I think if a person wants to sell more than 100 books they better do some self-promotion. I don’t think it takes a lot of effort to maintain a social network, I basically only tweet things regarding my writing or funny things. I post things on Facebook concerning my writing or pictures of me hiking, I email a lot of people asking if they want to review my book or to interview me, and sometimes it takes three hours, I just did a 10,000 word interview for Hobart, and yeah, it takes time. But I think it is fun to interact with other writers, I really enjoy all of it. I know of several books that are incredible, that are amazing, but the authors don’t think they have to self promote, and the books haven’t sold 500 copies. A musician has to practice for months to make sure everything is perfect, then they have to travel all over playing shows if they are sick or not, a lot of them have to practice choregraphy, then they have to do interviews at 5am or in the middle of the night at radio stations. Athletes have to practice and exercise constantly like maniacs to play their games. People on movie crews (from camera men to actors and actresses) have to go to weird places and wake up at 5am and work all fucking day to make their movies. Actors and actresses have to maintain perfect bodies via massive amounts of exercise. And a writer can’t emotionally handle copy and pasting links into Twitter, well then you don’t deserve to sell copies, you’re lazy, I don’t care.

— Noah Cicero, in conversation with Jake Levin at Entropy

That’s sort of my favorite thing is just to do nothing with someone, where you’re not going to a movie, you’re not going to dinner, you’re not going to a party — you’re really just sitting in your apartment talking. That situation often arises because people don’t have money, and I certainly have felt that way in my life, that there’s this intimacy that comes out of not having a lot.

— Leopoldine Core 

I think it’s wonderful to take feelings that you’re really having, or maybe the theme of your bedroom, like you look around and see things. But then you turn it into a story and you really push it into another galaxy. And maybe that’s the idea of a successful story for me, when I take my life and it just sort of opens a door into another world. I feel so excited by that — like I’m watching a movie suddenly. It’s not me. It’s something else.

— Leopoldine Core