Payment of Writers

[Sir Edgar]

Yeah, but you still have to make the sale at the bookstore or the distributor won't carry your stuff anymore.

Anyhow, getting back to topic a bit here. I don't know if paying by the word is always such a good idea. That's because I see a lot of wordy text out there and quite a bit of unnecessary background material that just isn't required. Paying by word encourages more words! Maybe a better way is to get paid on just on a project-by-project level, say about this many pages for this much pay (like an average of $500 per "module", i.e. 32 pages leaving room for illustrations, legal stuff, etc). That could encourage putting quality over word count.

 

[JohnNephew]

I often think, as I stand in the store, about how long I'd have to work to buy something, and I've come to the conclusion that I'm not willing to spend more than what I make in 1 hour to buy a book.

What if it saves you more than an hour in preparation time?

Do you apply the same measure to other things? E.g., would you spend more than 1 hour's worth of money to buy a dinner for you and your gaming friends?

 

[JohnNephew]

Re: Higher prices?

I already personally know too many people who boycott (or worse, pirate) rpg books because of the high prices in the industry right now.

To be blunt, pirates who claim it's because prices are too high are liars, simply making a lame excuse for their greed and laziness, and lying to themselves above all, to maintain a false self-image of virtue. If they weren't liars, we wouldn't see the low-price items showing up on the P2P networks or the usenet, would we? Yet I see no difference between pirates' willingness to post $8 modules versus $10 modules. Is Crucible of Freya pirated less than those Rob Kuntz modules? It's pure rationalization, no better justification than "the devil made me do it."

If price was the issue, why do pirates eagerly share the core rulebooks -- when almost all of it is available for FREE, and when those books were being pirated while absurdly cheap at $20 each?

The pirate low-lifes simply want something for nothing. This, like their other arguments (like "these books suck, so I shouldn't have to pay for them"), falls apart upon any reasonable examination.

 

[Cergorach]

Ok, fans are never happy with higher prices, neither are retailers...

Although, as a retailer, you might fetch a higher profit per product, you also run a higher risk of not selling the product at all.

I'm a fan that has the lucky oppertunity to be able to buy a lot of D20 stuff, but even i have my limits. Although TBoR is very high production quality, even good writing, it's still a $40 B&W book. Now i know, both as a retailer and a fan, that WotC is the company that sets the pricing standard. When they produce high quality COLOR books at comparable size and at $40, both fans and retailers will think twice before jumping in the deep.

When i get my monthly order 'new things' form from my distributor, i do the following:
-Go to the WotC section order all the game books in 'bulk', adventures a little less.
-Then go to the SSS and Necromancer section and order everything D20
-AEGs L5R and Spycraft get the same treatment and often the rest of their D20 material as well.
-FFG D20 material is also ordered.
-Since a couple of months Green Ronin is also ordered, but at this time i have to make sure that i don't order over budget.
-Mongoose isn't so much a player anymore in my orders (more of the same and unpredictable quality, sometimes low, sometimes high), ordered the Slaine line though (the graphic novels sell rather well).
-After that i browse through the list looking for exciting things that i just 'have' to order. I do have to say that i can't get everything from my distributor, thus some companies that i would really want to carry aren't accessible for me at the moment...

The point is, although you might have a great product, but if you do not compare to the market leader (wheter in price or quality), your not getting as much exposure in the marketplace as you might want to have. It might not be fair that your products are compared with, for example, WotC products, but it is the reality!

Let's take for example:
- The Book of Righteous [320 pages, B&W, Hardcover, $40]
- Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting [320 pages, Color, Hardcover, Color Map, $40]

Now, how exactly am i going to explain to my customers that these books are worth the same price? Is TBoR better written? Also, i'm pretty sure that i'll sell a lot more of FRCS books @$40 than TBoR @$40, so why would i want to order a lot of TBoR?

