Quality, price, and the place for PDFs in the print industry
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Drawmack
First Post
Mark said:
I love you, Man...
What can I say - four 1/4 the price I usually get more content, quicker delivery then mail order, easy on shelf space, burned to CD for the game table means 1 cd in stead of creates of books.
For me personally pdf's are just all around better. However, using them so much I have had a lot of time to say, i want this - wouldn't that be cool, what if
jmucchiello
Hero
So I should use college students whom I pay in pizza to do my writing and editing too, right? What did you say in that other thread?Drawmack said:
What a double standard! I thought you wanted ACTORS. Actors cost money. Acting guilds have minimum payments for voice actors that are probably bigger than the budgets of most 64 page supplements. I too am a musician, song writer, singer, guitarist in my spare time. If I'm supposed to pay the writer his fair shake why am I giving the voice artist the shaft?
Read up on this. You have to separate the OGC from the rest of the code using independent markup. I have master's degree in computer science (and make my primary living programming computers). Writing these kinds of programs is like inventing a new computer language. It is not something you can just do. Ask the PCGen (and Twin Rose software) folk how long it took them to become OGC compliant. D20 compliance is much easier once you have OGC compiance.
Besides, why should I include a programmable character sheet in my PDF product when I know everyone savvy enough to use PDFs is using e-Tools or PCGen or whatever to make characters? What you should be asking for is plug-ins for those existing products.
I use ghostscript to create my PDFs. I have to hand code the Postscript to do linking. This involves taking my headers and dumping them to plain file and then converting the text to the proper set of pdfmarks. It's not hard. It's just time consuming. I'll be getting a copy of Acrobat soon just to save myself that headache but deep linking (inter-topic linking) is just far to tedious to even think about.
Have you ever gone to a news website? (rhetorical) They have a bunch links to stories. Sometimes the stories have a couple links inside them but mostly they are just identical to the story that went over the wire. Why? There's no profit in deep linking. If I spend an extra week or two deep linking my product will I earn in sales as much as I would have if I'd spent that time pushing another product out the door a week or two sooner? No. I don't think so. Bookmarks, I'll grant you, are a necessity. But making every occurance of "Freak of Nature" be a link to the definition of the "Freak of Nature" Feat is time better spent elsewhere. If you think you are wasting too much time going to the bookmarks, clicking feats and scrolling a page or two to find "Freak of Nature" well I'm sorry. Seriously, tell me how this makes it more likely people will buy my product. I don't see the cost:benefit ratio tipped in the right direction for me to do so.
And I've earned about $725 selling 1 PDF product half of which I've sunk into artwork for my next couple projects and a quarter of which I'm dumping into Acrobat. That leaves $100 "profit" with which to pay myself for writing that 60,000 word PDF. I'd love to accommodate you. But PDFs don't quite earn enough for me to meet your lofty demands.
Abulia
First Post
Reality check: You should be careful when you make such statements. You've just displayed an alarming lack of understanding of the market you purport to be in. Wizard's has sold -- as of a year ago -- over 1 million copies of their rulebooks (PHB, DMG, MM) for D&D with an average of 300,000 copies per book. That number has certainly gone up in the past 15 months. (Source)jmucchiello said:
Normally I wouldn't have called you on this but your snarky exchange with Drawmack pretty much made it a moral imperative.
Come on, group hug. Let's all be nice.
Regards,
Don Mappin
Freelancer for Hire
Drawmack
First Post
The college students would be doing the work for college credit their payment is their degree. For school I've had to write many programs that were on the same level as what I was getting paid to write in the real world. This is no different. You want to have interns do your writting and editing as well, then more power to you it would definatly increase your profit margin and that is something I never come down on someone for doing.jmucchiello said:
Yes actors guilds do have that, but you do not have to hire guilded actors anymore then you have to hire proven writters. Some of the best products out there were written, at least in a large part, by open call submissions of unpublished authors who are much cheaper then say Monte Cook.
You're not giving anyone the shaft. I was suggesting that you find ways to lower the budget and still supply the finished product. You can do this by finding people willing to work cheaper.
I'm 12 credits from a BSCS and I have been a professional programmer for 5 years. In that time I have developed 3 meta languages of my own. There is no need for this now though you can make it run off of xml. Yes the content has to be seperated from the code. Tell me something, in any any well written database application would the ogc be tied in with the code? The only place I can see it being logical to do that is with mathematical formulas and that is easy just put the formula into the database and then pull it back out with a named reference field.
Would that not be a programmable character sheet? BTW: I do not use any of those products. I find the downside of being a programmer is that I'm never happy with what other people write. I tried out e-tools extensivly and firmly give it the thumbs down. However when I'm posting things to the boards I'll do up their stats in e-tools just so I can supply the files to others, why can't the pdf publishers do this as well.
