Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="jmucchiello" data-source="post: 854310" data-attributes="member: 813">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.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....." <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> )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. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification