Vigilance
Explorer
Turanil said:
That would be my preference too, but there's several things at play that make it unlikely.
The first thing is that RPGO is moving slightly away from printing. Not totally away, but printing less. Basically when you look at the economics of the situation print seems to be trending down, while PDFs continue to trend up.
From a business perspective its made us focus a little on the electronic side of things.
The second issue is, even in electronic form, the setting books don't sell as well as the generic sourcebooks, so making them big, which would mean me spending a lot of time on say, Prometheus or Blood and Relics, is time I can't spend on a vehicle book for Blood and Guts or some other sourcebook.
In short, when you look at my time month by month or week by week (as me and my boss certainly do), I could spend it doing a sourcebook, or I could spend the same month doing a setting book, and it would sell less.
The flip side of the coin is, that since if I wanted money more than anything else, Id still be working at a "major metropolitan department store" where I was on the management track (ugh) before I started writing full time.
But still, there are some practical considerations.
Last point I'd like to bring up is that for those really into a setting, its hard to make it big enough to satisfy. The original Prometheus was a 30 page or so freebie and folks said it wasn't fleshed out enough. So this version is about double the size, and I *still* hear from folks all the time that its not fleshed out enough.
The Blood and Relics book is almost 100 pages and people tell me *that* isn't fleshed out enough.
I sympathize, but the economics of 300 page setting books is a hard sell for a company our size (with 2.5 full timers and some freelancers). If we were smaller, or bigger, it would be easier.
Chuck
