Quality, price, and the place for PDFs in the print industry

[Abulia]

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.

LOL! If you don't care why did you cite them as an example? You just going to keep spouting off product names until you hit one that supports your supposition? I think C&C is also a poor example to prove your point; I wouldn't be surprised if it did sell 100,000 units because it filled the MM void before Wizards could get a product out. Also, they low-balled that project and fast tracked it to the market with open call "Joe Anyone" submissions. (And it showed in the final product.) S&S leveraged their position to be nimble and get a product quickly to the marketplace and beat the dominate leader in the industry. They leveraged an existing distribution channel (WW) to get it there as well as their existing expertise in the publishing industry (again, WW). The open call allowed them to develop the product at a low cost in a small window of opportunity.

No million dollar budget there. Just smart management.

Regards,
Don Mappin
Freelancer for Hire

 

[jgbrowning]

industry report

Here's something everyone here might be interested in reading. I imagine a lot of you already have, but oh well..

http://www.gamersrealm.com/store1/outofthebox.php?article_id=49


joe b.

 

[Dextra]

Here is my dream digital product, and I believe that all of this can be done in pdf.

1) Two pdfs in 1 zip, one for printing and one for online viewing.

2) In the view on-line I want massive hyperlinking. Give me a world map that has the different sections linked to their entries in the gazzeteer. Give be an index that's hyperlinked. Hyperlink every cross reference in the book.

3) Take advantge of the digital medium. Embed movies into the document. Give me some animation.

4) Include a character sheet that I can fill out right on the computer. For bonus points make is a litle database app.

Basically for me it boils down to this. Right now the pdf producers are producing a pdf version of the print product. I think that this is the wrong way to go, why not embrace the new medium for all that it is worth.

I mean imagine opening your pdf of Rise of Evil and the guy on the front cover is talking to you and everytime you come to a new chapter the journal entry is changed from a printed page to this guy talking to you some more. I would pay for that, but then again I'm a techno weenie so bells and whistles make me drool.

1. Done. We're also playing around with using landscape layout.
2. No way. Not enough time in the day. But howsabout using the Bookmark feature properly? If so, Done.
3. I'm waiting for us to publish an adventure to include a 3-D representation of a room... By moving the mouse around you can rotate the view of the room. I have a friend in digital art in Montreal who has agreed to do it for me. But that one's a ways off.
4. Nice idea, but most of us are writers first, puterheads second.

Some of the bells and whistles to which you refer sure would be nice, but I suspect that the cost would be fairly prohibitive. If a PDF only sells 200 copies, and my art budget was $200, there's not a lot of money left over for editors, layout, publisher and oh, the writer!

 

[Abulia]

My rant

Okay, Karg started this thread at my prodding, so time to weigh in with my own rants. I'm going to back up what I can with figures but I haven't spent a great amount of time in analysis. Meaning, I haven't intentionally cooked my numbers one way or the other.

1) PDF Value: This one really cooks my shorts. Picking some random PDFs, some from the leaders of the PDF industry, we have page counts of 35, 48, and 69. These respectively sell for $5, $5.75, and $6.95. Quality of the content aside, lets just assume they are held to the same standards of print products with the same layout and presentation one can expect in an average off-the-self release. These PDFs are $0.142, $0.119, and $0.100 per page respectively. Still with me? Okay…

Now, take some books from the print industry, some D20, some not. These three products (randomly chosen) are $19.95, $27.95, and $29.95. They're 144, 160, and 224 pages in length. Breaking it down on a per page basis, they're $0.138, $0.174, and $0.133 respectively. The first is softcover and B&W throughout, color cover. The middle one is full color with a high text density and softcover. The last is full-color throughout, glossy paper, hardcover. And while I said we're not going to compare the quality of writing, suffice it to say that the authors of the print products are well known.

Obviously the true "value" of a product is whether or not someone individually finds it of value. But short of polling several thousand gamers on any number of products about the best I can do is try to compare the costs of the products. Looking here the PDFs don't fare well, in my opinion. Two of the print products are actually cheaper than the PDF offering -- and they're already printed out for you. To add insult to injury one the print products is full color and hardback. The PDFs are, obviously, not.

When you factor in the quality of the content (yes, subjective) including art and presentation, the disparity becomes more prevalent.

