Quality, price, and the place for PDFs in the print industry

[Krug]

Ok you know who... your turn to rant.

[philreed]

Originally posted by Krug
Ok you know who... your turn to rant.

I suspect that, over time, there will become barriers to entry in the PDF market. The largest barrier to entry will be the e-mall that is selling the PDFs since, after enough complaints from customers, they'll find it is in their best interest to look over all PDFs before making them available for sale.

Think of it this way. How many people are lost forever when their first PDF is a poor-quality product? They spend the $5 on a PDF to see what the noise is about and then decide that if this PDF sucks then what are the chances that all PDFs suck.

As the creators of poor-quality material are weeded out new authors will become discouraged. Over time we'll see the e-malls acting like distributors which will then force talented amatuers to work with established PDF publishers.

Wait? Who's ranting here? Sorry.

[Krug]

Originally posted by philreed


Wait? Who's ranting here? Sorry.

Anyone, everyone. Abula (sp?) asked me to start a thread where he would give his 2 cents on the stated topic, but anybody can chime in!

[JoeGKushner]

I want to see more done with the PDF's. Sure, it's great that we can get some books from Malhavok that look exactly like they will in print but... where's the PDF material?

I enjoy the experiementation that some publishers are doing in some quarters. Philip and Ambient sprint to mind with trying the different layouts.

Still, I want to see further use of the medium itself.

None of this will however, overcome poor layout, grammar, editing, proofreading and unoriginality.

Beyond Monks and Joe's Book of Enchantment remain some of my favorite PDF files and neither are spectacular in terms of apperance and graphic use.

[Krug]

Originally posted by philreed


I suspect that, over time, there will become barriers to entry in the PDF market. The largest barrier to entry will be the e-mall that is selling the PDFs since, after enough complaints from customers, they'll find it is in their best interest to look over all PDFs before making them available for sale.

Think of it this way. How many people are lost forever when their first PDF is a poor-quality product? They spend the $5 on a PDF to see what the noise is about and then decide that if this PDF sucks then what are the chances that all PDFs suck.

I don't really agree. Do RPG stores look through all the material that's coming in? I think they would just look at a blurb from the publisher. If that entices their attention and the product is otherwise legit, they'd carry it.

I think the consumers are the best persons to police the product. Look at Robert Jordan's latest book and the comments on Amazon.com. The readers have spoken, and anyone purchasing the book will be forewarned. Any publisher who comes out with a sucky product will know, and make a quick exit.

A bad PDF just won't create 'noise' except grumblings, and I think most new buyers would purchase what's on the top ten lists rather than what's new.

[Mark]

Print industry? Do you mean the industry that does printing? I worked in Printing for quite a few years on presses (four-color, over/under, sheet-fed, etc.) and as a representative for a Printing Company. I do not think you do mean that though because even print products from RPG or Gaming Companies have no "place" per se in the Print Industry except maybe as samples of the kind of work a Printing Company can do or may do...

Or do you actually mean the RPG or Gaming Industry? Because that's a question I can also answer to some degree.

OK. Just a bit of an object lesson because this is part of the problem, IMO. Even some folks such as our pre-eminent Newshound have a seemingly ingrained mindset to think of PDFs as "the other product" rather than just one more piece of the larger gaming product puzzle. I think most publishers that primarily delivery print products to the market are very happy with this mindset, but as this changes things will become easier for publishers who mainly deal in PDFs...and it begins with the media, my Newshound Brother, before it filters to the general public.

This post speaks to "place" and I'll try to return to discuss price and quality a little later.

[philreed]

Originally posted by Krug


I don't really agree. Do RPG stores look through all the material that's coming in? I think they would just look at a blurb from the publisher. If that entices their attention and the product is otherwise legit, they'd carry it.

Some of the better retaillers do. But the real line of defense is the distributors. It is next to impossible to have your material carried by a distributor if you're a new company. Even Mage Knight had a hard sell at first. And with WA gone one leak in the system has been fixed.

Money, of course, will open of of doors for you.

[Drawmack]

Here is my dream digital product, and I believe that all of this can be done in pdf.

