Cost/Page analysis

[Yair]

I've spent the last few hours piecing together and mulling over a cost/page spreadsheet for some books. Of course the list of books is completely arbitrary (books I like or wanted to see how they fair), and this statistic doesn't say much, but still I thought it might interest others. So I attach the files, and here is what I saw in it...
(There are probably errors in it, feel free to correct me...)

First, just to give a scale, hardbound books range in price from 0.12 $/page (Arcana Evolved, Infernum, World's Largest Dungeon, and The Penumbra Fantasy Bestiary) to around 0.21 (Mastering Iron Lore), ignoring the old splatbooks (Sword and Fist at the outragous 0.3). Large books cost more than small books, of course (WLD at 0.12 not including colorful huge maps has 840 pages!), but it doesn't determine much - for example, Infernum at 0.12 has 240 pages, while Denziens of Avandu at 0.18 has 224 pages. The industry standard seems to be around 0.16 or 0.15.
Softcovers are smaller and usually more expensive (per page). They range from 0.13 (Blue Rose and Heroes of High Favor: Elves) to 0.23 (the Encyclopaedia Arcane series), just a bit more expensive. The main difference is that the typical softcover's price is set at the higher part of this range, at around 0.18 or 0.19.
PDFs vary widely in costs, far more than printed products. They range from 0.05 (which I was delighted to see was Murchad's Legacy Campaign Setting - the setting I'm using now ) to, say, 0.39 (Grim Tales: Gamemastering; and worth every penny). The typical PDF should have a price of 0.11/page, but really I don't know if that's truly typical. It seems the cheaper ones hover around 0.07 (including such gems as Arcana Evolved, Oathbound, Iron Lore, all the XRP products, Advanced Bestiary, Blue Rose, and Infernum), but you can find ones at higher and higher costs. I'd say a PDF starts getting expensive at 0.14 or so, and the expensive ones usually hover at around 0.2. The costs (per page) of pdfs are sometiems cheaper than the costs for print products, but (especially for small pdfs) they are sometimes actually more expensive.

The most efficient way to spend you money (in the $/page sense) is to purchase the cheaper PDFs. These contain excellent products, including Arcana Evolved, Oathbound, A Magical Society: Beast Builder, Ecology & Culture, and Western Europe, Advanced Bestiary, and Blue Rose. Going up the price will allow the purchase of more and more PDFs, until the 0.12 mark is reached where books become available, interposed with the more expensive PDFs. This continues all the way, except for the most expensive PDFs that stand out above the print products (Grim Tales: Gamemastering 0.39, Grim Tales: Creature Creation 0.5 [not fair, as it includes an excel file], and My Thoughts on Writing and Publishing Short PDFs 1.25 [not really for players]).
The AMAZING purchases are the cheap PDFs, plus the cheap books which include Arcana Evolved, Infernum, Penumbra Fantasy Bestiary, The Book of the Righteous, Necropolis, Fiend Folio, Heroes of High Favor: Elves, and Blue Rose. Other cheap books inlcude Tetament, Book of the Planes, Draconomicon, Dungeon Master's Guide II (and probably other WotC products), The Black Company Campaign Setting, and the Advanced Bestiary. That's an impressive list of quality products, you don't need to sacrifice quality to be cheap.

Conversely, the most "wasteful" products are expensive pdfs, which are usually the short ones, and expensive books. The pdfs include short Ronnin Arts or Bad Axe Games pdfs, The Andwan Legacy adventure (which I've just bought ), and EN Arsenal: Spiked Chain. The books involve short softcovers sadly including The Assasin's/Psychic's/Unholy Warrior Handbook series (0.21 to 0.23), and the Encyclopedia Arcana series (0.23) (and stay away from WotC adventures, they're REALLY expensive!). Amongst the hardbacks, sadly the excellent X & Y of Atlas Games (Love & War, etc.) is at 0.19 and Mastering Iron Lore is at 0.21 (and again WotC trumps it all with an old Sword & Fist at 0.3).
It seems to "save money" you'd want to avoid short softbacks or short pdfs. (Not exactly a major revelation, but hey). And even more so avoid certain WotC lines/books (ahem).

