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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jim Butler" data-source="post: 1332431" data-attributes="member: 1461"> In the early 80s (back when I was in High school--Go Camels!), I decided I wanted to go to work for TSR and write D&D books. I contacted TSR and got their Writers' Guidelines, wrote my heart out on my trilogy of adventures, and played snail-mail tag with Jon Pickens (who was Acquisitions Director for TSR at the time). He gave me some invaluable advice: Get a degree (preferably in English, Creative Writing, or something similar)--but get a degree. It wasn't that my writing sucked (though looking back on it, it's nowhere near as polished as my later published work), it's just that getting constructive criticism is vital to the development of your writing. And getting a degree means you're going to be exposed to other things--knowledge across a variety of fields--that you can then use in your writing. Chemistry might seem a tad boring when you'd rather be writing about dark elves fighting for their lives, but that knowledge becomes invaluable when it's time to talk about what that alchemist is doing. Writers write. It's easy to be a writer these days, and even easier to get a lot of feedback on what you do. The RPG hobby is filled with writers--mainly DMs who have been writing for their campaign worlds for years. Some of these people have even gone on to produce a printed or PDF release d20 product. Professional writers write to specifications and meet deadlines. They agree to an X-thousand word project that's due on a set date. If they miss that date (or stray off spec), their work suffers. Some Lawful Evil editor will strike passages from their work to bring it more in line with what was planned, dock their pay and assign someone else to clean up the manuscript, or one of 101 other Nasty Things that can happen.   If it's professional writing, you're not going to have a lot of control over what you've written. You'll probably get galleys back that show how your work has been altered by developers and editors since you turned it over. That process is an important one for writers to accept, because virtually no one's prose is perfect when it flows from their mind to the paper. The more you're funding the project, the more control you'll have. If you only want to use "name" artists, print in full color, and run a monthly full-page ad in all the RPG magazines, expect to write a $50,000 check (or more) to get your product done *exactly* as you envision it.  Most publishers are happy to listen to your ideas, but they need to be in charge of the day-to-day operations that get books through the development cycle and out to retailer shelves. The more you're involved the better--since you'll be the primary cheerleader for your product at conventions, online message boards, and other events. You just have to trust that other people are as professional with their jobs as you are with yours.  If you're just publishing a single book as a PDF, there's nothing really wrong with doing it on your own. If you're looking to print a book, get distributors to carry it, convince retailers to buy it, etc. you'd better either plan an entire line of books or find some consignment house (like Impressions or Osseum) who can do all that business work for you. RPGNow has a book that gives some advice to startup publishers...  Professional writers in the industry generally write around 28,000 words of useable text in a month; Ed Greenwood can write about 150,000. The Player's Handbook is around 250,000 words or so.  Make sure that one person is in charge. This is the person responsible for making sure everything comes together in a cohesive whole. Make sure that the other contributors to a project understand their roles and don't write over each other.  Having multiple designers working on a single project can be quite tricky. It takes a good lead designer (and plenty of work up-front to make sure assignments don't overlap too badly) to bring everything together.</blockquote>

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