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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Djeta Thernadier" data-source="post: 1104720" data-attributes="member: 12043">Person who works in the claims dept. of one of the largest book publishers in the country stepping in...Actually this happens all the time , esp.. with large publishers. I don't know how big the RPG companies are but for a large publisher, returns come in and get mixed up with good stock occasionally and it's not that infrequent to get two damaged books if they happened to come from the same print run. Going through the entire stock is a time consuming process and sometimes you just get unlucky and get a second bad book before the separation of the good from the bad is finished. Usually, at least for a large publisher, it takes at least a handful of complaints , or a second complaint from the same person to warrant a spot check of all stock. Spot checks are done by having a person in the warehouse pull stock at random and check it. It's not a fool proof method but few companies, even large ones, have the finances or people to go over each book from a print run with a fine tooth comb. I know at the publisher I work for , this sort of thing has happened at least a couple of times every few months or so. I think it was just an honest mistake. Alert them to the problem, so they can fix it. Even if they are a smaller company with less product, they probably have fewer employees and not someone set aside specifically to run spot checks.  There is a difference between the printer and the publisher. Publishers are the people who make the decision (or, editors, to be more specific). Publishers consist of more than just editors though.Printers (or, I think you mean binderies) are the places where the books are produced. The more copies of a book you have printed, the cheaper but the more problems. The more common the paper size and finish the cheaper as well. Usually the publisher orders the books to be printed from a separate printer and only discovers the problems with things like missing pages, binding issues, upside down print after a retailer or end user contacts them to let them know. I have to disagree with the publisher being the ones to make or break a writers dream. There are tons of publishers and ways to self publish and promote. And the writers don't pay the publishers. They pay their literary agents. Publishers usually only accept manuscripts from agents because unfortunately, they can't afford to pay enough editorial assistants to read through all of the material they'd get. Authors and artists who are serious enough to have an agent are usually worth looking at. Unfortunately for the talented authors who can't afford this, the people who just write rambling nonsense and submit it to a publisher have rather ruined it for them. I have a friend who is an editorial assistant here and he has told me about some of the unsolicited "manuscripts" he's gotten. They are really, really either scary or just plain bad. But there are plenty of publishers who still accept manuscripts directly from authors as well. If your stuff is good, an agent will usually work with you without an up front payment. Publishers, on the other hand, pay authors for the rights to their books.And, again, in this day and age, anyone can self publish and self promote.Not quite sure what you mean here. I partially agree that for a normal book (i.e.. the latest hardcover by such and such NYTimes Bestselling author) are jacked up. The average novel costs about $4 to produce and sells for about $25. When you factor in the costs of paying employees, returns processing (what I do),  and other misc. odds and ends, you're looking at more tacked onto the $4 but I'm not sure exactly what it is. It could probably go down a little bit, but I do know that there's not a ton of profit in publishing. Some, but not a lot. RPG books, as I mentioned in an earlier thread, are pretty fairly priced when you consider the cost to produce them is higher and they are used longer and more repeatedly than a novel or regular hardcover.</blockquote>

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