Michael A. Stackpole
Michael A. Stackpole
Michael Austin Stackpoleis an American science fiction and fantasy author best known for his Star Wars and BattleTech books. He was born in Wausau, Wisconsin, but raised in Vermont. He has a BA in history from the University of Vermont. From 1977 on, he worked as a designer of role-playing games for various gaming companies, and wrote dozens of magazine articles with limited distribution within the industry...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth27 November 1957
CountryUnited States of America
I sell a lot of ebooks from my website and encourage authors to set up their own stores.
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.
Publishing can be tough. It has the ability to kill dreams.
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.
People downloading my stories from the bit torrent sites were never going to buy them anyway. It's no money out of my pocket.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A lot of stuff people do these days is not mentally challenging.
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.
Authors can easily produce ebook versions of novels and shorter work which publishers don't own.