If people ask for a God bbok i usually ask first whether or not they have Deities and Demigods, if yes, i ask wheter or not they play Forgotten Realms or would mind using FR gods (FR god book is slick!), after that we get to SSSs The Divine and the Defeated, and THEN to TBoR, mostly because it's not a cheap book (AEG has a God book, but for some reason i haven't gotten it yet with my orders)...

Sorry for just spilling words, i've a nasty cold so my head hurts and i might not make the most coherent rants. (i know, excuses, excuses ;-)

Clark's attitude gets him a LOT of good will with customers. Also a lower price will make people more willing to buy something on the fly, "Just because it looks so kewl!". The added benefit of Necromancer is that it uses the distrobution channels of White Wolf (easy access for most retailers and decent margins).

Just ranting on, and on, while i cough out my lungs ;-)

Someone (as someone always does) mentioned the 'illegal' network of product scans. It's made out to be asif people are not going to buy anymore books if they are overpriced, i think that's an illusion. Sure, if products get more expensive the chance is bigger that people will take an electronic copy and not buy the real thing. BUT over 90% of the target audience still prefers it's books in printform for 'consumpton'. Thus chances are that the 'illegal' copy will be printed out, now i don't know about the rest of you, but i don't relish te experience to print out 400 pages (especially if done on my home printer and that's an highend inkjet). You have to print double sided (otherwise you have one big pile of paper) and have to bind the whole packge, even if you can do this for free at work or at school, a lot of people would rather buy it at $30 (or $21 @-30%) compared at 320 pages at $40 (or $28 @-30%). That's a 20% decrease in page count and a 33% increase in price. The savest way for publishers to 'secure' their products is to add a lot of color to their books (FR style especially).

But the most important thing i think people seem to forget is consistent quality. If people buy a couple of products from a certain publisher and find most of them 'pretty crap' (sorry MP), you'll see a certain drop in sales. So will the retailers and next time when the new product list arives, that publisher will be noted as an investment risk and even good products might not initially be stocked...

 

[Pramas]

Plus, then there is the whole issue of returns. You sales to distributors might be great, but 6 months from now you see big returns of unsold product. It is really hard to peg the market right now. And I even have a bit of an advantage since I can compare my stuff to other SSS stuff, so I dont have to just rely on sales data for my own products. And I still have a hard time predicting this stuff.

Sales into the hobby trade are usually not returnable (though maybe White Wolf has its own terms). It's the book trade where returns are a danger. However, while GR and Necro are in the book trade, most d20 companies are not so they don't have the additional headache of dealing with returns.

Our pricing structure begins with a base of $14.95 for a 64 book and scales up from there. Other factors, like hardbacks, poster maps, and color printing, can add cost. Freeport: The City of Adventure, for instance is the same page count as our upcoming Plot & Poison: A Guidebook to Drow, but $29.95 to Plot's $24.95. That's because Freeport is hardback and has a bitchin' color, fold out, poster map.

At a certain point though, publishers get diminishing returns for adding page count and content. In another thread, I showed how Book of the Righteous has the word count of 7 of our 64 page books. If I charge the same word to price ratio, Book of the Righteous would be $105. Now big books can be worthwhile for other reasons (they grab attention, they add prestige to your line, etc.), but you'll note that we don't have any other 320 page books on our schedule right now.

 

[Pramas]

Let's take for example:
- The Book of Righteous [320 pages, B&W, Hardcover, $40]
- Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting [320 pages, Color, Hardcover, Color Map, $40]

Now, how exactly am i going to explain to my customers that these books are worth the same price? Is TBoR better written? Also, i'm pretty sure that i'll sell a lot more of FRCS books @$40 than TBoR @$40, so why would i want to order a lot of TBoR?

You can tell them several things. First, WotC can charge that much because they do print runs ten times larger than the biggest d20 company on products like the FRCS. Their cost per unit is much lower than mine, so they can afford to do color books for $40. You can also point out that Book of the Righteous is the price of two WotC class books (Tome and Blood, etc.) but contains 3-4 times the material.

