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I have been pushing for GAMA to recreate itself as an industry organization not just a manufacturer and retailer organization for fifteen or twenty years, so they would include creators in the voting membership. Recast like that, with a code of conduct for all members and a grievance committee...

Fan culture is more toxic than the cultures you encounter in most other professions. There are exceptions, politics and education being the most obvious. (The most credible death threat I ever received was connected to a university teaching gig, not my work in publishing.) But lots of people...

Most of the things you have suggested are already in play, in various forms, using the tools available. Many established companies and pros use Kickstarter and other crowdfunding operations as a preorder system, to muster existing fans and help fund projects, since "just in time" ordering and...

General word rates for the industry are fairly easy to find. They generally range, for bigger publishers, from a couple cents per word up to the SFWA and HWA professional rates of 8 cents/word. The latter is rare and based more on the fiction model for publishing, not the RPG model, which...

There are some ways in. Kickstarters are one. How much you raised with the campaign is not the primary metric here, though. Once you deliver the promised product, the Kickstarter becomes an audition set--especially if you delivered on time (hugely important) and the backers are happy with the...

Sure. Not with every post they make, though. And not necessarily in the way you demand. Posting about the harsh truths of an industry can certainly be part of looking out for those who are starting out. You're likely not seeing the "legs up" because you are not in the industry or not looking...

All posts by every game designer or [insert your profession here] do not have to be recruitment copy for their industry. That's how unrealistic opinions of an industry or profession are born and fostered. And making public statements that reveal the harsh truths can be a way of helping inspire...

The vast majority of people who work in RPGs (or fiction or comics), as side gigs or as careers, are well aware that they could make much better money elsewhere. At one time or another, they probably have, when the freelance creative work was slow or they were between company jobs. (As I...

eBay is a good starting place. The site bookfinder.com is a good used book search aggregator. You can sometimes find good deals there. As the Realms series stretches on, many of the titles will become harder to find. The TSR books in the late 80s and early 90s went through multiple printings...

Great stuff. Stellar work, as always, Ben.

Some people liked Brian. I was not one of them. His management of the book line and the book department directly led to me parting ways with TSR as a writer and editor in 1994. Shores of Dusk was, I believe, finished and ready for the printer when the project was killed. Mark Anthony might have...

For a few years I was fortunate to live close to full time in the Realms as a writer and game designer, and as line editor for the fiction. It's gratifying that people are still discovering the books and enjoying them (or discussing why a particular novel or story did or didn't work for them)...

Once Around the Realms was created at a time when TSR's book department was struggling with some authors and editors over control of their Realms characters--some legal wrangling, mostly skirmishes for creative control. The book department's relatively new lead editor, Brian Thomsen, did not get...

Prince was supposed to be the roughly same length as the other Realms books at the time--100,000 words, according to my contract--but I wrote long and my editor successfully petitioned for me to be allowed extra pages. With the color map at the front, which ran in the first few printings, and...

Yes. Go with operations who know the market and plan to make all your money through licensing fees. The fiction market right now is a disaster. (I am dealing with distribution headaches as part of my work with Chaosium.) There are a lot of good reasons to be cautious about publishing fiction...

It's not either/or here. Hasbro has never been all that thrilled about the fiction program. This goes back to when they bought WotC and did not even realize that the company published fiction. (I was told a Hasbro VP noted in an early meeting something along the lines of "We do fiction?" when...

WotC continues to keep my books in print in various formats, I worked with both WotC and Hasbro on the Worlds of D&D comics for Devil's Due a few years back, I was a consultant on Tomb of Annihilation, and I have talked with folks over at WotC about fiction as part of the D&D IP as recently as a...

The intent of both Realms of Valor and Realms of Infamy was indeed to give readers a chance to sample the different authors and different types of stories available in the Forgotten Realms line. Not all the stories tied to novels, but the books were intended to be showcases for many of the...

Well, it is quite important for the continued existence of hobby games, as a hobby and a business, for publishers to offer multiple easy-access gateways to their lines. Intro products such as D&D Essentials or the Call of Cthulhu Starter Set give likely gamers the tools to start playing at a...

Running the permission line on the copyright page is typical for those sorts of things, but where it is included on page 4 probably was fine. TSR decided they did not want to keep doing that--running the permission line as you saw it--so they pulled the material. When game companies get...