With the method that you use I will agree, however if you're making professional pdfs you don't really have a right to complain, or use as an excuse, that you do not have to professional software that allows you to make quality products. That would be like me saying sure I can write your web-site but it'll take a while cause I'm using a 286.
That's not what I was talking about. I mean where you have an explicit cross reference in your material. You really can't use news sites for this, something more like historychannel.com is appropriate. If the book says (see channelor pg 82). Now this reference had to be double and tripple checked many times and with each layout change to make sure the page number was correct. How hard is it to make channelor a link to the appropriate place in the document and avoid all that double checking?
The term is user friendly, I'm sure you're familiar with it. I go to the index and it tells me that nonnymonny can be found on page 82. So I then have to go to page 82 and look it up. If that were a link it would be much more user friendly. The answer to the question is that at first you probably won't see many more sales from it, but over time you would get a reputation for user friendly pdf's once that reputation is established your sales will increase. Look as Bastion press they release superior quality product and charge extra for it, but that doesn't make their sales less then anyone elses.
First of all, I did not demand anything, but I can tell you this your attitude towards the fans, me being one, is going to loose you sales. Did you never have a class in public speaking or public relations at school?
So you're claiming $100 profit, when this is not the case
You created 1 pdf and make $725 (I'm assuming that this is after you paid for the expenses of creating that pdf.
From this pdf you're paying the price of producing two future pdf's. As baseline let's say you sell the same amount so that's $1450 - but your art was already paid for making them earn $1812.50. Now add to that the $100 you kept from the first one. That's an over all profit of $1912.50 on the three products, two of which your first one enabled.
A reinvestment of funds is payment. You pay yourself by keeping yourself in business. If you want to play with numbers to make yourself seem poor then do it with someone who hasn't had all the math for a comp sci degree please.
EOL
First Post
JoeGKushner said:
Hopefully this won't end up coming across as a crass product plug, but as far as "further use of the medium itself" check out DireKobold.com we have a free demo sign-up.
We take normal well-written adventures (Abulia's is coming out on Friday) just like you'd see in Dungeon Magazine and dynamically generate them. Which means that you enter the level of your party (within +/-3 of base design), the number of characters in your party (1-12), the percentage of recommended treasure, whether you want high, low or medium stats, whether you want images included, and the list goes on.
Yeah, we don't have cut-scenes voice-actors, or map drill-downs but we do offer something which cannot be done with a print product.
And yeah we're just getting started so we're trying to keep costs low, but with the exception of a few people who were just getting their start I've paid .04 cents/word. Which is not outrageous, but its right there with the print publishers.
To get back on topic, I offer adventures from people like Wil Upchurch, Don Mappin, and Jeffrey Quinn, with art and professional cartography, so there's your quality. I charge $34.00 for a years subscription, so there's price, and I offer a service unduplicateable in print, and there's the place of pdfs. So competative in terms of quality, simliar in terms of price and innovative in terms of features and placement. That's the future I see for the PDF industry.
But it's going to take a while, primarily because when people think of PDF publishers they lump the "big boys" like Joe and Malhavoc into the same category with somebody that ran his house rules through distiller and posted them for sale on RPGNow, and until people began to draw a clear distinction, PDF's are always going to have a stigma of being lower quality, even when there are a lot which aren't.
Anyway there's obviously a lot more to it than that, but I need to get back to work so I can support my PDF publishing habit.
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jmucchiello
Hero
Let me start this again. We are not having the same discussion apparently. You listed a couple things you'd like to see in PDFs. I said some of those things are prohibitively expensive. You said use amateurs.Drawmack said:
Now, at this point I found it odd that someone who does "artsy" work, aka writing, would say (in another thread) underpaying writers is one reason I don't work for some people and at the same time you suggest doing an end run around the actors' guid's pay scales. So in my last message I asked you to justify this seemingly unusual attitude and you replied saying you were supplying ideas to save on budget.
This is not what we were talking about (I thought). If I pay the writers scale and artists scale, I cannot ethically underpay the actors. If I'm looking for a certain level of professionalism, I should maintain it in all parts of the process. After all, we don't want the first multimedia PDF to be amateurish, do we? We want it as slick as computer game cut scene.
So, are we talking about professionals, creating professional PDFs with sound and graphics? If so, then the answer is, it's too expensive. If not, then the answer is, no one's taken the time gather round the computer and speak into the little microphone, convert it to mp3 in musicmaker and attach it to a couple links in the PDF yet.
