My thoughts on Writing and Publishing in the RPG market...

[inthisstyle]

Great post. This is something that comes up regarding game publishing all the time. It is hard work, and there is not much reward. Many times I have wondered, why do I put myself through the pain? It really comes down to love. I just can't stop writing games, and I really enjoy doing it. The money is secondary, and my main goal is just to break even and fund future projects.

I'm just waiting for that winning lottery ticket so I can quit my job and write games full-time.

 

[Ranger REG]

Great post. This is something that comes up regarding game publishing all the time. It is hard work, and there is not much reward. Many times I have wondered, why do I put myself through the pain? It really comes down to love. I just can't stop writing games, and I really enjoy doing it. The money is secondary, and my main goal is just to break even and fund future projects.

Does that pain also includes criticism from the gaming public?

What have been your experience (as publisher and/or game designer) when you come up against such obstacle?

 

[philreed]

It would be interesting to read like posts from other PDF publishers, to see how the experiences stack up. Learn from others' mistakes and all that.

My experiences are probably quite different. My first PDF, 101 Spellbooks, was written over a week. I didn't spend any money since I already had all of the necessary tools.

The next two PDFs, released the next month, were also quite easy to do. Those first three have gone on to be some of my better selling PDFs.

 

[Crothian]

Mr Reed was also a pretty well established person in the RPG industry at that time.

 

[philreed]

Mr Reed was also a pretty well established person in the RPG industry at that time.

Yes, that's true. I didn't try to leverage my name when I released my first PDF, instead trying to let my work talk for itself. The fact that I was not well known in D20 circles did mean that I had to work at proving to a new customer base that I had a clue. I suspect that if someone with an established name released a PDF they'd see much better results than I did with my first release.

I do find it interesting to see how other people approach writing and publishing. I find that I tend to do projects in bursts, sometimes writing entire PDFs in a day (101 Divine Spell Components was a one day project).

I envy people who can sit down and produce material at a consistent rate. I've been working at that but it's difficult for me.

 

[Vigilance]

Well since we're sharing...

I had decided I wanted to write a d20 superhero game, because I wanted to run one for my group. So I wrote Vigilance, my group liked it, and on a complete whim I decided to post it on RPGNow.

I bought Adobe to PDF distill it and a CD set of public domain pictures and photographs that served as the art.

The layout was atrocious, one of RPGNow's people (Chris Davis, who also owns RPGObjects) went over it with me several times just to get the layout functional and not have it detract from the book.

When the book was released it pretty quickly went into the top 40 at RPGNow, which was relatively easy to do in those days (the book is still in the top 100, currently hovering around 93).

At that point I started attempting to shop it around to publishers. Got rejected by everyone and his brother, but eventually Doug Herring of Mystic Eye agree to give it a go.

After doing one-fourth of Raw Recruits and writing Vigilance:Absolute Power (the print version) for Mystic Eye I did a game with a friend called Prometheus Rising at RPGnow.

During this time Chris Davis and I had been chatting about me doing a book for RPGObjects, I kept tossing out proposals which he kept rejecting, and then one day he said to me "I think the starship construction and combat chapter from Prometheus would make an interesting book all by itself, want to do that?"

So I wrote Blood and Space.

Since then I have written Blood and Relics, Blood and Fists, Blood and Guts, BNG: War on Terror, and Blood and Vigilance for d20 Modern, Legends of Excalibur for 3.5 D&D.

Currently I'm working on my first book in a loooong time for someone other than RPGObjects, the Haven d20 Modern conversion for LJP Designs.

So its been a rocky three years financially... but it sure has been interesting (and Im probably not telling it in the best way lol).

Chuck

 

[pogre]

So its been a rocky three years financially... but it sure has been interesting (and Im probably not telling it in the best way lol).

Maybe so, but I found your post very interesting. Thanks for sharing!

 

[Vigilance]

Maybe so, but I found your post very interesting. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks pogre

A couple of things about my personal experience that I think could be really helpful to those looking to become established in the business are:

1. Self-publishing on RPGNow can go a long way toward proving to publishers that you have the "chops" to take a project idea and carry it forward into a completed product.

It opened a lot of doors for me. Doing exactly what I did (putting out a PDF then shopping it as a print product) is probably a little harder now than it was when I did it, but it can be done.