Rant #1: PDFs are overpriced

2) Open Calls: I can appreciate the opportunity that an open call gives an aspiring writer. However, truth be told, if you're really serious about breaking into the hobby and game industry as a writer it's easier than you may think. With that said, open calls are the root of all Evil ™. Open calls really only serve the publisher. They get a large number of disjointed entries of varying quality of writing, tone of voice, at little to no cost. Clearly the publisher has no obligation to accept (or print) any material and the rates typically are not competitive when you break it down to a per word basis.

I don't know if most publishers realize this, but for most writers it is only slightly more time consuming to do x+1,000 words then it is to write x. Meaning, if you'd just hire one or two writers you could a) increase the overall quality, b) have a consistent tone and writing style, and c) probably spend a hell of lot less time editing. Of course, the cost is slightly higher because you're hiring a professional.

As someone in my gaming group said the other day: "Nothing screams 'quality' like an open call for a product."

Rant #2: I can't stand open calls. Hire a professional!

3) Leverage the medium: Another big one with me. I happen to like PDF technology. I'd just wish that more publishers would utilize it to its logical end. For example, a PDF product that includes the print version (suitable for nifty printing), a screen version, and an all-text version, and a tagged version for Acrobat e-reader. I'll bet most publishers don't know how to make a tagged version suitable for a PDA.

PDFs will full bookmarking and indexing ability are easy to make if you design the layout from the ground up to support it. InDesign has a script that will automate most of the process. However, all I ever read about is "it's too hard!" It's not that hard. Or, look at it another way: what's the opportunity cost of you not providing those features? How many additional copies could you have sold?

I'm going to single out Philip Reed for his excellent work at this point and embarrass him a tad. The layout-for-screen process that he's used is an example of value added. Ross Richey and DireKobold is another. Dynamic PDFs. Now we're talking. Ross offers a service that can't be duplicated. He's leveraging the competitive advantage of the medium and pushing the envelope.

Rant #3: PDF publishers aren't using the medium fully

I'll stop for now. I'm sure this will generate some spirited discussion. I've got a few more on the size of the marketplace and the disparity for author rates, but I'll save those for another day.

I'm interested in hearing other opinions or some friendly discussions on these topics. By all means, I'm open to hearing contrasting opinions or changing my mind.

Regards,
Don Mappin
Freelancer for Hire

 

[jgbrowning]

Here is my dream digital product, and I believe that all of this can be done in pdf.

2) In the view on-line I want massive hyperlinking. Give be an index that's hyperlinked. Hyperlink every cross reference in the book.

Internet Arcana will be the first product, I think, to use hyperlinking in the way you want. So far its got over 3200 anchors and hyperlinks and we've just begun adding the material from E-publishers.

Although I'm %100 behind this product, i've started to question my own sanity about doing it. The end result is very very sweet and very useful. But it takes a LONG time to do.

I'm a big believer in not doing anything for a product that doesn't lead to an increase in sales somewhat proportional to the effort involved. If i can be more fiscally beneficial to myself for less effort, that's what i prefer to do. As long as I think that the end result is a good product, of course.

Doing all of these hyperlinks has me questioning my basic assumption about cost/effort benefit. I'll have to see if it pays off enough to do what I'd really like to do, the entire 3.5 SRD with massive hyperlinking. Did I mention that it takes a LONG time.... i thought i did....

LONG... *not that I'm bitter*

joe b.

 

[jmucchiello]

Re: My rant

1) PDF Value: This one really cooks my shorts. Picking some random PDFs, some from the leaders of the PDF industry, we have page counts of 35, 48, and 69. These respectively sell for $5, $5.75, and $6.95. Quality of the content aside, lets just assume they are held to the same standards of print products with the same layout and presentation one can expect in an average off-the-self release. These PDFs are $0.142, $0.119, and $0.100 per page respectively. Still with me? Okay…

I don't know what PDFs you picked but as a suggestion, you should do content comparisons based on wordcount in a PDF. PDFs with high text density save pages when printed out. Thus paying more per PAGE is a benefit in a PDF if those pages have more content. Now, I realize you want to compare this to printed products and again you might try to do this by word. Some printed products are very space padded with few words per page. Take my PDF as an example. It's over 60,000 words in 64 pages (+ TOC page + OGL page = 66 pages as advertised). That's nearly 1000 words a page. You will not find too many print products with 1000 words a page. At it's current price of $6.95 that's $0.105 per page but I'll bet you'll find most of those books have closer to 500 to 800 words per page. (And don't use the PHB, WotC squeezed a lot of info into that. Use a d20 company. You aren't complaining about WotC PDFs. Check out a Mongoose book, preferably.)

