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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9155732" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Now, what happens if we open up this fictitious binary to a spectrum of results? E.g., the curve between 50k copies each of 40 books for $25 each and 200k copies is, say, a square-root curve rather than a linear curve. So, perhaps you sell 100k copies of 20 books for $25 apiece, but your costs only go up by sqrt(2) rather than 2 via working at scale--essentially, you could have (say) three teams working continuously and separately, so each team is putting out 5 books a year, with an additional 5 "all hands on deck" books, as opposed to just one team putting out 5 books a year. Asking slightly more of the individual teams, but not that much more, and exploiting the between-team cooperation/cross-pollination to get more content out.You could even specialize the teams. One team does exclusively adventures, and builds up a lot of skills for adventure-writing. One team focuses exclusively on monster design. Etc. Each team becomes more efficient than the single team that must do a bit of everything. Then, when you do the cross-pollination, it's to create books for everyone, major highlights/releases.Essentially, this argument is a very elegant way of begging the question: it assumes that economies of scale cannot apply, that cost-per-book is never sub-linear, and that cost-per-worker cannot be reduced below linear growth through specialization or focus.There is a certain term that gets bandied about for such things, but I find it rather distasteful, so I'm not going to use it myself. I'll just say that I find that this ignores real-world factors that are highly relevant, creating a trivial binary, rather than the much more realistic incredibly complex problem this actually is.</blockquote>

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