Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton and I were the first female headliners, where we would book our own opening acts. Before that, it was a standing joke that it was more like we had 'pretty little girl singers' opening for a male headliner.
Read Don Quixote; it is a very good book; I still read it frequently.
'Don Quixote' is a very political book that has been used by diplomats, politicians, guerrilla fighters, to inspire people, to convince them that they themselves can become quixotic. George Washington had a copy of the book on his desk when signing the U.S. Constitution.
I don't despise 'Don Quixote,' but it is a book I don't... get. I'll have to come back it. Maybe there'll be a gateway story that opens it up for me; that happened for me with 'Paradise Lost' and the 'His Dark Materials' trilogy.
I started my first business out of my college dorm room - DJ Connection - and grew it to more than 4,000 events per year. Sounds easy, but while doing that, I made every mistake in the book.
My debut book is a collection of personal stories and advice about communication on the Internet. More specifically, the downfall of communication because of the Internet.
You want people to be eager for your book; the downside is when the people forget the series even exists.
The books that stuck with me most as a child were 'A Wrinkle In Time', 'Dracula', 'Hatchet', 'Bunnicula', 'White Fang', and this YA/kids' book called 'Nobody's Fault' where a kid drowns one weekend as friends play around a flooded ditch.
I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft. I can write more quickly than I can read.
That freedom of writing you don't get in other formats, I'd rather leave it to someone else to deal with the headache of drafting my book into a screenplay.
When I began to write and used a typewriter, I went through three drafts of a book before showing it to an editor.
I'm always intrigued by authors who say, 'This book took 17 drafts.' They're very clear about it. I couldn't possibly count the number of times... So many of these stories I worked on for a very long time and wrote them, set them aside, rewrote them, worked on something else - they were never far from reach; they informed each other.