Now, take some books from the print industry, ...

May I slip a slight rant in here: It's print publishers, not industry. Random House, Del Ray, etc are in the Print Industry.

... some D20, some not. These three products (randomly chosen) are $19.95, $27.95, and $29.95. They're 144, 160, and 224 pages in length. Breaking it down on a per page basis, they're $0.138, $0.174, and $0.133 respectively. [...] Two of the print products are actually cheaper than ONE OF (emphasis added) the PDF offering -- and they're already printed out for you. To add insult to injury one the print products is full color and hardback. The PDFs are, obviously, not.

I cannot disagree with this but you are comparing oranges and apples here. There are 128 and greater page count PDFs. Why not compare them to 128 page books? Or compare the 47 page PDF to a 48 page module?

Rant #1: PDFs are overpriced

And they make less money than print products, what a dichotomy.

But seriously, you forgot to take into account some of the benefits the have over books. The whole copy/paste thing. You don't have to print what you don't need thus saving shelf space. You can't tell you me you've never bought a book that you never use half of but that half of book still takes up shelf space.

2) Open Calls

I agree.

Rant #3: PDF publishers aren't using the medium fully

Perhaps. I don't have a PDA that can display PDFs so I didn't even know about PDA versions of PDFs. And yes, bookmarks are a necessity these days. But I've already sounded off on this with Drawmack.

 

[Drawmack]

First in response to Dire Kobold - if you check your database you'll find a subscriber by the name of Drawmack. I love your idea my only question is why PERL I feel that PHP is a much better fit to that solution.

Also I would like to note that jmuncchiello's response was much nicer this time around and I'll attempt to keep mine in the same vein.

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.

Which is a statement that I stand behind. As I will explain below.

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 a misquote I never said that underpaying writters is a reason I won't submit to some companies. What I said is that I do not submit to companies that pay different amounts for pdf vs. print publishing. To be more clear - I will not submit my work to a company who intends to vary what they pay me based on the means of publication. I am the same person submitting the same work, my pay should not vary. I am not a salesman. I'm not going to mention names here but go on a troll through the open calls forum and you'll find them.

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.

I never suggested that you ''underpay'' the actors. It is called economies of scale. If you know or can find people who are willing to do the work for little more then a resume credit you are not underpaying them. Underpaying in the arts is a tricky matter. I know many musicians on the same caliber, if not a higher caliber, as the big name stars. However, since they have not hit it big they only command a $5.00 cover while the big names command $100.00 a ticket. There are two factors that go into pay scale with the arts one is who you are paying Lockwood is much more expensive then Dingledorf, even if the quality is the same. I am a huge proponent of using college students who, rightfully so, command a smaller pay then ''professionals''. I do not consider college students to be amatures, but I do not consider them to be professionals either. They are somewhere between the two and get paid as such. The student's main payment comes from experience not money, unlike the professional. What I suggested was that you could make the recordings cheeply by using actors who make less money.

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.

There was a national ad campaign for adobe photoshop. The artist was a friend of mine named Donald Langsdorf. He got paid no money for that campaign because he won the right to do the art in a college contest. However when he graduated he started his first job at $10,000 above other people he graduated with - which in the long run paid a lot more then if he would have gotten paid for that campaign. Using college students does not mean that you are making an amature production. Believe me those college students are going to expect a profesional quality product to be produced so they can show it to potental employers later, an amature production does not a resume credit make.

As far as what, exactly, I mean when I say use the medium it depends on the product. I'm not talking about gratuitious use of technology. The pronounciation guide you mention would be great (especially since I can't whistle). In some products there would be no need. But how about a monster book that has a couple of avi's or flash movies of some monster's in combat? How about a 3d rendered movie that walks me through a city while an announcer takes me on a tour for a citybook? The different types of books call for different applications. I'm saying when it makes sense do it. In a 2 minute avi I can convey more to the reader then in 30 pages of text. You don't think that this would help sell your product? I do.

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.

In the Pale Designs pdf you can see my writting verbatim - they didn't even change the formating. In the book there were minor gramatical changes make to the bladder lock.

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.

Point well taken, that was a bonus points thing. But a seperate pdf that is a character sheet I can fill out on the puter and have it do the math isn't that hard to do and it would increase sales.

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.

Then why would you make the remark about using those other programs in the first place?

It's why I've avoided Acrobat for so long. I thought massaging the postscript was "better". It isn't.