1) Two pdfs in 1 zip, one for printing and one for online viewing.

2) In the view on-line I want massive hyperlinking. Give me a world map that has the different sections linked to their entries in the gazzeteer. Give be an index that's hyperlinked. Hyperlink every cross reference in the book.

3) Take advantge of the digital medium. Embed movies into the document. Give me some animation.

4) Include a character sheet that I can fill out right on the computer. For bonus points make is a litle database app.

Basically for me it boils down to this. Right now the pdf producers are producing a pdf version of the print product. I think that this is the wrong way to go, why not embrace the new medium for all that it is worth.

I mean imagine opening your pdf of Rise of Evil and the guy on the front cover is talking to you and everytime you come to a new chapter the journal entry is changed from a printed page to this guy talking to you some more. I would pay for that, but then again I'm a techno weenie so bells and whistles make me drool.

[jmucchiello]

Originally posted by Drawmack
Right now the pdf producers are producing a pdf version of the print product. I think that this is the wrong way to go, why not embrace the new medium for all that it is worth.

Um, expense? You want the PDF to talk to you. Do you know how much it costs to get studio time, hire an actor, make decent recordings? A 4-hour block of studio time (which may yield 20 minutes of useful audio) can cost as much as I've made gross on Joe's Book of Enchantment. PDFs earn at the low end of the industry. And you also want movies? Animation? Until PDFs start selling in the 100,000 range, this just is not going to happen unless the producer is a graphic artist with access to a render farm for free. PC Games with cut-scenes and full animation have $2-3 million budgets and are considered flops if they only sell 100,000. Reality check: WotC probably has not sold 100,000 3E DMGs.

Ask the PCGen folk how "easy" it is to release a programmed product. WotC basically forbids it so interactive character sheets with databases are not going to happen.

Highly interactive indexes and deep referencing take time. Time is money. Which is more important to you: the information or the bells and whistles? Me, I'd rather be spending time writing and producing quality material than spending time worrying if I've found every reference and cross-reference in the work.

Yes, all of the things you want would be nice. But I know that I cannot make them a priority. And the reason I publish in book format is because once all the kinks are worked out of my books, I take them down to a printer and get a copy made for myself so that at least my book sits on my shelf with the other RPG books.

P.S. Joe, thanks for the plug.

[Drawmack]

Originally posted by jmucchiello
[b]Um, expense? You want the PDF to talk to you. Do you know how much it costs to get studio time, hire an actor, make decent recordings? A 4-hour block of studio time (which may yield 20 minutes of useful audio) can cost as much as I've made gross on Joe's Book of Enchantment.

Considering that I've done professional recording for the better part of the last decade as a musician - another hoby of mine. I think I might have a clue. However, do you have any idea how cheap a four track, basement and a digital converter are. For the cost of about 1 hour in a digital studio you can set up a home studio. As far as the actor goes, you can get voice changing software for about $20.00 which allows a single person to do all the voices, no need of an actor use a couple of friends. If you're reluctant for that then go to the local college you can probably get some theatre majors to do it for pizza, heck you might be able to get them to record and produce the entire thing very cheaply if you wanted. Everyone forgets about their local college students.

PDFs earn at the low end of the industry. And you also want movies? Animation?

Yeah I know this one is a pipe dream, but that doesn't mean I don't want it.

Ask the PCGen folk how "easy" it is to release a programmed product. WotC basically forbids it so interactive character sheets with databases are not going to happen.

What you cannot do is random number generation - there is nothing about storing a character sheet as long as it does not include IP or random number generation. I suggest that you talk to the PCGen folks, since their program does well exactly this and it's perfectly legal. Besides - the program could be offered off of the website with a password in the pdf and then the program only needs to be ogl not d20 which is where pcgen ran into the problems. Creative solutions are what makes money, not hiding behind a we can't do that attitude.

Highly interactive indexes and deep referencing take time. Time is money. Which is more important to you: the information or the bells and whistles? Me, I'd rather be spending time writing and producing quality material than spending time worrying if I've found every reference and cross-reference in the work.

