Michael A. Stackpole Quotations

If someone is going to profit from your work, they need to earn it.

There is no denying the aesthetics of a well-made, well-loved book.

Paying a royalty to someone for prepping an ebook is akin to paying the kid who cuts your grass a percentage of the purchase price when you sell your house. It makes no sense.

It has been aptly noted that web browsers are less Internet navigation tools than they are ebooks with highly diverse content.

The advent of ebooks is no more going to kill the pleasure of reading than the introduction of the internal combustion engine made horses extinct.

The real important thing about Digital-Original publication goes beyond the fact that authors make more money off each sale than through traditional publishing. It's that we get to bypass a system of gatekeepers who have more than 'quality' as criteria for what they choose.

Digital-Original just shifts the R&D costs for publishing to the authors and affords us the chance to write the stories we want to write and the stories our patrons want to read.

Digital-Original publishing embraces the non-conventional and genre-busting story. It allows me to share good stories with readers who will enjoy them, and at a reasonable price.

I sell a lot of ebooks from my website and encourage authors to set up their own stores.

We all are faced by problems of 'How am I going to get the rent?' or 'Am I going to have this job six months from now?' It's very difficult to define in your life a victory.

People downloading my stories from the bit torrent sites were never going to buy them anyway. It's no money out of my pocket.

Prior to 2009, when publishers scoffed at the ebook market, they offered writers contracts which gave us half of the money they made off ebook sales.

Authors can easily produce ebook versions of novels and shorter work which publishers don't own.

Authors will make far more on those ebooks through direct sales than publishers are offering. There is no incentive for authors to sell those rights to traditional publishers which means, in the fairly short term, publishers run out of material to sell.

A lot of stuff people do these days is not mentally challenging.

Publishing can be tough. It has the ability to kill dreams.

Few and far between are the books you'll cherish, returning to them time and again, to revisit old friends, relive old happiness, and recapture the magic of that first read.

In games, we know who has won... You get the reinforcement for having played well.

I've done a lot of books with Asian antecedents to them - some of my fantasy novels have been that way, and certainly in the 'Battletech' universe, there's a lot of Asian culture in that.

Higher ebook prices don't benefit me, booksellers or readers, and that means something is really wrong.

Higher ebook prices only benefit one group: publishers.

If your job all day is disallowing insurance claims, you can still spend an evening playing games with your friends, and you can be faced with threats and puzzles that are far more exciting than anything you've ever imagined facing at work.

Choosing to publish work electronically myself is really a no-brainer.

Cars did not kill off horses. Digital publishing will not kill off books.

I certainly knew of 'World of Warcraft'; I had never actually played because I knew that if I started playing, I would never get any work done - because it would just totally absorb me.

Most innovative little board game since Chess.

Life itself was hard enough without monosynaptic sociopaths preying on folks.

Out of the firefight, into the carbon freeze." -Anakin Solo

As long as I'm fighting, I'm not dying." - Mara Jade Skywalker

I am so glad I found you and didn't kill you" - Mara Jade Skywalker to Luke Skywalker

Even being a Jedi is something where you look for more. At first you acted as if Jedi was synonymous with hero. It isn't. Being a hero isn't what all these folks are here to do. They're here to do their jobs." -Jaina Solo

If you can't recognize the man in the mirror, it is time to step back and see when you stopped being yourself.

Note to the wise: whenever someone insists that he wants to buy something from you, but tells you there's no real value in it yet, two things are happening: he's lying, and you're being taken.

In reality, a person questioning the existence of the Satanic conspiracy is merely pointing out that the emperor is wearing no clothes. In that case, one can understand why the emperor's tailors get upset and suggest the person doing the pointing is a tool of the devil. Then the question comes down to one of whether the crowd will believe the evidence they have before them, or if they will buy into the tailors' fantasies.