Sizing up my favorite companies and products... well, it is a mess.
The World's Largest Dungeon is a steal at it's price, that much is a given (0.12 not including the maps!).
Atlas Games gives another great bargain with The Penumbra Fantasy Bestiary (0.12), but also the boasts the very expensive Dynasties & Demagouges et al (0.19). At least it's PDFs are cheap.
Bad Axe Games seems to offer excellent prices, except for their short PDFs. The cost of Creature Creation is exceptionally abhorrant (0.5), exceeding everything in the market; I'm sure it is very good but the cost!. No wonder I was delaying it's purchase.
Bastion Press offers cheap PDFs, especially Oathbound. (If it wasn't for Oathbound: The New Generation or whatever they call their revised book, I would have downloaded one long ago.)
EN Publishing's PDFs are expensive (that ones that interst me, anyways). The EN Arsenal line in particular looks exceedingly expensive (0.28).
Goodman Games' books (as pdfs) sit at 0.14, also slightly expensive. I'm not sure if that includes their adventures.
Green Ronin (my absolture favorite publisher) ranges from cheap to expensive, the whole gamut. Amazingly, some of my Most Wanted are actually cheap (Blue Rose 0.13, Testament 0.14, Advanced Bestiary 0.14, The Book of the Righteous 0.13), but others on that list are expensive Their PDFs are cheap, however, which may be a good way to pick those things up (I'm still waiting for a Plot & Poison PDF).
Iron Circle Games are expensive. Well, I suppose high quality and high production values coupled to a small selling cycle will do that to you....
Malhavoc Press is interesting. I think Monte is selling the "core" products for cheap (Arcana Evolved 0.12, Iron Lore 0.15), and charging extra for the peripherals (Mastering Iron Lore 0.21, The Book of Rougish Luck 0.21). Anyways, his PDFs are dirt cheap (and he's the leading PDF publisher! Guys, follow his lead! Please?).
Mongoose Publishing has decent prices, well except for the expensive Encyclopeadia Arcane line (curse that short softback format). Their PDFs, unfortunately, are not sold at a considerable discount so even an average cost book (The Quintessential Wizard 0.16) comes out as a fairly expensive PDF (0.12).
Much the same can be said for Necromancer Games (with short adventures like Aberrations replacing the EA line), but here the discount on PDFs is more significant so at least their large books are well prices (Necropolis 228 pages, 0.13 or 0.07 as pdf).
The Andwan Legacy is expensive (0.23, for a pdf). Hmph.
Parent's Basement Games is dirt cheap (0.05)
Ronin Arts is expensive. Well, they publish short pdfs so it goes with that. But I was surprised at how much: for example Planar Factions sells at 0.09, a single faction sells at 0.16 (that's what you pay WotC for a typical harback!), and the fairly large Iconic Bestiary (27 pages) sells at 0.22. Of course the most expensive is Philip Reed's "My Thoughts on Writing and Publishing Short PDFs" for a staggering 1.25; given that he sells content at the cost/word of WotC products, and apparently sells quite a lot of them, I'm not surprised his thoughts on the matter are valuable.
Wizards of the Coast sells for a wide assortment of prices, but generally new hardbacks seem to go at 0.16, sometimes 0.14 - excellent, considering their production value and the top talent they often involve.
Last but not least, Expeditious Retreat Press sells their excellent PDFs at very low prices. I would almost suggest raising prices, but looking at Monte's products I think they are actually priced right.

So, that was long. I hope someone finds it interesting.

Yair

 

[Crothian]

Psion does this, or at least he did. I don't know if he's kept it up.

Personally, I think page cost ratiois not very useful. 500 pages of pure drek, even if it costs 10 bucks, is still not a good deal.

 

[Yair]

Personally, I think page cost ratiois not very useful. 500 pages of pure drek, even if it costs 10 bucks, is still not a good deal.

