Price points for print books...

[Frilf]

Hello, all.

I'm curious: What do you think is a good price for a 32-36 B&W supplement? Please vote in the poll and post your comments below. Thanks!

 

[Vaxalon]

How often do you see something this short, in print?

I can't see it being profitable.

 

[sellars]

I chose 11-15 because that are prices that we here in the Netherlands pay for adventures and supplements.

Of course I didn't consider the fact that if the American price was 10 to 15 dollars, the Dutch price would be 15 to 20 dollars.

I guess in retrospect that puts me in the below $10 range.

 

[Asmor]

What he said.

Something that short should just be a PDF, and that's that.

 

[DSC-EricPrice]

Is it really that unprofitable, or has too much money been sunk into them in the past? TSR (which I know ultimately did go out of business) seems to have made good money for quite some time selling adventures to go with our early rulebooks. I cant believe they would continue to make SO many if they werent popular. The question then is to ask what has changed?

Is it the bleeds we see on EVERYTHING now (which can account for as much as 25% of printing costs)

Is it the amount of adventure-specific artwork that one finds now? Has the economy of simple B&W line art faded away or been usurped because of the high price of creating art in a digital world of Photoshop?

Is it overhead in the form of marketing people and lawyers, secretaries and the like required when your company just gets too big?

Is it the inability to get good distribution because of a perceived saturation in the marketplace, and because of the work required to sit on the shelf next to the guy who owns the license?

I think we've all grown up and forgotten the simplicity of the early adventure designs. Now our dungeons have ecology, rhyme, reason, and lots of back story. I often wish I could tap into the young market again. The market I represented back when I first started playing (6th grade). Do they care about bleeds? Do they care about ecology? Or is that all theyve ever known? Id love to hear from young people, and Id love to hear what people think about the artificial, non value added aspects that I believe have inflated pricing over the last 20 years.

 

[DaveMage]

The 32-page Goodman Games modules are running $10.99. That seems fair to me.

 

[Seeker95]

Is it really that unprofitable, or has too much money been sunk into them in the past? TSR (which I know ultimately did go out of business) seems to have made good money for quite some time selling adventures to go with our early rulebooks. I cant believe they would continue to make SO many if they werent popular. The question then is to ask what has changed?

Competition.

TSR had almost no competition. Judges Guild was the only company authorized to make adventures that would "work" with D&D other than TSR. So if only one in five customers are DM's, and there are a million players, that means there are 200,000 DMs in the world. TSR could expect to sell to nearly 100% of the DMs that purchase pre-made adventures, so they new what both their print run and price point should be. Even if only one in five DMs purchased pre-made modules, that is still almost 10,000 units of a single module. I know I purchased every module they made from 1978 to 1985... often the same day they were released.

Today, with the Internet offering so many free adventures, and hundreds of third-party publishers making adventures from $2.98 and up, available in PDF instant download to online ordering through any of fifty different online sources, a single print run of a module just can't expect a large purchasing audience.

Forget illegal competition. Unless your module is the "must have" product of the year (a la RttToEE, etc.), you simply can't count on selling very many copies. Low sales = low print run. Low print run = high print cost per unit. High print cost = low profit.