I had thought about doing a pronunciation guide mp3 for my Aerova two-pager (the names contain whistles and clicks) but just never had the time to make descent recordings. Is that the kind of thing you are really looking for?
Sidebar: Hey, I'm curious. Companies that do open calls: How much do you have to edit/rewrite the submissions before you can publish them? Or maybe some of the submitters can comment on how much their work has been reworked before submission.
But I want to write RPG material. I'm not an e-publisher. I'm a publisher. (At least I am in my own mind.) I don't want to make database applications. I do that at work. I write RPGs to disseminate ideas. PCGen and Twin Rose are in the business of making database applications for RPGs. Throwing Dice Games is not.
I'm the same way. I do all character sheet work in Word. I check my own math. This way it is always exactly what I want. It's the curse of being a programmer. It's why I've avoided Acrobat for so long. I thought massaging the postscript was "better". It isn't.
First of all, I don't ever double check those numbers. Word does it for me: F9 | PAGEREF bookmark | update field. I never think about those references again. In fact, I create WORD bookmarks for every section and use REF fields when refering to them so if the chapter numbers are reordered, the REF still refers to the correct chapter. (I have the bad habit of writing in layout mode. I know your not supposed to but I'm a "how many pages is it now" junky.) Unfortunately, WORD doesn't export this data. If it does in Acrobat, then fine, it's not a problem for me to do what you expected. I did think you meant a full cross-reference of every data element. If you didn't then we spoke at cross purposes.
I've been a programmer for 20 years and I've never liked the term user friendly. Not that I endorse user hostile products, but I'd rather have the reputation for "cool ideas excellently executed" than "he does good cross-links". The second reputation is not bad. But it is not my primary concern.
I was kidding. If you didn't see that, I appologize. I used "demand" because it was hyperbole. This is a friendly discussion on my side of it.
Total income. No expenses went into that PDF but my own time. At the moment, I've been paid about 1.2 cents per word for writing/editing/laying out Joe's Book of Enchantment. Most of which I'm reinvesting into the company. I don't see where I can improve that profit margin by adding sound effects to my stuff. (And what would they be in that book? "You are getting sleepy....."
)Yes, I cooked my books for this example. But I also didn't have to pay for my word processor, it came with the computer. I didn't have to buy a computer, it came with me. That is all the money TDG has ever taken in. Artwork for future products has already gone out from that money. I won't know how much the next book makes until it's available. It doesn't have to do as well as the first book. I'd like to think it will do better, but the market is more saturated now. It may make less. Heck, I may torq off more potential customers such as yourself in the meantime.
jmucchiello
Hero
I'm trying not to be snarky, honestly.Abulia said:Reality check: You should be careful when you make such statements. You've just displayed an alarming lack of understanding of the market you purport to be in. Wizard's has sold -- as of a year ago -- over 1 million copies of their rulebooks (PHB, DMG, MM) for D&D with an average of 300,000 copies per book. That number has certainly gone up in the past 15 months. (Source)
Normally I wouldn't have called you on this but your snarky exchange with Drawmack pretty much made it a moral imperative.
Oh well. In any case, how many copies of Creature Collection have sold? Nowhere near as many I'm sure. So WotC sells a million books. Big deal. That's one winner. Those books probably had million dollar budgets. (I wonder if anyone could chime in with a round figure on that one.) And that's what I was getting at. Until every RPG products has a multimillion dollar budget, there will not be cutscenes, animation or voice overs in PDF products.
Mark
CreativeMountainGames.com
jmucchiello said:I'm trying not to be snarky, honestly.
Along these lines, and to keep some perspective, I did a quick search by "million" and user name "ryand" because I remember him discussing things along these lines a couple of times. Perhaps the following posts/threads will have some fodder for your assertions -
http://enworld.cyberstreet.com/showthread.php?s=&postid=145440&highlight=million#post145440
http://enworld.cyberstreet.com/showthread.php?s=&postid=146167&highlight=million#post146167
http://enworld.cyberstreet.com/showthread.php?s=&postid=152034&highlight=million#post152034
http://enworld.cyberstreet.com/showthread.php?s=&postid=325709&highlight=million#post325709
jmucchiello
Hero
Interesting. But somewhat tangential to what I'm attempting to prove. The computer games threads seem to only cover TRPGs vs CRPGs. What about sales figures on a game like Myst? or Half-Life? Yeah, WotC can score big with the biggest badest bestest name brand in RPGs. But we aren't WotC. How do the runner ups do? Far below 1 million sales I'm pretty sure. And the PDF pubs? They are fleas on the industry's backside.Mark said:
The comparisons to CCGs and Warhammer are views from within the industry. But neither of those benefit from computer graphics and sound.
Of course, this mini-thread is almost off topic in the thread's title.
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