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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eyebeams" data-source="post: 2768721" data-attributes="member: 9225">This is sort of true. What actually happens is: 1) Companies want to keep down costs, especially in an age of depressed demand for games. Game books are too cheap right now and are starting to "flip" from being priced as clearance items to being priced higher as specialty items. Labour is almost always the largest expense of any production, so it has to be cheap to keep costs unrealistically low. Unfortunately, the flip to specialty-item pricing is usually happening at the last possible moment to cover looming losses, so it doesn't so much get writers paid more as get them paid -- period.2) Publishers who don't really care about quality hire writers on the basis that they are disposible, because they can always find an eager fan to replace a writer who asks for too much. This does not really mean that there are more *good* writers and other creatives. It means that good writers will either move to another industry or go into business for themselves, retarding development of the roleplaying form accordingly. This means that fans get lousy books and writers get lousy pay. Publishers who are a bit more conscientious have trouble competing (if they compete) with the low standards of some hack outfit that (to use an example drawn from nowhere in particular), pays a penny a word to staffers and sacks them to disguise their own ineptitude and avoid a scheduled raise. Plus, it lowers the standards in a fairly insular community.3) Freelancers have no collective bargaining of consultative power aside from what they can acquire discreetly from their own networks. Most of the  networks where writers were supposed to talk about people who broke contracts and caused other problems have a managerial presence (because when all is said and done, the difference between the average publisher and a freelancer is just pretension and a couple of grand). Furthermore, the standard established in #2 makes writers concerned that they might be blacklisted for talking about this with absolute candor, especially when it comes to specific cases.</blockquote>

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