Janx said:
Well, I've never bought a PDF, though I'm considering doing some publishing. Here's some thoughts that occur to me as someone who's been watching this industry.
It's hard to take you seriously if you haven't bought any PDFs. I bought a couple before I made the plunge.
seeing a book before buying it is preferable. It's harder to do that with a PDF. A real book, I can flip through the entire thing, a sample excerpt from a PDF I can't.
An excellent statement of the problem. But what's the solution?
How much piracy is occurring? Since the number of sales is so small, piracy hurts more than a big company like WOTC (I've seen people handing out CDs of WoTC's product in PDF). A recent FastForwar 900 Words article makes a good point on this.
Complete non-issue. There are far more scanned pirated copies of the PHB than there are pirated copies of even the best selling PDFs. Pirates "win" by amassing the largest collection. They don't care about the content of the books, just the file size.
Free product seems to have high download rates (per the how are sales doing threads). Maybe people have a mentality that if it's on the internet it must be free.
There have been 10-12 times as many downloads of my first free Tuesday Two-Pager as sales of my first book. I don't consider that anywhere near a bad ratio. I'm sure 10 times as many people pick up books in a store as actually buy said book.
For new publishers, doing improved layout work may be harder for them. Just learning to format things in a word document so it looks better than what you might make for your game group is an effort. Heck, I'd consider using a free PDF maker like PDF995, which would have limited capabilities.
Layout is a skill just like art and writing. If you don't believe that you shouldn't be publishing.
A valid point was made in that ePublishing needs to take advantage of the medium. It should be easier to use on the PC, with a print version. Think how web-pages are done. print version and screen version. And people do read things online, consider this thread for instance.
The lesson from that is what web designers had to learn. Don't make the page scroll sideways. Avoid forcing a need to scroll at all (but vertical is better than horizontal). For my sites, that means trying to make the page work within the screen view space, with buttons to navigate to the next page. Basically format for a smaller sheet of paper, instead of 8 1/2 by 11"
I despise websites that assume how big my screen is and I avoid them if they have little, next page buttons for no reason. I prefer one long giant webpage over modular pages. What does this have to do with what you said? It means, don't assume that everybody wants or needs a screen and a print version. The extra time formatting your layout twice is not made up for with extra sales. PDF buyers, by and large, want content, not complex layouts.
Also consider using the medium to its full extent. Software. Why don't your tables roll themselves? At the minimum, provide support files for the popular RPG manager apps around. That's more work, but it provides something a paper version does not.
There are clauses in the d20 license that prevent the creation of Interactive games. I would not tread close to having computations on OGC take place in a PDF. Providing support files for RPG manager apps? Which ones? All of them? That's not more work, that's A LOT MORE work. And I doubt it has any payoff.
As for the dearth of "crap" PDFs, consider it may not be limited to just PDFs. When the D20 license came out, a plethora of D20 materials were released in stores. Most of it sat there. The ePublishing world is even easier to publish in than the real world, so it has the same problem.
Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crud.
This plethora of publishers moves into my next thought. There's no quality control going on. At WOTC, there are product managers and editors and the like figuring out what to design and who does it, and having final approval to release it. This means that if all goes well at WOTC, they will not release products that compete with each other, contradict each other or are incompatible with each other. With 50+ solo operations going on, how many "compleate book of marmoset hunting" books are there? Let alone different brands. It would have been better if these solo operators clumped together, pitched ideas and "contracted" themselves out to do certain titles. Rather than each tiny company trying to do the same things. This gets you economies of scale for consistent style and name recognition.
Half the fun here is being in business on your own. Having no deadlines that you don't set for yourself. Having not to rely on someone you don't know. You yourself state you are thinking of publishing. Why haven't you contacted some of the existing publishers and pitched your idea so they can publish it?
Now to marketing. Why did they call themselves EN Publishing. They're named after a guy (Eric Noah) who doesn't seem to work there, who ran a news site. They had a good name of "Natural 20 Press" and they changed it to name themselves after some guy.
EN World is the most popular D&D website around. It's not like they switch to TL Publishing.
Not a marketing decision I would have made. Don't name your stuff after someone. It tends to limit the scope and makes others think it isn't that big. Joe's Book of XYZ is an example. I haven't seen it. Joe himself seems like he's really sharp and has a good product. Maybe he likes the gimick of making the product sound like it's some GM named Joe's collection of stuff. But to me, when I saw the title (which I saw before reading these forums), it sounded like it was some guy cranking out PDFs from his gaming notes.
Thanks. Go buy it. I must admit I knew nothing about marketing 1.5 years ago and did not catch the connotation of "it's just some guy's stuff". The first review on RPGNow even says that. Over time, the title has vindicated itself but given what I know now, I would have given it a better name.
Study what the successful among you have done that have started the same way as you. You'll learn more and it it'll be easier to emulate. I can't emulate Monte Cook for how to get started. But I can find out which ones of you started from scratch and find the best of you to emulate the process of getting started.
Again why aren't you following your own advice and sending one of us a proposal for your product?
