Publishing Single-item PDFs - Advice?

[Munkwunk]

One of the things I love about this industry is the ability for publishers of any size to put their ideas out there for the world to see, and occasionally to make a small margin of profit from it. I'm a huge fan of RPGNow/OneBookShelf and I tend to buy a lot of little supplements, some of which are only 4 pages in length (not including OGL) at a super cheap rate, if only to get ideas for my own games.

I've developed quite a catalogue of these sorts of items over time myself, and especially for D&D -- 20-level base classes, monsters, items, etc. -- and I once had the idea to put a bunch of them together and publish them through RPGNow, but that sort of took a back seat to life for a while.

My biggest issue though is that I am by no means an artist and am not planning on making enough money on the sale of such items to warrant commissioning an artist to draw pictures for each supplement. I have seen a few PDFs with no art whatsoever and I was wondering what you experienced folks thought of this practice?

How much is too much to ask for, say, a new 20-level base class that doesn't have any art associated with it? $0.50? $1.00?

I'm more interested in sending these ideas out in to the wild than making a quick buck, but more importantly I want to gain some experience in the PDF Publishing arena to know what I'm doing for that time when some of my bigger, more full-featured projects (the ones I'll pay someone to add color to) are ready to publish.

So the big question is: How important do you feel it is to have art attached to small, impulse-buy PDFs? Would it be worth it for me to try to sell them through OneBookShelf (bearing in mind I've already paid for a publisher's account) than to just list them on some freebie web site somewhere? Also, bear in mind that I have bigger projects in the works and am looking for some publishing experience, however little, at this time.

Any advice or thouhts on the matter would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Morrus]

One option is to use public domain art. There's tons of really old art which is appropriate. Be careful to make sure it is public domain, but if it's a few centuries old it will definitely be.

Alternatively, pitch 'em to a publisher who *can* afford the art and resources. You'll get paid per-word, most likely, and if you're a new author it won't be much.

 

[jefgorbach]

generally speaking, artwork is a nice fluffy waste of space for the most part which the majority of which is NOT needed when a quick descriptive blurb would more than suffice to trigger the reader mental faculties into picturing your creation.

ie a ring is a ring is a ring so the funds for a picture displaying how your particular finger-sized metal donut etched with gold filigree and diamond studs differs from the one next to it in the display case would be better spent on word-count relating its creation/usage in your campaign ... words which further bring your creation to life, provide additional in-game hooks/ideas and could easily be adjusted to better fit my own.

Its not so much what it looks like but rather what has happened beforehand to make that particular piece so important.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

I kind of have to disagree - pretty pictures do help sell books. Heck, I know folks who have picked Pathfinder over 4e for the pictures alone. (A stupid, stupid method to choose a game, even if I do agree with which game they chose.)

Look around for public domain art - Dover has some very good collections of royalty free art.

I would also recommend Lord Kyl, but his site seems to have passed away. But, you can jump into the Wayback Machine and find much of his collection.

The Auld Grump

 

[Morrus]

Yeah, production value and artwork do make a big difference to sales. There's no way getting around that unless you're lucky enough to come up with one of those low-budget sleeper hits.

 

[Bacris]

Yeah, production value and artwork do make a big difference to sales. There's no way getting around that unless you're lucky enough to come up with one of those low-budget sleeper hits.

Absolutely.

Sure, there are those who won't care, but production quality and artwork make huge differences.

Take it for someone who has gone from virtually non-existent art budgets to now having art budgets that tend to START at $400 and still wishes it was more.

You can get away with minimal art - especially if you do a decent job with some text effects for a pseudo-cover. But I'd recommend having at least one or two decent illustrations in a product.

Additionally, one thing we did at Dreamscarred Press for our first few products was to release the constituent pieces with no / minimal / free art, then use the revenue to fund the art budget for the final book. That can work really well if the content is good.

 

[Morrus]

Take it for someone who has gone from virtually non-existent art budgets to now having art budgets that tend to START at $400 and still wishes it was more.

I dream of the days of a $400 art budget; they were simpler times! We spend friggin' thousands when you add it up. $400 would not get us far!

 

[Bacris]

Well, the size of the product definitely makes a difference.

The Bestiary product that we're working on, I'm expecting the budget for that is likely going to be at least $500, and it's only expected to be around 32 pages...

But for Psionics Expanded, I imagine our art budget for that is going to be around... $600-700? And it's going to be at least 100 pages, if not 200. Leveraging existing graphics that we used in more obscure / poor selling products, things like that, can stretch a budget pretty handily...

 

[pawsplay]

How much is too much to ask for, say, a new 20-level base class that doesn't have any art associated with it? $0.50? $1.00?

That's a tricky question. Do it, and tell us... as far as I know, no one does that. $5.99 is probably the top end, for one class, with art, with a couple of pages of commentary. Bottom price is... well, free, publishers sometimes give away one or two classes. And Fistulf of Denarii, my product, contains eleven classes, making each class cost less than $0.25. Of course, the reason it's priced like that is because I normally wouldn't expect one person to purchase eleven of my classes.

I'm more interested in sending these ideas out in to the wild than making a quick buck, but more importantly I want to gain some experience in the PDF Publishing arena to know what I'm doing for that time when some of my bigger, more full-featured projects (the ones I'll pay someone to add color to) are ready to publish.

A worthy goal.

So the big question is: How important do you feel it is to have art attached to small, impulse-buy PDFs?

Vital. If you don't do that, you don't have publishing experience. You might as well give your class away on a website. At least then you can hope for eternal glory or something.

So here's the deal. Figure out all your actual expenses for producing the product. If you do it all yourself, as I did, that cost is probably the cost of getting a logo and your art. Figre out how many copies you expect to sell; my suggestion is to guess around 100. You can sell about 100 copies of anything, if it's good, for a game that's in print. Add the cost of your art, plus your desired profit, the divide by 100. There's the cost of your product.

You can get one portrait commissioned for about $15 to $25, and you'll need "cover art" (at least for posting on a sales sit). If you want, you could use just one quarter page illustration on the cover and make the book more graphical inside, without a second portrait. Alternatively, you could hire art for the cover (for probably $50 to $200) and, after making sure it's okay, use the same art inside. There's lots of ways to do this.

Remember that you're trying to develop an audience. If you think your class is awesome enough to stand on its own, my suggestion is to spend $50 on hiring art, or find a really nice public domain image, and set the price of the product to $0.99. You could try to give away the same class without art, but I don't think that's really going to help you.

First of all, people tend to value something for what it costs. It's irrational, but it's a fact of human psychology. You can probably sell more things for 99 cents than you could give away for free, in many cases. Second, if you give away your class without art, you'll increase your exposure... as someone who makes products with no art.

If you think the product is really good, but you don't want to risk your own money on it, not even $50, either you lack confidence, or you're not being honest with yourself about the commercial potential of the work. If you think the work deserves a larger audience, it's worth considering whether you'd rather sell it to someone else rathe than publish it yourself.

If your goal is to be a publisher, if you derive personal satisfaction from midwiving products into being, and having control over the look, editing, and production of products, then you will need art. Period. Published products have art. They just do. you might as well try running a movie theater without popcorn, as having a serious product with no art.

 

[pawsplay]

This is an example of what can be had, royalty-free, and for a reasonable price:

illodeli.com - Pick Your Own!