Lost City of Barakus, big print reader edition

[Ghost2020]

I just picked up The Lost City of Barakus from Necromancer Games, looks pretty decent except for the huge font!
Would this book have been significantly smaller if it had a decent sized font?

Am I being too picky? It's an expensive book $35, for not being glossy or full color and a large font. Methinks that's a bit too much.

 

[BiggusGeekus]

I just picked up The Lost City of Barakus from Necromancer Games, looks pretty decent except for the huge font!
Would this book have been significantly smaller if it had a decent sized font?

Am I being too picky? It's an expensive book $35, for not being glossy or full color and a large font. Methinks that's a bit too much.

I'll take a stab at this......

SHORT VERSION:

Not really too much. I mean, you may not like paying the $35, but the publisher probably didn't do it for the profit.

LONG VERSION:

My understanding of the industry is thus:

I'm not going to go into the full details of small press publishing, but when you're looking at a small run (all RPG books aside from the core rules pretty much fall into this category, d20 companies more so) keeping the cost of the book down is a challenge.

Glossy and full color are for the big boys only. If these are important to you, then you are likely to find that you are going to be sticking with WotC products. Few, if any, d20 companies can generate the demand for a product to justify a full color interior that won't end up costing $50 a book.

But let's look at page count. This is the other end of what you're talking about when you mention font size. After all, they could have produced a smaller font text with fewer pages, right? Well, now we start looking at printer costs.

Take a piece of paper. As far as a printer is concerned there are four sides to that piece of paper. Fold it in half and count the back and the front of both halves. So there is no difference between printing one "page" and priting four "pages". It's the same peice of paper that's going to go through the same machine. So it's in a publisher's best interest to publish a book with a number of pages that are easily divisible by four.

But now things get a little more complicated. Printers don't like treating each book as a special unqiue jewel. They like batch orders that are easy to run off. So there are certain "sweet spots" that cost a little less because the printers don't have to do anything special for it. A 96 page book is going to cost less to print per page than a 92 page book.

So take a publisher who has just recieved the copy and art for a book. They're doing layout and realize they can either print a run with a 10-point font and get a weird number of pages, or go with a larger sized font and get a page count that's friendlier to the printer even though technically there are more pages. So as long as you're going to go with that higher page count, why not nudge up the font size and at least make it a tad easier to read?

Again, if you don't feel you got your value for $35, that's a different story. But I would be surprised if Necromancer wasn't charging a fair price for their book from a publisher's point of view.

 

[Ghost2020]

" But I would be surprised if Necromancer wasn't charging a fair price for their book from a publisher's point of view.[/QUOTE]


I'm pretty familiar with the whole cost per printing scenario and RPG publishing is not the area to be in, to make a lot of money.

I bought it pretty much on the goodness of previous products. I don't doubt that the book will provide months of playing, but at first glance it just struck me as odd. Just feels like I might be getting less for my money than another book of that size and cost.
Still, we'll play it and I don't doubt we'll have a blast.

 

[Melan]

Here is what Tsathogga (Bill Webb) posted on the Necromancer Games Boards:

No one...no one gets anywhere near $10k a book. Well, maybe Monte does, on occasion. When times were good (2-3 years ago) we paid 3 cents/word. Now we pay a lot less, because sales are a lot less. Bill K and I have made 0$ on Barakus after a huge cost for art and print; and we typically do sell a couple thousand or more of each book. THERE IS NO MONEY IN THIS.

More discussion is found here.

 

[Ghost2020]

I guess my original point was this...

Fonts...too large. Could've made fonts appropriate size, put book into smaller page count and possibly softcover. Might get more sales.
Just a thought.
Regardless...fonts too large. Makes book easy to read though.

 

[Treebore]

Since Bill and Clark pretty much paid for the book out of pocket, they did the print run a t a size and quality that would give them the best chance of at least breaking even.

If you want to know for sure come visit their board, necromancergames.com, they will answer your question, or at least one of the editors will. Within the day, most likely.

 

[Melan]

Ghost2020: just a WAG, but the increased font size could have been due to Troll Lord Games, who were in charge of the production. They are also responsible for the extra-strong binding, tho.