I do not consider hyperlinking a bell or a whistle. I consider it something that you should do in a digital product. Would you be happy with a web-site that gave non-linked internal references. A pdf product is much closer to a web-site then a printed book. This is the main problem, publishers are not looking at pdfs in the right light. BTW: if you use headers properly in you orgininal document pdf creator will make links to them and stick them in the menu making a linked TOC much, much, much less useful then a linked index.

and just so we're all clear on this one. In the last year I have spent $300.00 on print products and about $600.00 on pdf products.

[Mark]

Originally posted by Drawmack
...and just so we're all clear on this one. In the last year I have spent $300.00 on print products and about $600.00 on pdf products.

I love you, Man...

[Drawmack]

Originally posted by Mark


I love you, Man...

What can I say - four 1/4 the price I usually get more content, quicker delivery then mail order, easy on shelf space, burned to CD for the game table means 1 cd in stead of creates of books.

For me personally pdf's are just all around better. However, using them so much I have had a lot of time to say, i want this - wouldn't that be cool, what if

[jmucchiello]

Originally posted by Drawmack
Considering that I've done professional recording for the better part of the last decade as a musician - another hoby of mine. I think I might have a clue. However, do you have any idea how cheap a four track, basement and a digital converter are. For the cost of about 1 hour in a digital studio you can set up a home studio. As far as the actor goes, you can get voice changing software for about $20.00 which allows a single person to do all the voices, no need of an actor use a couple of friends. If you're reluctant for that then go to the local college you can probably get some theatre majors to do it for pizza, heck you might be able to get them to record and produce the entire thing very cheaply if you wanted. Everyone forgets about their local college students.

So I should use college students whom I pay in pizza to do my writing and editing too, right? What did you say in that other thread?

I know that I do not submit to companies that pay a different amount for pdf then they do for print. The reason being is that you get what you pay for, not you get what you pay for and what you intend on doing with that.

What a double standard! I thought you wanted ACTORS. Actors cost money. Acting guilds have minimum payments for voice actors that are probably bigger than the budgets of most 64 page supplements. I too am a musician, song writer, singer, guitarist in my spare time. If I'm supposed to pay the writer his fair shake why am I giving the voice artist the shaft?

What you cannot do is random number generation - there is nothing about storing a character sheet as long as it does not include IP or random number generation. I suggest that you talk to the PCGen folks, since their program does well exactly this and it's perfectly legal. Besides - the program could be offered off of the website with a password in the pdf and then the program only needs to be ogl not d20 which is where pcgen ran into the problems. Creative solutions are what makes money, not hiding behind a we can't do that attitude.

Read up on this. You have to separate the OGC from the rest of the code using independent markup. I have master's degree in computer science (and make my primary living programming computers). Writing these kinds of programs is like inventing a new computer language. It is not something you can just do. Ask the PCGen (and Twin Rose software) folk how long it took them to become OGC compliant. D20 compliance is much easier once you have OGC compiance.

Besides, why should I include a programmable character sheet in my PDF product when I know everyone savvy enough to use PDFs is using e-Tools or PCGen or whatever to make characters? What you should be asking for is plug-ins for those existing products.

I do not consider hyperlinking a bell or a whistle. I consider it something that you should do in a digital product. Would you be happy with a web-site that gave non-linked internal references. A pdf product is much closer to a web-site then a printed book. This is the main problem, publishers are not looking at pdfs in the right light. BTW: if you use headers properly in you orgininal document pdf creator will make links to them and stick them in the menu making a linked TOC much, much, much less useful then a linked index.

I use ghostscript to create my PDFs. I have to hand code the Postscript to do linking. This involves taking my headers and dumping them to plain file and then converting the text to the proper set of pdfmarks. It's not hard. It's just time consuming. I'll be getting a copy of Acrobat soon just to save myself that headache but deep linking (inter-topic linking) is just far to tedious to even think about.

