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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AaronLoeb" data-source="post: 428358" data-attributes="member: 4382">In general, it seems like a lot of the arguments on this thread are boiling down to "people like these books enough to pay more for them in return for higher quality," responded to with "I don't and therefore they won't." Both arguments are missing, in my usually inaccurate opinion, the subtle nuance of pricing as marketing mechanism...Clearly, expensive books are for a smaller share of the market than dirt-cheap books. To use my own book as an example, no, neither GR nor I imagined that every gamer in North America and Europe would want a copy. Yes, we knew that the size and price of it would deter some people. But you make a decision -- you make the best book you possibly can for your target consumer and hope people outside the core consumer will become interested by word of mouth, marketing and reviews. Then you work like heck to reach that core consumer with your message: this product is for you!Because this is a book about religion in d20 games, it is obviously not a "mass market" book. It is not something every single person in the market might want, therefore it should not be assigned a "mass market" price point of $6 - $7 (maybe in RPGs, mass market pp is more like 15). You give people within the niche of core consumers the best product you can at a reasonable and fair price. In this case, the core consumer has been wanting a book with a comprehensive pantheon and corresponding churches for years; comprehensiveness takes a lot of words (300,000, as it turns out). We would not have satisfied the core by producing a 64-page book at $15. While that size and price of book might have made the book more palatable to people who never wanted the book in the first place, without a core you can't sell a book in the first place. And for the core, $40 is a reasonable and fair price for 300,000 words of useful material and lots of lovely black and white art. It is not a cheap price, of course, but it is not a scandal nor is it an outrage.Obviously people who look at a book and say "I won't pick that up because it's $5 more than a black and white book should be based on established market practice, but I'd buy it if it were color. It's a matter of principle!" are not the core target audience for the product -- or any product. Target consumers don't make decisions about things they really want based on arcane production value comparisons. This is not me being a wisea$$. I'm serious. Marketing and sales professionals tell me this all the time, and I never believe them but they back it up with numbers: the core consumer on an entertainment product makes decisions about the product driven by desire first and foremost. You don't market to the core with lower price. (Note, for example: Blizzard already charges more for its games than nearly  anyone else, and for the core they offer even more expensive collectors editions, which they sell out of. These products are as much as $30 more than other computer games on the market. Do their core consumers complain? No, because Blizzard makes highly, highly desirable products). Lowering prices is how you reach the secondary market, and you sure don't want to do that out the gate unless you have to. WotC learned this the hard way -- they priced the PH for a secondary market at release, didn't need to, and unnecessarily lost millions of dollars in potential revenue. Of course, you can also slash prices for predatory marketing purposes to put your competition out of business so you can raise your prices to be higher than they were in the first place when the competition is gone. This unsavory practice leads to international trade wars and name calling, but all's fair in love and capitalism, eh wot?Now, there are members of the target consumer group who look at a book and say "I really, really want it but just can't afford it." Every one of those instances is regrettable -- but what can you do about it? There will always be people who say that (and mean it, deeply, truly, honestly. I'm not trying to belittle anyone) when you get into non-mass market pricing. You just try to keep the price at a level that there are as few of those people as possible.But just because GR published my very large book does not mean (as our gentleman retailer implied) that they are pricing themselves outside of reality. Like any reasonable publisher, they have an assortment of products. The character sheets and pocket grimoires are clearly mass market products and are priced accordingly. Book of the Righteous is for interested DMs and Players (and yes, it is quite useful for players -- most of the crunch is prestige classes, a character class, feats and spells) who, like me and many other busy people like me, want to game but don't want to spend weeks designing every facet of a world, but also don't (necessarily) want to buy into all the assumptions of an existing campaign setting. No, it's not an enormous market, but it is a market and it's a market that is not served by other god books. If you think you can't sell it, I guess you shouldn't try, but I found it to be a pretty easy sell at Gen Con. Now, obviously, I believe in my book a lot. It was years of effort and I care about it. I'm not a professional RPG freelancer like a lot of people piping up, so I can afford to be atached to one product. But I don't think my attachment is blinding me on this issue. As a consumer, my experiences consistently back up these assumptions about pricing. For example, I really wanted Oathbound based on the preview. I flipped through it at the store and saw some things that, were I unconvinced, might have cause me to put the book down. But my desire for the book was firmly enough established through Bastion's excellent marketing that it didn't matter. I bought the book anyway, at full FLGS price ($43 with tax), and I do not regret it at all. Honestly, price didn't even enter into my mind when making the purchase. Nor does it when I buy a computer game or a book or a movie ticket unless it's outrageous or unless I don't already desire the product (at which point, I am a secondary, not a core consumer, or I'm a core consumer who has not been reached due to poor marketing).Point is this, and is simple: relying on price as your primary or even secondary marketing mechanism is a bad business mistake and will lose you money unless you have a sub-standard (often called "bargain") product, in which case, price it as low as you can (this comes from my years in bargain book publishing, where price was our #1 marketing mechanism). This is an established business principle and is proven time and again in books, movies and, particularly, video games. It will prove itself to be true in RPGs also, as it did with the PH. Or at least that's the opinion of this particular chattering monkey.Oop oop, ack ack,Aaron</blockquote>

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