The second curse of being a programmer, we must learn everything the hard way.

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.

Hmmm, I'm proficient with word but generally only use it for draft material so I was not aware of that feature - it's neat though. However, you use word for your layout???? Wouldn't ms publish be better?

I did think you meant a full cross-reference of every data element. If you didn't then we spoke at cross purposes.

Nah, linking every reference to a feat is just silly. Maybe the first one but I wouldn't even say that. I'm speaking specifically of explicit cross references - they really should be linked. Then I can click once and go there, click back once and come back to where I was.

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.

How about being known as the guy who has cool ideas exellently executed and goes the extra mile to create a user friendly and interactive experience? I think that's better then either of the above personally.

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.

Sorry, strong word - strong response, it's all good.

Total income. No expenses went into that PDF but my own time.

So your art will be improved by that money and my point stands it's a reinvestment.

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....." )

You've got to admit that would be funny as hell.

 

[Drawmack]

1. Done. We're also playing around with using landscape layout.

Yeah a couple companies are already doing this. I think it's great keep up the good work.

[qoute]
2. No way. Not enough time in the day. But howsabout using the Bookmark feature properly? If so, Done.
[/quote]
Okay, you've got enough time in the day to figure out the important words in the document, look up their pages of occurance and then type those pages into an index, but not enough time to make those page references into links???? Here's a leaky bucket you can set it next to your excuse and see which holds more water. - Seriously, if you don't have an index that's one thing - but if you've got the index link it.

3. I'm waiting for us to publish an adventure to include a 3-D representation of a room... By moving the mouse around you can rotate the view of the room. I have a friend in digital art in Montreal who has agreed to do it for me. But that one's a ways off.

I have an adventure that only needs a bit of touching up to be finished which would be perfect for this cause the main focus is a maze without monsters. The important aspects are the traps which this would really lend itself too.

4. Nice idea, but most of us are writers first, puterheads second.

I wouldn't take a lot to get the character sheet made. A lot of role-players are computer heads and I'm sure you could get that done fairly cheaply - the barter system is great.

Some of the bells and whistles to which you refer sure would be nice, but I suspect that the cost would be fairly prohibitive. If a PDF only sells 200 copies, and my art budget was $200, there's not a lot of money left over for editors, layout, publisher and oh, the writer!

I've heard this argument before and here is my response to it.

First, by making your product a cut or ten above the rest you will increase sales. If you create a product that makes the reviewers go wow, people will buy it.

Second, if you add some of these things to it you can up the price a bit and people will still pay it. How much did the FRIA sell for? This is more along the lines of what some of the things I was talking about are.

Third, not all of my suggestions work for every product. Like anything else decisions would need to be made based on the product. However if you make your download a multimedia experience you will attract people who are not attracted to regular pdf products.

 

[Drawmack]

Re: My rant

Rant #1: PDFs are overpriced

You forgot one thing in your little analysis. In pdf price is only very loosly tied to page count. Most pdf's sell for between 5 - 10 dollars. I've seen 140 page pdfs for $5.00 and I've seen 64 page pdf's for $10.00. Another point so consider, as mentioned above, is word count. Also you cannot use any of the core books in this manner. The core books are produced very cheaply and count on large print runs to be profitable though WotC makes it's real money on supliments and not on the core books.

Rant #2: I can't stand open calls. Hire a professional!

You make valid points and I'll not argue with them. Suffice it to say that there is another side. This is the DM who doesn't have the time or desire to write an entire book but he's got some really good homebrew he can send in to the open call. Also it gives the publisher a chance to preview someone's work before offering them a job.

Rant #3: PDF publishers aren't using the medium fully

here, here - it's what I've been saying for this whole thread. Of which my posts make up a substantial part. You know I feel strongly about it when me, Mr. that post is too long to read, starts making posts upwards of 500 words.

 

[Drawmack]

Internet Arcana will be the first product, I think, to use hyperlinking in the way you want. So far its got over 3200 anchors and hyperlinks and we've just begun adding the material from E-publishers.

Yeah I'm anxiously awaiting it's release. I can't wait to see how this works out and I'm betting that it will get a lot of use at my game table - that'll make spells so easy to look up. Matter of fact I was working on a spells database and decided to wait for this product first.

As far as the time it takes you should look into alternate methods of pdf generation. Personally for something like this I would recommend that you set up a database that spits out the pdf (ala dire kobold) to make future updates quick and easy.