Have you ever gone to a news website? (rhetorical) They have a bunch links to stories. Sometimes the stories have a couple links inside them but mostly they are just identical to the story that went over the wire. Why? There's no profit in deep linking. If I spend an extra week or two deep linking my product will I earn in sales as much as I would have if I'd spent that time pushing another product out the door a week or two sooner? No. I don't think so. Bookmarks, I'll grant you, are a necessity. But making every occurance of "Freak of Nature" be a link to the definition of the "Freak of Nature" Feat is time better spent elsewhere. If you think you are wasting too much time going to the bookmarks, clicking feats and scrolling a page or two to find "Freak of Nature" well I'm sorry. Seriously, tell me how this makes it more likely people will buy my product. I don't see the cost:benefit ratio tipped in the right direction for me to do so.

and just so we're all clear on this one. In the last year I have spent $300.00 on print products and about $600.00 on pdf products.

And I've earned about $725 selling 1 PDF product half of which I've sunk into artwork for my next couple projects and a quarter of which I'm dumping into Acrobat. That leaves $100 "profit" with which to pay myself for writing that 60,000 word PDF. I'd love to accommodate you. But PDFs don't quite earn enough for me to meet your lofty demands.

[Abulia]

Originally posted by jmucchiello
PC Games with cut-scenes and full animation have $2-3 million budgets and are considered flops if they only sell 100,000. Reality check: WotC probably has not sold 100,000 3E DMGs.

Reality check: You should be careful when you make such statements. You've just displayed an alarming lack of understanding of the market you purport to be in. Wizard's has sold -- as of a year ago -- over 1 million copies of their rulebooks (PHB, DMG, MM) for D&D with an average of 300,000 copies per book. That number has certainly gone up in the past 15 months. (Source)

Normally I wouldn't have called you on this but your snarky exchange with Drawmack pretty much made it a moral imperative.

Come on, group hug. Let's all be nice.

Regards,
Don Mappin
Freelancer for Hire

[Drawmack]

Originally posted by jmucchiello
So I should use college students whom I pay in pizza to do my writing and editing too, right? What did you say in that other thread?

The college students would be doing the work for college credit their payment is their degree. For school I've had to write many programs that were on the same level as what I was getting paid to write in the real world. This is no different. You want to have interns do your writting and editing as well, then more power to you it would definatly increase your profit margin and that is something I never come down on someone for doing.

What a double standard! I thought you wanted ACTORS. Actors cost money. Acting guilds have minimum payments for voice actors that are probably bigger than the budgets of most 64 page supplements.

Yes actors guilds do have that, but you do not have to hire guilded actors anymore then you have to hire proven writters. Some of the best products out there were written, at least in a large part, by open call submissions of unpublished authors who are much cheaper then say Monte Cook.

I too am a musician, song writer, singer, guitarist in my spare time. If I'm supposed to pay the writer his fair shake why am I giving the voice artist the shaft?

You're not giving anyone the shaft. I was suggesting that you find ways to lower the budget and still supply the finished product. You can do this by finding people willing to work cheaper.

Read up on this. You have to separate the OGC from the rest of the code using independent markup. I have master's degree in computer science (and make my primary living programming computers). Writing these kinds of programs is like inventing a new computer language. It is not something you can just do. Ask the PCGen (and Twin Rose software) folk how long it took them to become OGC compliant. D20 compliance is much easier once you have OGC compiance.

I'm 12 credits from a BSCS and I have been a professional programmer for 5 years. In that time I have developed 3 meta languages of my own. There is no need for this now though you can make it run off of xml. Yes the content has to be seperated from the code. Tell me something, in any any well written database application would the ogc be tied in with the code? The only place I can see it being logical to do that is with mathematical formulas and that is easy just put the formula into the database and then pull it back out with a named reference field.

Besides, why should I include a programmable character sheet in my PDF product when I know everyone savvy enough to use PDFs is using e-Tools or PCGen or whatever to make characters? What you should be asking for is plug-ins for those existing products.

Would that not be a programmable character sheet? BTW: I do not use any of those products. I find the downside of being a programmer is that I'm never happy with what other people write. I tried out e-tools extensivly and firmly give it the thumbs down. However when I'm posting things to the boards I'll do up their stats in e-tools just so I can supply the files to others, why can't the pdf publishers do this as well.

