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What's a Freelance RPG Writer Worth?
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<blockquote data-quote="Jeremy.Smith" data-source="post: 7659059" data-attributes="member: 6790015"><p>Our revenue streams have diversified drastically over the past few years, with CreateSpace becoming a larger segment of our profits than it was in years past. PDF-only products traditionally do not sell enough to justify a lot of investment. The no-hassle print products, such as CreateSpace and DriveThruRPG's print-on-demand, help to supplement that, which means that for us, if a product doesn't have a print version (or plans for one), it's typically not going to sell a huge volume of copies.</p><p></p><p>It's hard to gauge relative size, but I can tell you that while our library of products has grown, the 80/20 rule is in <strong>full</strong> effect. 20% of our products make up 80% of our revenue, and while we try out new products or niches, those have typically turned into money sinks. For example, we have yet to produce a profitable adventure, despite increasing our pay rate for writing, illustration, and cartography to produce a "higher quality" product that we can then charge a premium price for.</p><p></p><p>To give an example:</p><p>The Opened Mind (our latest adventure, one of the stretch goals of the Ultimate Psionics Kickstarter which has gone over budget in every way imaginable)</p><p></p><p>Costs</p><p>Writing: $260</p><p>Artwork: $235 (custom artwork, plus a small amount of stock art for layout)</p><p>Cartography: $150 - two maps</p><p>Layout: Free (I did it)</p><p>Total: $645</p><p></p><p>Sales To date (this is net, not gross)</p><p>DriveThruRPG/RPGNow: $68</p><p>Paizo: $15</p><p>CreateSpace: $11</p><p>d20pfsrd: $8</p><p>dreamscarred.com: $5</p><p>Total: $107</p><p></p><p>Now, we had several hundred backers who paid in knowing that was a stretch goal that they were going to get, at least as a PDF, but part of our justification for increasing our production cost on our books was an expectation of future sales of said books. Those sales are abysmal - and while I could go into a variety of reasons why (already giving it to our backers, potentially poor marketing, crowded market segment, GMs are a smaller segment compared to players, whatever), the fact is that we invested several hundred dollars of money into a book that so far has been a net loss. And a significant net loss. And since the Kickstarter went over budget (our own self-made problem, I fully admit), it's hard to find the silver lining in the loss. Will sales grow over time? Maybe, but history would imply no, they won't for that particular book.</p><p></p><p>Meanwhile, Ultimate Psionics, even after the 500+ backers who got it from the Kickstarter, and the people who had Unleashed and Expanded who decided they didn't need the combined book, has broken Gold status at DriveThruRPG (free downloads don't count toward that rank), and been in the top downloads at Paizo more weeks than it hasn't been.</p><p></p><p>So, there's an argument that could be made that we're "doing it wrong" by creating these other products. It's something I've been actively contemplating and it's been a discussion Andreas and I have had on multiple occasions. Unfortunately, that would mean further reducing the work we have for freelancers, because in-house we are absolutely <strong>great</strong> at producing new psionic content. Sure, we get assistance from freelancers on things like monster design, or handling projects we don't have time to do, but creating psionic content for players is where we started in the industry - and it's also where the bulk of our profits come from. Our other books, high-quality as they might be, paid at "reasonable rates" as they might be, don't produce the sales volumes of books like Psionics Unleashed and Ultimate Psionics that are largely produced in-house. So those sales are used to fund the other projects to "fill out" our library... which then turn out to be a financial loss. And we haven't really seen evidence that those support products have translated into increased sales of the other books.</p><p></p><p>And that's been a crux of the matter as the publisher - we want to let other people do it for us, since I am a bottleneck on our ability to publish (especially with a growing family with two young children), but doing so has not proven to be financially beneficial except in a few cases (Psionic Bestiary, Path of War, Akashic Mysteries. Virtually all other projects we have freelanced out have been losses or barely break-even.) And getting freelancers interested in writing for psionics, who actually understand the system enough to properly design for it and actually complete the project, has been a struggle. We have fewer than a handful of reliable developers who can take a project on psionics and turn it around without it requiring significant rework by Andreas or myself. We have lots of people interested in doing work, but actually <strong>turning in work ready to publish</strong>? </p><p></p><p>That's been the struggle - paying people to do projects we're not as good at has not been worth the cost, and paying people to do things we can already do well isn't in our financial best interests.