Yes, but it isn't like the work is without a title. It just gives you another measure. And hey, I was bored

 

[Psion]

Psion does this, or at least he did. I don't know if he's kept it up.

I used to maintain a spreadsheet of everything I reviewed so I could quantify the relative value of items.

I think right off the bat, you need to consider products of similar size and format, or the comparison loses validity. As efficiency goes, you will find that shorter products have much higher cost per page than larger products. But does that mean "bigger is better"? I don't think so. If a 8 page pdf costs more per page than a 224 book, it is arguably worth it if those 8 pages are all making an active contributions to you game, and only a small sliver of that 224 page hardbound is. Which is genrally the case. (I get great use out of Complete Book of Eldritch Might, but it has lots of stuff I don't use. But if I could chop out the variant core classes and spellsongs, the value to ME per page would jump considerably.)

But still, one lesson to take home here is that if you are buying lots of pdfs, you might want to wait for the compilation.

On the same note, when I started comparing the price per page of the mini-adventures by FFG and AEG is when I decided that they weren't worth it. They were about $.5 per full 8 1/2 x 11" page.

I did find the comparison very useful however. At the time I was maintaining the database, some customers were complaining that some books were too costly, yet some publishers were retorting that they could not be cheaper. Yet if you stacked up similar books against one another, you could see that certain publishers were cheaper and some were more pricey. Admitted, these were often due to issues a publisher can't control like size of saleable print runs, but when looked at from the perspective of value it provides to a customer, these issues are relatively immaterial.

One other thing I would caution regarding Yair's comparisons is that he seems to be lumping in newer and older works. There was a pretty significant market wide price jump, especially in hardbacks, about a year ago, when the $25, 224+ page hardbounds (principly from White Wolf) went the way of the dino. This will cause his analysis to favor older products. Which is not an entirely invalid judgement where these products are still available, but usually older products do no directly compete with newer products.

 

[Turjan]

Your next Excel table will be about the costs per word, I suppose ? j/k

Well, I find some aspects of the table interesting, as they reflect different business strategies and/or market values.

I suppose Monte's prices for pdf's build on the fact that many customers might buy both, pdf and print editions. You usually can buy the pdf a few months upfront, and if you like the product - which is quite often the case - you might buy the printed book as well. Incidentally, Malhavoc is the only company, where I sometimes own both, pdf and print editions of the same publication, except one EN world publishing title.

The other trend that I noticed was that some of the recent pdf publications had prices that exceeded typical print book prices on a price per page basis. Of course, printing of, let's say, a 40 page booklet would be more expensive, but for a print publication the page count would most probably upped to at least 96. If this product then contains no art or only 2 pieces, the pricing gets a bit questionable to me. Of course, this is my personal meter that I apply; value is always a very personal thing .

 

[John Morrow]

This can all be very interesting but just bear in mind that book costs are not simply based on a price per page but also (sometimes substantial) fixed costs that a company has to recover whether they print 1 book or 1,000,000, and that cost gets divided over the print run. Adding color increases the fixed costs because you need 4 times the number of printing plates and a larger make-ready on press because the plates have to be aligned to print properly and that wastes paper.

Thus if it costs $10,000 to pay writers, artists, the company's employees, the printing plates, the cover the press "make-ready" costs, etc. a single book would need to have $10,000 added to it's cost to recover that money (actually, closer to twice that after it goes through distribution), on top of the regular per unit cost. If they print 1,000 books, that adds $10 to the cost of every unit (double that for the retail price increase). If they print 5,000 books, it adds $2 to the cost (double for retail). If they print 10,000 books, it adds $1. At 20,000 books, it adds $0.50. And so on. At 1,000,000 copies, that cost almost disappears, though the fixed costs may increase a little if the print run runs on multiple presses, etc.

And, of course, the fixed prices for paying employees and for office space get split over how many titles a company produces and depend on how many employees a company has, how much they are paid, etc. And of course writing and artist costs depend on how well they pay for those things.

