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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4870049" data-attributes="member: 2067">"I imagine a book would have to sell at least 100,000 copies to be even worth doing" is looking at it the wrong way around, at least for my proposed wacky scheme. Make a profit (even a small one) selling memberships to the site, and on each individual book sale, and keep the team small, and you don't need to sell that many individual books to turn a profit. Even better, you don't need to "do" the books yourself -- other people create the material in them, you just print them (again, look at Flat Earth Publishing). Since you're not really producing content (or not producing much), you can decrease the size of your infrastructure, and you make a huge profit over the long term, without very many costs after the initial cost of setting up the system. For the TTRPG industry, a format like this makes a lot more sense than the traditional edition format. Take a look upthread at where I layed out the theoretical steps in this system. Even if all WotC did was charge something like $20 a month for access to every edition's rules, they would make a profit on it, especially in the long term, after the costs of setting up the system were accounted for in the first year or so. You don't need a lot of people. Half the web games being advertised on ENWorld right now only make money on about 5% of the user base, but because the costs of supporting that other 95% are so low, they make a profit.Essentially, this is about lowering marginal costs, and expanding the market, at the same time. If only 10 people ever print a 2e book with this system, it can still be entirely worth it, because it is so insanely cheap to make that 2e stuff available, that essentially the people playing, say, 4e or 5e or whatever, can subsidize these, and the few bucks that the 2e folks throw your way are still profit. I'm under the impression that Dungeon right now is kind of a special case. It's still trying to figure out what it is. As far as using material from ENWorld? Absolutely! Asmor's 4e programs, or, heck, Jamis Buck's 3e programs in the early days of Eric Noah's site...ENWorld was how I found MapTool. ENWorld is the only reason I'm still buying D&D products. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> How many threads right now are asking DMing advice, or learning about game design of specific elements, to help people enjoy their game more? When we're not sniping at each other about what kind of rules are the best to dress up and play faerie elves with, ENWorld is an amazingly productive community.And it's not even just ENWorld. Fan stuff for D&D and other TTRPG's tends to be pretty dang high quality. What's lacking -- aside from occasional threads on ENWorld and the like -- is an easy way to separate the wheat from the chaff and quickly and easily monetize it. Add WotC - level production values to get the most out of your Print On Demand item, and I can't help but think it would do quite well for itself.Traditional book publishing is probably not the best way to serve the TTRPG crowd in the next 10 years, let alone 30 or 40 or 50 years down the line.</blockquote>

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