2. Don't be upset when people tell you "not interested". Of the companies that have hired me (Mystic Eye, RPGObjects, LPJ Design and Mongoose) two of them turned down the first projects I pitched them.

And one of those companies that turned me down (RPGobjects) has been the source of most of my projects and easily the most important connection I have made in the last three years.

A lot of people will tell the "writer's perseverance story". However it's not about being able to take "no" for an answer. A lot of times whether a project is accepted or denied comes down to two things: timing and how well the book fits the current product line of the company you're pitching to.

A superhero game that doesn't use M&M mechanics isn't going to be accepted by Green Ronin unless you convert it to M&M no matter how good it is.

Similarly a d20 Modern book has a much higher chance of being accepted by RPGObjects than almost any other kind of book you wanted to pitch.

A simple look at a company's website will give you a fairly good idea of what they want and what they don't, and a product pitch that fits what the company is already doing gets a lot more attention than your pet project which doesn't fit with the company's current plans.

Chuck

 

[RangerWickett]

I'll share a piece of advice that seems topical to me now. Keep in touch with people that you collaborate with. If you work alone, no worries. But if you are getting help from others, for art, layout, writing, editing, etc., keep in touch, and let them know when you're approaching the time you're going to need their help, so you'll know if they're ready too.

Now, I'm off to go reply to about 20 people who've submitted things for the ENWorld Player's Journal.

 

[malladin]

Okay, here's the Malladin's Gate Story...

Malladin's Gate Press began a long time ago with myself and Nigel McClelland colaborating on system ideas back when we were at University.

I started writing my own RPG Product before D20 started. It began as a system for a Vampire LARP myself and Nigel were running at Leeds Uni. We wanted to move away from the typical WoD background so that our players didn't know what else was out there. We created a system that would work equally well as LARP or tabletop and fleshed out a modern horror setting.

The game ran very successfully for a short time, but (as is often the case with Vampire LARP, in my experience) it imploded due to to internal politics within the referees. They players were very distraught that we canned the game and some of them tried to resurrect it themselves. I don't know how successful this attempt was.

So after this Nigel and myself started to write up the game to tout around to publishers. However, we found that during the time we took to write it D20 had burst onto the scene and we couldn't get a look in with a non-d20 product. We got a little way with Mongoose but they said they wouldn't accept anything non-d20 in the end. We had a good response from John Wick, but then he just seemed to vanish off the face off the planet.

Anyway, so we then decided that we might be better tapping in to the D20 market and can up with a couple of ideas to tout around, one of which was a class book for Paladins. We got quite far with this with one publisher but then had the plug pulled at the last minute for reasons that don't make much sense to us still. So we decided to publish it our self, which is when we discovered RPGNow. It seemed such a perfect option for us, and just £60 ($100) started us off with all the stuff we needed to get going.

Forgotten Heroes: Paladin got off to a flying start, mainly thanks to a number of fantastic reviews both here and at RPGNow, and I think we'd made a proffit after the first few days.

So, being very surprised with our success (and thinking Yah-Boo-Sucks-to-You to those who rejected us) we planned our next few products and began writing them. Our next product was a mixed class/setting book for Abjurers and did not do anywhere near as well as Paladin. We were at a loss as to why, but got some really good advice from people on these forums about marketting, and found that our third product fared much better.

Since then we've ended up slowing down our production, mainly due to a bunch of real-life issues cutting back on our time, but our products seem to get constant good reviews, and this definately sells products.

One final note I think I want to point out is that timing is crucial. I think we were just too late at jumping on the PDF bandwaggon to get any of the print deals that the likes of Chuck, Nat 20 and Ambient got.

That said, we're hopeful we might be able to tie something up for a print deal with our Etherscope game, if we can find the time to get it written and not miss any window of opportunity that might have opened to us.

Just to quickly comment on some other people's experiences. I think Phil Reed has exactly the right products for the PDF market place. They are short (and take hime even less time to write than I suspected ) and priced very cheaply. We find we're very bad at keeping our products to a sensible page count and spend far to long discussing and playtesting and not actually writing things down. But, hell, we're in this for fun, not for $$$! Even as a relatively successful PDF publisher we're only bringing back an average of $30 a month each. It's no living, but it's good to get nice reviews and to think that your ideas are being used by some people you've never met.

Hoep that's helpful.

Ben