I use ghostscript to create my PDFs. I have to hand code the Postscript to do linking. This involves taking my headers and dumping them to plain file and then converting the text to the proper set of pdfmarks. It's not hard. It's just time consuming. I'll be getting a copy of Acrobat soon just to save myself that headache but deep linking (inter-topic linking) is just far to tedious to even think about.

With the method that you use I will agree, however if you're making professional pdfs you don't really have a right to complain, or use as an excuse, that you do not have to professional software that allows you to make quality products. That would be like me saying sure I can write your web-site but it'll take a while cause I'm using a 286.

But making every occurance of "Freak of Nature" be a link to the definition of the "Freak of Nature" Feat is time better spent elsewhere.

That's not what I was talking about. I mean where you have an explicit cross reference in your material. You really can't use news sites for this, something more like historychannel.com is appropriate. If the book says (see channelor pg 82). Now this reference had to be double and tripple checked many times and with each layout change to make sure the page number was correct. How hard is it to make channelor a link to the appropriate place in the document and avoid all that double checking?

If you think you are wasting too much time going to the bookmarks, clicking feats and scrolling a page or two to find "Freak of Nature" well I'm sorry. Seriously, tell me how this makes it more likely people will buy my product.

The term is user friendly, I'm sure you're familiar with it. I go to the index and it tells me that nonnymonny can be found on page 82. So I then have to go to page 82 and look it up. If that were a link it would be much more user friendly. The answer to the question is that at first you probably won't see many more sales from it, but over time you would get a reputation for user friendly pdf's once that reputation is established your sales will increase. Look as Bastion press they release superior quality product and charge extra for it, but that doesn't make their sales less then anyone elses.

And I've earned about $725 selling 1 PDF product half of which I've sunk into artwork for my next couple projects and a quarter of which I'm dumping into Acrobat. That leaves $100 "profit" with which to pay myself for writing that 60,000 word PDF. I'd love to accommodate you. But PDFs don't quite earn enough for me to meet your lofty demands.

First of all, I did not demand anything, but I can tell you this your attitude towards the fans, me being one, is going to loose you sales. Did you never have a class in public speaking or public relations at school?

So you're claiming $100 profit, when this is not the case

You created 1 pdf and make $725 (I'm assuming that this is after you paid for the expenses of creating that pdf.

From this pdf you're paying the price of producing two future pdf's. As baseline let's say you sell the same amount so that's $1450 - but your art was already paid for making them earn $1812.50. Now add to that the $100 you kept from the first one. That's an over all profit of $1912.50 on the three products, two of which your first one enabled.

A reinvestment of funds is payment. You pay yourself by keeping yourself in business. If you want to play with numbers to make yourself seem poor then do it with someone who hasn't had all the math for a comp sci degree please.

[EOL]

Originally posted by JoeGKushner
I want to see more done with the PDF's. Sure, it's great that we can get some books from Malhavok that look exactly like they will in print but... where's the PDF material?

I enjoy the experiementation that some publishers are doing in some quarters. Philip and Ambient sprint to mind with trying the different layouts.

Still, I want to see further use of the medium itself.

None of this will however, overcome poor layout, grammar, editing, proofreading and unoriginality.

Beyond Monks and Joe's Book of Enchantment remain some of my favorite PDF files and neither are spectacular in terms of apperance and graphic use.

Hopefully this won't end up coming across as a crass product plug, but as far as "further use of the medium itself" check out DireKobold.com we have a free demo sign-up.

We take normal well-written adventures (Abulia's is coming out on Friday) just like you'd see in Dungeon Magazine and dynamically generate them. Which means that you enter the level of your party (within +/-3 of base design), the number of characters in your party (1-12), the percentage of recommended treasure, whether you want high, low or medium stats, whether you want images included, and the list goes on.

Yeah, we don't have cut-scenes voice-actors, or map drill-downs but we do offer something which cannot be done with a print product.

And yeah we're just getting started so we're trying to keep costs low, but with the exception of a few people who were just getting their start I've paid .04 cents/word. Which is not outrageous, but its right there with the print publishers.

