Science & Tech Quote by R. A. Salvatore

There is a particular kind of fatigue baked into Salvatore's aside: the weariness of a working novelist watching the promotional game mutate into information warfare. By naming "authors and publicists" in the same breath, he flattens the supposed hierarchy of art and marketing. In the internet era, the author is no longer just a maker of books but a potential operator in the attention economy, tempted to astroturf praise, seed doubt, and quietly kneecap rivals. The phrase "manipulate opinion" is blunt on purpose; it refuses the softer euphemisms of "community building" or "engagement."

The key move is the double-valence: manipulation can be "positively for a work" or "negatively against the competition". Salvatore isn't only condemning smear campaigns, he's side-eyeing the entire premise that engineered enthusiasm is acceptable if it's in service of your own book. That moral symmetry matters. It suggests a worldview in which credibility is a finite resource and any attempt to counterfeit it corrodes the ecosystem that makes readers trust recommendations at all.

"I don't do this" reads like both confession and preemptive defense, the kind of line you write when you know the audience suspects everyone is playing dirty. "Can't stomach it" makes the refusal visceral rather than strategic: he's not abstaining because it's ineffective, but because it feels contaminating. The context is a publishing culture where social media rewards outrage, hot takes, and pile-ons, and where authors are quietly expected to be brands. Salvatore is staking out an older ethic - craft over campaigns - while acknowledging, with a wince, that the ground has shifted under everyone.