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Jeremy.Smith, post: 7659059, member: 6790015"] Our revenue streams have diversified drastically over the past few years, with CreateSpace becoming a larger segment of our profits than it was in years past. PDF-only products traditionally do not sell enough to justify a lot of investment. The no-hassle print products, such as CreateSpace and DriveThruRPG's print-on-demand, help to supplement that, which means that for us, if a product doesn't have a print version (or plans for one), it's typically not going to sell a huge volume of copies. It's hard to gauge relative size, but I can tell you that while our library of products has grown, the 80/20 rule is in [B]full[/B] effect. 20% of our products make up 80% of our revenue, and while we try out new products or niches, those have typically turned into money sinks. For example, we have yet to produce a profitable adventure, despite increasing our pay rate for writing, illustration, and cartography to produce a "higher quality" product that we can then charge a premium price for. To give an example: The Opened Mind (our latest adventure, one of the stretch goals of the Ultimate Psionics Kickstarter which has gone over budget in every way imaginable) Costs Writing: $260 Artwork: $235 (custom artwork, plus a small amount of stock art for layout) Cartography: $150 - two maps Layout: Free (I did it) Total: $645 Sales To date (this is net, not gross) DriveThruRPG/RPGNow: $68 Paizo: $15 CreateSpace: $11 d20pfsrd: $8 dreamscarred.com: $5 Total: $107 Now, we had several hundred backers who paid in knowing that was a stretch goal that they were going to get, at least as a PDF, but part of our justification for increasing our production cost on our books was an expectation of future sales of said books. Those sales are abysmal - and while I could go into a variety of reasons why (already giving it to our backers, potentially poor marketing, crowded market segment, GMs are a smaller segment compared to players, whatever), the fact is that we invested several hundred dollars of money into a book that so far has been a net loss. And a significant net loss. And since the Kickstarter went over budget (our own self-made problem, I fully admit), it's hard to find the silver lining in the loss. Will sales grow over time? Maybe, but history would imply no, they won't for that particular book. Meanwhile, Ultimate Psionics, even after the 500+ backers who got it from the Kickstarter, and the people who had Unleashed and Expanded who decided they didn't need the combined book, has broken Gold status at DriveThruRPG (free downloads don't count toward that rank), and been in the top downloads at Paizo more weeks than it hasn't been. So, there's an argument that could be made that we're "doing it wrong" by creating these other products. It's something I've been actively contemplating and it's been a discussion Andreas and I have had on multiple occasions. Unfortunately, that would mean further reducing the work we have for freelancers, because in-house we are absolutely [B]great[/B] at producing new psionic content. Sure, we get assistance from freelancers on things like monster design, or handling projects we don't have time to do, but creating psionic content for players is where we started in the industry - and it's also where the bulk of our profits come from. Our other books, high-quality as they might be, paid at "reasonable rates" as they might be, don't produce the sales volumes of books like Psionics Unleashed and Ultimate Psionics that are largely produced in-house. So those sales are used to fund the other projects to "fill out" our library... which then turn out to be a financial loss. And we haven't really seen evidence that those support products have translated into increased sales of the other books. And that's been a crux of the matter as the publisher - we want to let other people do it for us, since I am a bottleneck on our ability to publish (especially with a growing family with two young children), but doing so has not proven to be financially beneficial except in a few cases (Psionic Bestiary, Path of War, Akashic Mysteries. Virtually all other projects we have freelanced out have been losses or barely break-even.) And getting freelancers interested in writing for psionics, who actually understand the system enough to properly design for it and actually complete the project, has been a struggle. We have fewer than a handful of reliable developers who can take a project on psionics and turn it around without it requiring significant rework by Andreas or myself. We have lots of people interested in doing work, but actually [B]turning in work ready to publish[/B]? That's been the struggle - paying people to do projects we're not as good at has not been worth the cost, and paying people to do things we can already do well isn't in our financial best interests. [/QUOTE]
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