To get back on topic, I offer adventures from people like Wil Upchurch, Don Mappin, and Jeffrey Quinn, with art and professional cartography, so there's your quality. I charge $34.00 for a years subscription, so there's price, and I offer a service unduplicateable in print, and there's the place of pdfs. So competative in terms of quality, simliar in terms of price and innovative in terms of features and placement. That's the future I see for the PDF industry.

But it's going to take a while, primarily because when people think of PDF publishers they lump the "big boys" like Joe and Malhavoc into the same category with somebody that ran his house rules through distiller and posted them for sale on RPGNow, and until people began to draw a clear distinction, PDF's are always going to have a stigma of being lower quality, even when there are a lot which aren't.

Anyway there's obviously a lot more to it than that, but I need to get back to work so I can support my PDF publishing habit.

[jmucchiello]

Originally posted by Drawmack
You're not giving anyone the shaft. I was suggesting that you find ways to lower the budget and still supply the finished product. You can do this by finding people willing to work cheaper.

Let me start this again. We are not having the same discussion apparently. You listed a couple things you'd like to see in PDFs. I said some of those things are prohibitively expensive. You said use amateurs.

Now, at this point I found it odd that someone who does "artsy" work, aka writing, would say (in another thread) underpaying writers is one reason I don't work for some people and at the same time you suggest doing an end run around the actors' guid's pay scales. So in my last message I asked you to justify this seemingly unusual attitude and you replied saying you were supplying ideas to save on budget.

This is not what we were talking about (I thought). If I pay the writers scale and artists scale, I cannot ethically underpay the actors. If I'm looking for a certain level of professionalism, I should maintain it in all parts of the process. After all, we don't want the first multimedia PDF to be amateurish, do we? We want it as slick as computer game cut scene.

So, are we talking about professionals, creating professional PDFs with sound and graphics? If so, then the answer is, it's too expensive. If not, then the answer is, no one's taken the time gather round the computer and speak into the little microphone, convert it to mp3 in musicmaker and attach it to a couple links in the PDF yet.

I had thought about doing a pronunciation guide mp3 for my Aerova two-pager (the names contain whistles and clicks) but just never had the time to make descent recordings. Is that the kind of thing you are really looking for?

Sidebar: Hey, I'm curious. Companies that do open calls: How much do you have to edit/rewrite the submissions before you can publish them? Or maybe some of the submitters can comment on how much their work has been reworked before submission.

I'm 12 credits from a BSCS and I have been a professional programmer for 5 years. In that time I have developed 3 meta languages of my own. There is no need for this now though you can make it run off of xml. Yes the content has to be seperated from the code. Tell me something, in any well written database application would the ogc be tied in with the code? The only place I can see it being logical to do that is with mathematical formulas and that is easy just put the formula into the database and then pull it back out with a named reference field.

But I want to write RPG material. I'm not an e-publisher. I'm a publisher. (At least I am in my own mind.) I don't want to make database applications. I do that at work. I write RPGs to disseminate ideas. PCGen and Twin Rose are in the business of making database applications for RPGs. Throwing Dice Games is not.

BTW: I do not use any of those products. I find the downside of being a programmer is that I'm never happy with what other people write. I tried out e-tools extensivly and firmly give it the thumbs down. However when I'm posting things to the boards I'll do up their stats in e-tools just so I can supply the files to others, why can't the pdf publishers do this as well.

I'm the same way. I do all character sheet work in Word. I check my own math. This way it is always exactly what I want. It's the curse of being a programmer. It's why I've avoided Acrobat for so long. I thought massaging the postscript was "better". It isn't.

That's not what I was talking about. I mean where you have an explicit cross reference in your material. You really can't use news sites for this, something more like historychannel.com is appropriate. If the book says (see channelor pg 82). Now this reference had to be double and tripple checked many times and with each layout change to make sure the page number was correct. How hard is it to make channelor a link to the appropriate place in the document and avoid all that double checking?

