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I believe my publisher has shown a great deal of faith in me over a lot of years but I'm not prepared to be so arrogant to say that the long-term literary value of my work would compensate them for a financial failure.

There is an enormous shadow industry of scammers and amateurs who prey on aspiring writers, who divert people from the real publishing industry into this shadow world of vanity publishing and fee-charging agents.

I had several publishers, and they were all the same. They all wanted salacious. And everybody is writing autobiographies, and that's one reason why I'm not going to do it. If young Posh Spice can write her autobiography, then I don't want to write one!

There is always a certain leap of faith that editors have made with their nonfiction writers. If the trust is broken, things can get very embarrassing for the writers and the publisher.

Publishers were ever eager for authors to do their own publicity because nobody else was willing to do it for nothing. But then it became clear that if you want somebody to champion the story, there's nobody better than the person who made it all up.

From time to time, just about every 'Vanity Fair' writer has a chance to sell rights to an article or a book to Hollywood.

Authors can get an attitude of us-against-them when it comes to publishers, but learning how authors and editors can work together taught me to look at my work in a different way and to make that work as solid as possible before it ever goes to the publisher.

In the past the publishers I've worked with have been extremely generous. And in almost every case, have been people who believed in the work rather than the sales and marketing.

There's been a growing dissatisfaction and distrust with the conventional publishing industry, in that you tend to have a lot of formerly reputable imprints now owned by big conglomerates.

I had a hard time publishing my books in the beginning of my career, because editors were afraid what people would think of THEM, personally, if their name was associated with me.