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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="Darrin Drader" data-source="post: 1143340" data-attributes="member: 7394">You know, every tim e the price issue comes up, my response is that you just don't understand the economics of the situation. First of all, any book printed in full color costs the publisher an arm and a leg. Second, hard covers are also quite a bit of money for the publisher. Finally, both of the books mentioned above are licensed products. I've heard numbers for the Babylon 5 license tossed around that are in the neighborhood of $100,000. That means that over the life of the product line (or up front, depending on how Mongoose arranged it), they have to pay Warner Brothers that amount for the right to sell games based on that setting. Now, for a roughly 300 page book at approximately 800 words per page at 5 cents per word, you have to pay your game designer roughly $12,000. Add to that editing fees, which are about a third of that ($4,000), typesetting (another $2,000). There will probably also be misc costs of around $3,000. Then you've got your printing costs. I'm guessing that Mongoose will be able to move a total of 20,000 of these maximum and the printing costs for full color plus hardback would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 each. Add to that the fact that they sell their books to the retailer for 50% of cover prince, and lets crunch the numbers here: $12,000 design$4,000 editing$2,000 typesetting$3,000 misc$200,000 printing/shipping$221,000 totalNow, assuming that they sell 20,000 copies at $22.50, they make $450,000. Subtract your costs and the profit on this is now $229,000. Not bad, but you have to take into consideration that the company still has to keep more products in development and they still have to pay Warner Brothers $100,000 for the license. Also, they're taking a pretty serious risk. What if they can only move half that number? If that ends up being the case, then we're only talking about making $225,000 - just barely enough to cover their costs, let alone paying Warner Brothers their due. In other words, even at 10,000 copies sold, with a $45 retail price tag on each book, and sales that are about 3 times the expected sales for most D20 books that are published, they've actually lost money.All this means that you, as a consumer, have the right to purchase or not purchase based on price, but I disagree that the price to value ratio is out of whack. Personally, I own all the B5 books Mongoose has released thus far, and I will continue to buy them as long as the quality remains high.</blockquote>

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