I'm not saying that you can't evaluate value based on cost per page. I'm simply trying to make people aware of the other side of that because most game companies are not simply picking prices arbitrarily. They need to set a retail price at which they think they can make a profit. If they aren't making a profit, then it's a hobby, not a job.

 

[MonsterMash]

Surely the most important thing is the value you get out of a product rather than its cost per page. If I buy something that costs $35, but end up getting a years worth of gaming sessions (2 sessions per month) out of it, then that's better value than something that costs me $5 and only is useful for one session.

 

[philreed]

Cost per page really doesn't have much meaning. I'm never sure what the cost/page ratio means if you only use 70 pages out of a 200-page book.

As to "$1.25/page" that's because that product isn't meant for everyone and isn't the typical PDF.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

I am glad to see so many Bad Axe products in your analysis-- but I think you're a bit unfair on Creature Creation.

First let me just explain my pricing model.

For PDFs that are identical to the print book, well, I just eyeball it. $9.95 for Heroes of High Favor in print (which I think we can all agree is a very nice price for the content). In PDF format, I just knock off about what it would cost to print it at Lulu, for example. So, $5.95.

For PDFs that are a part of a larger print book (the Grim Tales PDFs for example) I figure out the price-per-page of the print version, and then price the PDF about the same (this works out to about .16 per page). At least, that was my initial instinct. A couple of things break this model. First, there's not much point to pricing anything below about $1.95 at RPGnow. That just clutters the market with stuff that's too cheap-- it annoys other publishers and annoys the admin, as well.

(Hey, I can't help it if I can say everything that needs to be said about Mass Combat in 8 pages. I'm good that way. But we'll come back to that.)

So, for starters, with my PDFs, I pretty much just rounded everything up to $1.95.

However, please note that almost all of my PDFs, even the short ones, have some kind of Excel component for added value. It's hard to put an exact value on them-- except for Creature Creation.

In the case of the Creature Creation PDF, you've just completely waved away the spreadsheet. Obviously what you're really paying for here is the spreadsheet. That spreadsheet took a lot of time to program-- much thanks to BryonD, who seriously undercharged me for the amount of work he put into programming it. Even so, I published that one with the expectation of actually losing money on the deal and, sure enough, I have yet to recover what I paid for programming the Excel sheet. But I think it's absolutely worth it-- I would have paid for that spreadsheet out of pocket, even if I never planned to publish it. (Just from a publisher's perspective, having a spreadsheet to calculate CRs with a great degree of accuracy to the core rules was worth the programming cost.)

When it is all said and done, though, I think that Bad Axe products-- both in print and in PDF-- have some of the highest content-per-page of any products out there. I am sure there are a lot of folks who would prefer more art, or more fluff, or more breathing room in the layout, but my stuff is very, very dense with usable, portable material-- and in terms of the design work, very concise. A simple price-per-page estimate (for as much as my stuff competes even on that level) isn't a very good estimate of "value" with respect to Bad Axe stuff.

.... If'n I do say so myself...


Wulf

 

[Turjan]

A simple price-per-page estimate (for as much as my stuff competes even on that level) isn't a very good estimate of "value" with respect to Bad Axe stuff.

Oh, you can extend that statement to quite a lot of products. Volume doesn't say anything about quality (let's not get into this topic ). Page count doesn't say anything about word count (layout varies vastly in this regard). It doesn't say anything about the nature of the contents, either (some people like art in products, others couldn't be bothered less). The answer to the question what makes a product enjoyable and worthwhile will be different for every individual.

My statement to recent pdf prices from further above conerned some run of the mill products that hit the market recently (with 'run of the mill' I don't mean that the products don't contain any original ideas, but that it's the usual fare of campaign supplements; no derogatory meaning intended here). Things like that nifty spreadsheet are a different category .

Lastly, a product is priced appropriately (or too low ) as long as it sells. From the view of the producer, it should obviously cover his expenses. But in the end, monetary value is set by the buyers.