Michael A. Stackpole Quotes

I know dozens of authors who have had a lot of books published by New York, and they won't ever take another Big 6 contract since they've gotten a taste of the freedom, control, and money self-publishing offers.

I think people are confusing the right to write with the right to be published.

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.

Which is the healthier kind of literary diversity: an un-gate-kept self-published book world, run substantially through Amazon? Or our current book world, which is part-gate-kept, part-not, with many different publishers and retailers and platforms? I'm not smart enough to figure it out, but if I had to guess I'd guess the latter.

Of course, people say maybe there are some self-published books out there that shouldn't be out there. Well, it's the same with conventional publishing.

I think the more avenues that open up when people want to publish, the better. Some of the authors that want to jump ship from the traditional houses and go on their own, you know what? Good luck. It's going to be a lot tougher than you think.

I know most publishers probably don't let their authors write on Wattpad all the time, but mine are pretty open about it.

Self-publishing has been a dubious challenge to traditional publishers, at best.

It's been more than a decade since I put that self-published novel, 'Lip Service', up on a website. Since then, many hundreds of authors have gone from self-published to traditionally published.

I did have a nice career in print, but traditional publishers don't always have the resources to create individualized marketing for their authors. Mine never figured out how to package books as hot as mine so that they found their full audience. Finally, I got frustrated enough over my lack of traction to walk away.

There's almost no author alive who isn't weathering the tumultuous changes in the publishing industry.

Kindle Singles is publishing on skates. It prints like lightning; our book meets readers in hours. I've spent so many years waiting for publishers to consider whether they wanted to print a book of mine, making contracts, taking months to fit it into the Fall list or the Spring list, fitting it into an advertising plan.

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.

The Big Five publishing companies are dinosaurs trying to survive in a post-meteor world. They won't.

Hugh Howey and Amanda Hocking come to mind immediately as authors who managed to build a successful following without the initial support of a large publisher.

Electronic distribution is more of a fall-back strategy for putting out a book that isn't deemed profitable enough to print. You hardly make any money publishing an electronic book.

Maybe self-publishing is going to be an extra step added to publishing. Maybe what's going to happen is you self-publish a book, someone notices it - an agent? - and it goes from there into the traditional sphere.

When a single author uploading his own books to Amazon can earn more money than a large N.Y. publisher exploiting both print and e-rights, there's something amiss.

It was a great time to be born, because I got to have my own publishing company right from the beginning, so I made more money than somebody would have doing what I did ten or fifteen years before.

The thing that fascinates me is that the way I came to film and television is extinct. Then there were gatekeepers, it was prohibitively expensive to make a film, to be a director you had to be an entrepreneur to raise money.

If I had followed my own rules - if I had eaten my own dog food - I would have created a digital book that is searchable and linkable, that can be corrected and updated and discussed and passed around. But I took my publisher's advance money. Hey, dog's gotta eat. The book publishing industry still works - for now - because it adds value with editing, promotion, sales, and cash.

Some books and authors are best sellers, but most aren't. It may be easier to self-publish than it is to traditionally publish, but in all honesty, it's harder to be a best seller self-publishing than it is with a house.

It [eBook] is like introducing the machine gun to a revolutionary war. It changes everything. If you can reach your fans directly without having to go through a middle man, the entire economics of the publishing business changes.

Some authors are quite happy - and have the time - to do it all themselves, which is great.

I really do love 'Panama.' But I'd also have to admit that right now, if I were driven to write another novel like that, I wouldn't even try to find a publisher for it. It simply wouldn't be published. I'd be writing it to put in my closet upstairs.