Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I don't write for an audience, I don't think whether my book will sell, I don't sell it before I finish writing it.
After a while, you start to realize that you should write a book you would want to read. I try to write a book I would enjoy.
Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories.
Forget market or publishers or whatever. Just write with fire and joy, and in my own experience, those are the stories of mine people have wanted to read.
My shorthand answer is that I try to write the kind of book that I would like to read. If I can make it clear and interesting and compelling to me, then I hope maybe it will be for the reader.
I think people become consumed with selling a book when they need to be consumed with writing it.
Getting a book published made me feel a little bit sad. I felt driven by the need to write a book, rather than the need to write. I needed to figure out what was important to me as a writer.
I had written a book. For various reasons, the publishing industry had decided that my book was going to be 'important.' The novel had taken me 12-and-a-half years to write, and after being with the book for so long, I had no real perspective on the merits or demerits of what I had written. I hoped it was good, but feared that it wasn't.
I'd always been a big reader, and I loved books, and I always thought writing would be a great way to get by in the world.
I believe in books that do not go to a ready-made public. I'm looking for readers I would like to make. To win them, to create readers rather than to give something that readers are expecting. That would bore me to death.
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