Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="PatrickLawinger" data-source="post: 1735833" data-attributes="member: 2735">ByronD, Right now it doesn't really cost that much to enter the contest. Shipping costs and time are more expensive than the actual books given up for the awards. Shipping the physical books costs more $ than giving up the books themselves. The main proposal I have seen discussed is having publishers ship directly to the judges, this significantly increases the cost of entering. Increasing shipping costs is indeed going to make people drop out. It goes from "oh, it is only a few dollars, not a problem" to "what a pain in the ass, forget it" pretty quickly. This is particularly true of the smaller publishers that have less room to absorb these costs.It is always "cool" to enter a contest and even cooler to be nominated or even win. Some of us would like to see the Ennies grow into a more well-recognized award and support it on that alone. It is also great to see people working on a project recognized in some way, whether it is authors, artists, editors, cartographers, whatever. Publishers like to participate in active communities such as ENWorld and having products recognized by active, involved gamers and receiving that type of feedback is fantastic.Right now I believe that many publishers are participating because they would love to win an award, who doesn't, but also because they want to be a part of the community. The "community feel" here goes a long way toward getting publishers to participate. As it is, I know of several publishers that didn't participate and have no intention of participating in the future. Those publishers also don't feel any real link with the ENWorld community. I personally feel that if ENWorld is going to shift to having broader awards they are going to lose the DnD/d20 (OGL should be tossed in here too I suppose) "community feel." Lose that, and I think you'll lose some of your publisher participation. Nobody wants to be "lumped in with the rest." Asking publishers to go through an added step (and expense) of shipping directly to judges is going to cause more to drop out.Please don't tell me how important the Ennies are for marketing, or sales. On the ENWorld main page there is a tiny one-line link on the left hand side of the main page for the 2004 Ennies, if you follow it you get to a page mentioning who was nominated. It still hasn't been updated to list the winners, runners-up, etc. It doesn't discuss the history of the awards, or what they are supposed to mean. Even ENWorld isn't promoting the awards, or the award-winners, why would you expect a distributor or a retailer to care about them? Really, we tried to use the Ennies in the past to help promote certain books, the distributors didn't care. The fans on our own boards, sure, fans here, maybe, but distributors, retailers and the "average" gamer, um, the Ennies don't mean a thing to them.</blockquote>

Verification