Second, Book of the Righteous has more utility than FRCS. FRCS only has value if you plan to run a campaign there, whereas the material in BotR can be used in nearly any campaign setting.

If people ask for a God bbok i usually ask first whether or not they have Deities and Demigods, if yes, i ask wheter or not they play Forgotten Realms or would mind using FR gods (FR god book is slick!), after that we get to SSSs The Divine and the Defeated, and THEN to TBoR, mostly because it's not a cheap book (AEG has a God book, but for some reason i haven't gotten it yet with my orders)...

I think your first question ought to be, "Are you using a published campaign setting?" If so, point them to the FR, Scarred Lands, or another appropriate book. If they are not, Book of the Righteous is a much better purchase for them.

Clark's attitude gets him a LOT of good will with customers. Also a lower price will make people more willing to buy something on the fly, "Just because it looks so kewl!". The added benefit of Necromancer is that it uses the distrobution channels of White Wolf (easy access for most retailers and decent margins).

Clark has the luxury of being distributed by White Wolf. Most d20 companies don't. Clark also has the luxury of running his company as a hobby. I need to provide for my family and the rest of the GR team. I seek customer goodwill by providing the highest quality material that I can, using name authors and top line artists, and continuing to try to make my products look and play better. Book of the Righteous was a milestone book for us and Mutants & Masterminds will be another one.

 

[Cergorach]

Re: Re: Higher prices?

EN World ate my rant!<5,13KB rant snipped by SysOp>

Ohhh! Greg speaks wise words he does! (Greg just has to be a small green old balding fellow ;-)

It's true that there are now so many products that customers have a wide range of choices and only so much cash to spend. You really have to jump out with quality products or something really eye catching (Dragon Star for example). For some reason the publishers that are in it for the love of it are often more succesfull than publishers who aren't. Sometimes love pays off in business...

What i do hope is that some of the publishers out there finally get the hint that there's no huge pile of money to be had in the RPG industry. Eventually we will en up with an industry that is made up of publishers who are in for it for the love and not for the money. That's when thing will get interesting, a smaller fragmentation of the market, no more two dozen variations of the same theme, only a couple. That should mean that publishers would sell more, have larger printruns and generally make a larger profit. Which in turn would then be infested in better products, would mean better quality writing, better quality writing => higher paid writer (atleast that's how it should be IMHO)...

To be blunt, pirates who claim it's because prices are too high are liars <rant snipped by disgruntled SysOp>

Actually, it's not that black and white. I knew a lot of people in my student years that weren't as fortunate as i was (money wise). They had access to copy and print facilities at the university (for free) and would make copies of the PHB, etc. (for free). These guys brew their own beer (which is rather cheap, even when done in large quantaties), had sucky and small dorm rooms and already had to work rather hard and long at lousy wages (this money went mostly into living and school expenses). These same guys now hold excellent jobs and are paid very good wages, these folks buy now a sne load of D20 material because they can. I also started the same way at a vey young age (11), i saved my allowance to buy the PHB, that was my allowance for 2 months (AD&D books here rather expensive those days in The Netherlands). I wasn't allowed to work at that age, so working was out of the question, thus i borrowed a couple of interesting books from my friends and copied the most interesting parts from them at my fathers workplace. Now i invest over 70% of my income in Game material (mostly D20) and all profits are inveted again. Would i still have the same amount of enthausiasm (probably not correctly spelled) if i hadn't? I don't know? But i do know that in the last fifteen years i spent a whole lot of money on RPG material and it actually didn't cost the industry a penny that i 'coppied' interesting parts from some books. Does that make me a low-life, i certainly hope not!

