Recent content by CardinalXimenes

If your RPG is stolen and published by a stranger as their own creative work, it will be the first time I have ever heard of this happening to anyone, anywhere.

That's interesting- my own experience has been very different in terms of the payoff on KSes as opposed to the steady income stream from OBS. Last year OBS brought in about $30K in net profit, while the two Kickstarters I ran netted out about $25K in pretax profit. The money was welcome...

In my experience, OBS is the market. Evil Hat's public quarterly sales reports pretty well mirror my experience- take away conventional distribution, and OBS is the lion's share of everything left. Since I'm strictly POD, I can't do print runs of a size that'd make conventional distribution...

Well, I can give you some specific numbers up front. According to DTRPG, Stars Without Numbers' free version has been downloaded about 24,400 times. If I run a report on people who have bought both the free version of SWN and the expanded Core version, which just adds another 40 pages of...

That... does not sound like a highly-optimized sales plan, to be honest. I'm assuming that these two lines cover fundamentally different topics- and if that's the case, then the only parity between them is that they're both written by you. People who love sci-fi kelpmen may not be the ones who...

This a an extremely interesting article with a great deal of useful information in it. It's particularly worthwhile to see some of the cost structure of another small publisher, one who goes in for full-color books with high-end production. The costs on some of those books seem brutal to me-...

Undoubtedly so. I bought paper for R&PL, and I only buy a handful of paper RPG products in a year- the physical artifact was worth having. This basically boils down to "make something noticeably better in all possible ways than the standard market output", and it's undeniably good advice...

Do some zero-overhead products, collect the profit on them, and roll it over into your next project. I do not recommend Kickstarters to anybody unless they have a complete grip on their project workflow and a couple prior projects published already. I do not recommend royalty-sharing to anybody...

Free is part of the strategy, but it's not the whole story. If I were in your shoes, here's what I'd do: First, I'd go to where the eyeballs are, and that means OneBookshelf- DTRPG/RPGNow's parent. No free fanzine gets within an order of magnitude of the number of visits they get on an hourly...

If you've got experience in all three of those spheres, you have an enormous leg up already. Get yourself comfortable with InDesign, brush up on gamebook typography issues, and you'll be beautifully situated to giving self-publishing a spin.

All of my publisher materials are free and will remain free. As part of my Kickstarter stretch goals, I have released approximately $10,000 worth of art for free use by other publishers and creators, including all of the art I used in Spears of the Dawn, The House of Bone and Amber, Scarlet...

Opportunity cost is a factor when choosing between multiple alternative uses for your time and resources. If you have your heart set on writing RPG materials, then your time is a sunk cost- you will be spending your time writing RPG materials come Hell or high water. The only question is which...

Yea, verily, that's me. Still need to finish buffing up the site, but it tends to come in a little beneath sleep in priority lately.

I think we're just disagreeing on the scope of success that can be expected. I don't expect that anyone, talented or otherwise, could just cargo-cult repeat my processes and profit as well as I have. I had the luck to choose the right market niche and supply a need that wasn't sufficiently...

I made over sixty thousand dollars last year from indie RPG publishing. That is net, pre-tax profit, after subtracting all expenses for art, production, fulfillment, and OBS' cut of the take. My gross sales were approximately $107,000. My first product was released in November of 2010. I am...