PDF Industry - How do we help it grow?

[rpghost]

When is the opening? I may be able to get there and, even if I can't, I can send Christopher Shy over to do signings.

Sometime in November 2003. Not Holloween weekend. On a Saturday and Sunday. That's about all I got right now.

So far with only word of mouth promotion I have this:

Guests include Gary Gygax, Ken Hite, Jim Ward, Christopher Clark, Cylde Caldwell, Jolly Blackburn, and more. Free signings, door prizes, and open gaming!

Might do some free food - but not sure if I want the new carpet abused. I will promote this online, newspapers, flyers, and maybe even radio.

James

 

[jmucchiello]

Might do some free food - but not sure if I want the new carpet abused. I will promote this online, newspapers, flyers, and maybe even radio.

Make sure someone covers the event (with pitures) for the ezine!

 

[rpghost]

Make sure someone covers the event (with pitures) for the ezine!

Excellent point. I am/was actually thinking of installing webcams in the store

James

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Hmmm, as a consumer what first brought me to the PDF market was one thing: Out of Print Products. Specifically the old TSR Adventure Design Kit. From there I went to the free section, and thence to the specials. I made a bunch of further purchases for DM's Day, and have continued coming nack since.

If you can gather enough support from PDF publishers a 'sampler CD' in Dungeon or Dragon might help. (I would recommend having samples not complete products in the CD, whet their appetites, don't satisfy them.) And by support I mean helping pay for the CD, not just okaying product.

Advertise in printed products by companies that also have PDFs. Bastion, Mongoose, Pinnacle, and Malhavoc come to mind.

One minor problem that I have had with your site I don't know if there is any solution for: Slow load times for the pages due to all the graphics. When I go to your site I often know exactly what I want, so the slow loads because of the graphics can be annoying, offering a low graphics page for dial up connections might help there.

The main thing I have been shopping for lately on your site has been fold up terrain, mostly by World Works, make sure those are seen at conventions, the darn things very nearly sell themselves once people see them. Get in contact with folks running games/demos at conventions, let them have promos of the terrain, heck make it part of any package the convention may hand out to the folks running demos.. Games like Mage Knight as well as wargames and Dungeons and Dragons.

As for banner ads, try TheMiniaturesPage.com the only site where I have clicked all their banners.

And, silly as it sounds: bookmarks. Make some type of bookmarks that folks can slip into their Players Handbook or Dungeon Master's Guide and use for indexing. Give them away at conventions. Put headings like Experience Rewards or Attacks of Opportunity at the top, and your logo along the length, every time they use the mark to open to that section they will see your logo, and trust me, they will find them useful. (I made my own set, then ended up printing a few more copies for my players.)

I hope this helps.

The Auld Grump

 

[Zaruthustran]

(And now for the obligatory Amazon stumping):

One way to grow your PDF business is to go where the customers are. The majority of online retail consumers are on Amazon. Most potential PDF customers are online. So, list on Amazon.

One way to grow the PDF industry is to figure out a solution to that Piracy problem. I'm not an e-book expert but I think there are some interesting things going on with digital rights management for electronic text documents. It may be useful to form a formal fantasy game PDF publishers trade group, complete with folks who devote serious time lobbying MS and other DRM power blocks with your particular issues.

One thing is clear: it's a tough biz. Gamers are stingy (I know I am), and people in general have a hard time with the concept of paying for downloads.

My two cents,

-z

 

[jmucchiello]

(And now for the obligatory Amazon stumping):

One way to grow your PDF business is to go where the customers are. The majority of online retail consumers are on Amazon. Most potential PDF customers are online. So, list on Amazon.

Requires an ISBN. ISBNs cost hundreds of dollars each. PDF makers have no startup money. If they did, they'd print.

Also, Amazon probably takes more than 20% off the list price (as RPGNow does). That would also reduce profits.

One way to grow the PDF industry is to figure out a solution to that Piracy problem. I'm not an e-book expert but I think there are some interesting things going on with digital rights management for electronic text documents. It may be useful to form a formal fantasy game PDF publishers trade group, complete with folks who devote serious time lobbying MS and other DRM power blocks with your particular issues.

Digital Rights Management costs money. Big money. RIAA doesn't want DRM to stop piracy. They want DRM to eliminate self-promotion by independent artists. (But that's political and doesn't belong here.) RIAA sales are down because the economy is in the tank. Everyone industry's sales are down. People are tight with their money in a recession.

DRM doesn't stop someone from printing and rescanning. Even if it did, it wouldn't stop someone from manually typing it into wordpad while reading it out of another window. DRM can't do a thing about that kind of copy. In any case, piracy is a crock. People who pirate your material (any material) would not have paid for it in the first place. So if you completely stop piracy, you gain no profit. Why bother spending money on people who don't want to be your customer?

 

[Arnix]

Been a while since I've posted on the boards, so forgive me if I'm a little out of touch. Been slaving over work, school, and trying to put out the best pdf product I can hammer out.


Now to the meat of my reply.


Actually, I think that the ISBN numbers are a bit cheaper than that, maybe $30 each, but you have to buy them in some level of bulk. At least thats the numbers that I have read in a previous post.

One approach to fixing this problem that I though about was to partner with another publisher and maybe splittng the cost of a bundle. That way you can get a bulk discount without having to order a lot of numbers.

I plan on having a talk with my partners and my friends over as 12toMidnight and maybe splitting a 10 pack or something. I can scrounge together the costs of a few ISBNs, but don't want to shell out the cash for 10 when we don't even have 10 books planned right now. Especially since we have already had to shell out all of the start up costs for pdf publishing. Amazing how fast software licenses add up.


I do agree that the Kazaa issue really isn't that big. Very few of the people who pirate the pdf's would have bought them anyway.


Cameron (Arnix) Guill
Alea Publishing Group
AleaPublishing.com

 

[jmucchiello]

Actually, I think that the ISBN numbers are a bit cheaper than that, maybe $30 each, but you have to buy them in some level of bulk. At least thats the numbers that I have read in a previous post.

One approach to fixing this problem that I though about was to partner with another publisher and maybe splittng the cost of a bundle. That way you can get a bulk discount without having to order a lot of numbers.

I think that price is in Canada. In the US it's an arm and a leg. And you cannot split them up among your friends. Only one company name appears on the ownership field of the RANGE of ISBNs. If someone were looking for your book, they would send the fulfillment request to whatever company was registered as the owner of the RANGE. So short of creating a dummy corporation, and even that, I think they frown on, you cannot share a range of ISBNs. Look it up on the Internet, all the information about ISBNs you could possibly want to know is available.

 

[Arnix]

Do you have any specific sites? I do a google with ISBN int he search and every book ever published seems to come back.


Thanks,
Cameron (Arnix) Guill
Alea Publishing Group
AleaPublishing.com

 

[jgbrowning]

Do you have any specific sites? I do a google with ISBN int he search and every book ever published seems to come back.


Thanks,
Cameron (Arnix) Guill
Alea Publishing Group
AleaPublishing.com

http://bowker.com/bowkerWeb/


on the left ISBN agency

joe b.