First of all, I don't ever double check those numbers. Word does it for me: F9 | PAGEREF bookmark | update field. I never think about those references again. In fact, I create WORD bookmarks for every section and use REF fields when refering to them so if the chapter numbers are reordered, the REF still refers to the correct chapter. (I have the bad habit of writing in layout mode. I know your not supposed to but I'm a "how many pages is it now" junky.) Unfortunately, WORD doesn't export this data. If it does in Acrobat, then fine, it's not a problem for me to do what you expected. I did think you meant a full cross-reference of every data element. If you didn't then we spoke at cross purposes.

The term is user friendly, I'm sure you're familiar with it. I go to the index and it tells me that nonnymonny can be found on page 82. So I then have to go to page 82 and look it up. If that were a link it would be much more user friendly. The answer to the question is that at first you probably won't see many more sales from it, but over time you would get a reputation for user friendly pdf's once that reputation is established your sales will increase. Look as Bastion press they release superior quality product and charge extra for it, but that doesn't make their sales less then anyone elses.

I've been a programmer for 20 years and I've never liked the term user friendly. Not that I endorse user hostile products, but I'd rather have the reputation for "cool ideas excellently executed" than "he does good cross-links". The second reputation is not bad. But it is not my primary concern.

First of all, I did not demand anything, but I can tell you this your attitude towards the fans, me being one, is going to loose you sales. Did you never have a class in public speaking or public relations at school?

I was kidding. If you didn't see that, I appologize. I used "demand" because it was hyperbole. This is a friendly discussion on my side of it.

You created 1 pdf and make $725 (I'm assuming that this is after you paid for the expenses of creating that pdf.

Total income. No expenses went into that PDF but my own time. At the moment, I've been paid about 1.2 cents per word for writing/editing/laying out Joe's Book of Enchantment. Most of which I'm reinvesting into the company. I don't see where I can improve that profit margin by adding sound effects to my stuff. (And what would they be in that book? "You are getting sleepy....." )

Yes, I cooked my books for this example. But I also didn't have to pay for my word processor, it came with the computer. I didn't have to buy a computer, it came with me. That is all the money TDG has ever taken in. Artwork for future products has already gone out from that money. I won't know how much the next book makes until it's available. It doesn't have to do as well as the first book. I'd like to think it will do better, but the market is more saturated now. It may make less. Heck, I may torq off more potential customers such as yourself in the meantime.

[jmucchiello]

Originally posted by Abulia
Reality check: You should be careful when you make such statements. You've just displayed an alarming lack of understanding of the market you purport to be in. Wizard's has sold -- as of a year ago -- over 1 million copies of their rulebooks (PHB, DMG, MM) for D&D with an average of 300,000 copies per book. That number has certainly gone up in the past 15 months. (Source)

Normally I wouldn't have called you on this but your snarky exchange with Drawmack pretty much made it a moral imperative.

I'm trying not to be snarky, honestly. Oh well. In any case, how many copies of Creature Collection have sold? Nowhere near as many I'm sure. So WotC sells a million books. Big deal. That's one winner. Those books probably had million dollar budgets. (I wonder if anyone could chime in with a round figure on that one.) And that's what I was getting at. Until every RPG products has a multimillion dollar budget, there will not be cutscenes, animation or voice overs in PDF products.

[Mark]

Originally posted by jmucchiello
I'm trying not to be snarky, honestly. Oh well. In any case, how many copies of Creature Collection have sold? Nowhere near as many I'm sure. So WotC sells a million books. Big deal. That's one winner. Those books probably had million dollar budgets. (I wonder if anyone could chime in with a round figure on that one.) And that's what I was getting at. Until every RPG products has a multimillion dollar budget, there will not be cutscenes, animation or voice overs in PDF products.

Along these lines, and to keep some perspective, I did a quick search by "million" and user name "ryand" because I remember him discussing things along these lines a couple of times. Perhaps the following posts/threads will have some fodder for your assertions -

http://enworld.cyberstreet.com/showt...ion#post145440

http://enworld.cyberstreet.com/showt...ion#post146167

http://enworld.cyberstreet.com/showt...ion#post152034

http://enworld.cyberstreet.com/showt...ion#post325709