Recent content by JLowder

They have to stop the bleeding, even if doing so means more short-term damage to them by limiting access to their new releases.

The damage is far more direct. The publishers all paid for these specific products to be printed, and the money that went into printing and shipping and warehousing the copies held hostage is possibly lost, with no hope of recovery. They are also directly losing out on money to be made when...

At base, TSR/Lorraine wanted DC to publish Buck Rogers comics. DC was not interested. TSR pushed—and pushed hard—for a time, for DC to add Buck to the license, even as DC was publishing the other TSR comics. Those comics were selling really well. When it became clear DC was not going to publish...

That's tended to be overstated, in my experience, but there were some specific problems. The company definitely published too many hardcovers, for example, and they got hit with returns on a couple of those, so much so they ended up remaindering the Buck Rogers hardcover in large numbers...

That ends up being a lot like overprinting some products or adding products to the schedule to game the RH deal—get money on ship faster and hope the sell-through covers you . . . eventually. It's all founded upon the hope there will be a wild upswing that covers the advance and then some. The...

Right. The context for the book returns matter a lot. They are not the cause of the failure. The returns are a result of the core business failures. For folks who don't know: TSR had a deal with Random House going back to Gary's days. Random House distributed TSR products to the book...

From what I saw, Lorraine and the parts of TSR upper management who had come into the company from "the business world" didn't understand the customer base. Some showed disdain, some confusion, many condescension. I disagree on a core philosophical/ethical level with the destructive way Lorraine...

Quite a lot of what you say about Lorraine's tenure at the company is excellent and needs to be said, repeatedly, especially about the misogyny underlying some of the criticism aimed at her and the ways in which critics use different standards for the pre- and post-takeover company. More than...

TSR was very much a trial-by-fire sort of workplace, where you were challenged quickly and expected to step up and learn multiple jobs. Anything that might be connected to your formal role and then some, really. In Books, editors handled the usual proofing, copyediting, and story editing, but...

In the 80s and 90s there were other companies where you could work full time--West End, GDW, Chaosium, eventually White Wolf, and so on. Those houses were nowhere near as large as TSR, but there were other full-time gigs designing TTRPGs to be had. As the 90s wore on, a lot of those other...

One of the constants at TSR, no matter who owned and ran the company, was the inability to deal fairly or constructively with creators, both staff and freelance. With the book/fiction program, the company was handed staggering international successes three times over the course of a decade and...

Pretty much everyone in TSR's Game Department played not only TSR's games but hobby games from other companies. If you mentioned in the Games Library, where many of us ate lunch, you had not played some classic title other folks considered an essential, someone would promptly bring a copy from...

Most folks don't remember or maybe just don't know how stunning the growth of TSR's fiction program was in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Book Department started in 1982 with the Endless Quests books (championed by Rose Estes), the fiction program in earnest in 1984 with the first...

The fiction line suffered some bloat in the mid-1990s, to be sure, like all the company lines, and TSR would have done better with fiction by having fewer hardcovers and not trying to support so many game settings with novels. Some people inside the company saw this, even as the fiction program...