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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chern Ann" data-source="post: 1135920" data-attributes="member: 14400">Philip, just checking, you got 3000 HC, FC copies printed for $11,500 or for $10 each?  Did that include colour seperation? If the former I'm definitely going to check out Sirivatana.I'll put it another way, I paid $7k to get the book colour seperated and plated, and $4.5k to get 1000 copies printed.  So my cost per unit goes down dramatically the more copies I print, but here's the trick of it;  there's no advantage to printing lots since the printers are more than happy to print me up another 500 copies later, if I need it, without charging me the plating costs all over again.  I've currently got 580 out of 1000 left, so am quite close to break even. The reason why I brought up such low quantity runs is because of something James mentioned about the poor response to POD (due to perceived poorer quality?) and that 500 units in the e-publishing world is considered a hot seller.  If you could reliably expect selling 500 units via the e-publishing route for a 100 page B&W book, let's say it's a core rulebook, why not just get 1000 copies printed?  It'd cost $5k to get it done and shipped to your door step.  If the book sold out, it'd cost $3k or less to get another 1000 copies.[snipped my previous reply]  I was just rereading the whole thread, and it seems that publishers already are using PDFs to gauge public opinion before deciding whether or not to go to print; I'm referring to the top 10 sellers and the observation that most of them have already gone to print (I wouldn't know, as an outsider to the RPG world so I'm going to assume this is true).  So maybe a good way of educating people about PDFs would be to get RPGNow to take a couple of these books that have "made it" and sell them on consignment at conventions, rather than giving out demo CDs.I think there's no real problem with PDF publishing if you're near the top of the best seller range that does 500 copies or more in PDF sales.  If I had a title that was doing that well I'd just use the profits from the PDF sales to fund printing (B&W internal, HC FC cover would be $5k max for 1000 copies).  That's where the synergy between PDFs and print publishing lies I think.  Would this be the way that most publishers decide whether or not to do a print run?The real problem seems to be at the lower end of the scale, the 200 or less copies sold.  Taking my outsider's point of view with a pinch of salt, it seems like anything that could possibly do well in print (where the real money is at the moment?) has already been picked up by a publisher based on the PDF sales already, everything else will not make the jump to print.It's been previously mentioned on the thread that customers aren't at the level yet where they are prepared to consider PDFs as a main stream alternative to physical books.  In the meantime, I would view e-publishing as a useful market feedback tool to see if a product would sell in print before actually publishing; it's like a focus group that pays you.  I would then aggressively try to make money out of print editions of the PDFs that did well and focus my development on similar titles.I don't think I'm saying anything that the folk who've made the jump to print don't already know: low print runs aren't as expensive or capital intensive as you might expect, there are many alternate distribution channels especially if you're only trying to sell 1000 copies.  It seems to me that the synergy between e-publishing and printing is obvious, if you have a good e-publishing run you've raised enough money to do a print run, where you can make serious money if you manage to sell the book, which you probably will since you had a good PDF run! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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