Cohen’s Rules of Book Publishing
1. There is only one thing worse than losing an auction for a book - and that is winning it.
2. It is nearly always more profitable to leave your money in the bank than to venture into trade book publishing [i.e. fiction and non-fiction for general readers as opposed to textbooks, reference books and so on] where a profit margin of even 5 percent is elusive.
3. No two people will agree on anything, even where to have lunch.
Roger Cohen discovered these rules while covering the book publishing beat for the New York Times. He pointed out that the third rule is the most important because it underscores a central fact about the business: “Nothing in publishing is demonstrably true. Optimism and pessimism, fact and rumour, statistics and guesswork, mingle so completely that objective certitude and this industry bear as much relation to each other as Argentine steak and a vegetarian dinner” (September 2nd 1991). For more about publishing lunches see Creasey’s Law.
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