I really think that the 'low-live pirates' you are talking about are NOT your target audience and wheter or not your products where available over the internet 'illegally' would matter one way or the other in terms of sales. The thing you should worry about are the 'borderline' casses, those who do feel that the product does not fit in their budget at it's current price and are content enough to print it out at work/college. Calling people noughty names, won't help (it might even alienate some people) a bit. But making products that have a high production quality value compared to price will. Making a book hardcover, color, high quality paper (glossy), high pagecount, competative price, posters, etc. will make the line a lot lower for people to actually buy a product. If after all that people still are content to copy your product rather than buy it, than these people where never your target audience and any effort to combat them is a waste of effort, time and money.

 

[Pramas]

Seems my message double posted due to board weirdnes. Nothing to see here, move along.

 

[JohnNephew]

Re: Re: Re: Higher prices?

I really think that the 'low-live pirates' you are talking about are NOT your target audience and wheter or not your products where available over the internet 'illegally' would matter one way or the other in terms of sales. The thing you should worry about are the 'borderline' casses, those who do feel that the product does not fit in their budget at it's current price and are content enough to print it out at work/college. Calling people noughty names, won't help (it might even alienate some people) a bit. But making products that have a high production quality value compared to price will. Making a book hardcover, color, high quality paper (glossy), high pagecount, competative price, posters, etc. will make the line a lot lower for people to actually buy a product. If after all that people still are content to copy your product rather than buy it, than these people where never your target audience and any effort to combat them is a waste of effort, time and money.

Let me clarify my point this way:

Some pirates say, "I do this because the publisher rips me off by charging too much."

Publishers can't, for example, cut their prices in half. Most publishers just don't have that room to maneuver; they would be losing money on every book. So "charging too much" typically means 10% or 20% -- say, charging $10 for a 32 page module instead of $8 or $9.

If the pirates were honest, we should not see any of those $8 and $9 modules pirated, only the $10 ones that are "too much." However, reviewing the titles circulating in pirated form, it's clear that there is no such distinction -- starting with the ludicrously cheap $20 core rulebooks that were being swapped back and forth as soon as 3E was released. Those rulebooks were priced at a level where any publisher other than WotC would have lost money on every single copy, easily -- we would have to charge 2X or 3X that price, if not more, for such books, with our print volumes. This tells me that if I cut my prices by 50% or 75%, and lost money on every sale, I would STILL have those same pirates trading their warez -- and they'd still make the bogus "it costs too much, so that's why we do it" excuse to justify it.

Cutting prices (at least not within the range of reason) won't dissuade pirates. So why should one worry that raising prices will encourage pirates?

That's what I was trying to say.

In the end, I think we agree, to wit: We can't take the behavior of pirates much into account. They'll do it whether a book is $5 or $50, and (IMHO) make up excuses to make themselves feel justified in doing it either way. When it comes to figuring out what you need to charge as a publisher, forget them.

 

[Thorin Stoutfoot]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Higher prices?

Publishers can't, for example, cut their prices in half. Most publishers just don't have that room to maneuver; they would be losing money on every book. So "charging too much" typically means 10% or 20% -- say, charging $10 for a 32 page module instead of $8 or $9.

I have to say, the industry distributor chain must be incredibly inefficient for this to happen. I usually see books sold at 30% off on Amazon.com (and I typically manage to an additional 5% by using the special credit card), plus free shipping. That means that on average, at least 35% of the cover price goes into the wholesale/retail distribution chain!

Doesn't that mean that if publishers somehow managed to capture that extra 35%, you could pay writers more AND have better profits?

Anyway, the Book of the Righteous definitely got really good reviews. It's not priced out of my reach, but at $40, I have the patience to wait for a 2nd hand copy of eBay (it's not available on Amazon.com at a 30% discount, either). Gaming is a luxury. It's something I do after I've paid for rent/mortgage, food, car mainteneance, doctor's bills and retirement savings. Sure, it's a cheaper hobby than going to the movies ($20 for me and my girlfriend), but it's not cheaper than renting a DVD ($5 a movie), unless I watch my expenses by not buying a $40 book every month.