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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Janx" data-source="post: 1265010" data-attributes="member: 8835">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.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.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.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.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.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"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.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.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.That's what I percieve that EN Publishing has done.  They've "housed" several solo publishers and present themselves as a larger force.  That's a good idea and it gives smaller publishers a fighting chance.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.  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.  And that's the point, not to put down people's names of products but to show how the naming (and marketing) of those product can be percieved by potential customers.It might also help not to compare too directly to Monte Cook, Phil Reed and Sean Reynolds.  They were recognizable in the game industry before ePublishing got to be too big of an idea.  Figure Monte has big credit for D&D3e which puts him just under the big Gygax himself.  Sean's been getting larger and larger in the products his name has shown up in.  I remember when he replaced Rob Repp as the online coordinator back in the USENET days.  And Phil Reed seems to be the youngest of the batch (He did Frag, which is an excellent SJG product).  Phil's advice of not spending more than $200 on making a product and planning to sell 80 seems the most practical.  These guys have connections, and visibility.  That's an advantage over say, me and my idea to ePublish.Anyway, that's a lot of verbage.  But it's what I've noticed while watching all of this from the sidelines.  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.</blockquote>

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