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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="HellHound" data-source="post: 855387" data-attributes="member: 3397">No.We already promote ourselves like whores (pardon the language) to get this far. Guess how many sales you get from winning an award or picking up those 'wow' reviews. Damn close to squat. A five star review will bring in a surge of sales for a PDF product, but that "surge" is 5 to 7 extra sales. What gets sales is NOT bells and whistles, hyperlinking, animations, sound files and huge downloads. What gets the sales is people using your material in a game and their friends going 'cool'. And then them telling their friends. Useable , well written, well thought-out material will produce 95% of your sales. A product that gets a few "passing" reviews in the 3/5 zone will often sell better than the one that has wowed the reviewers, as long as the material in the first product is outright useable and EASILY used. That is the market for PDFs. The more specialized your product, the less it sells, no matter how cool it is. The reviews that have come in for Three Arrows have been far from glowing, but it has been a steady hot seller because people are using it in their games and telling other people about it. Meanwhile, products with a batch of HOT reviews have been having lukewarm sales.---And in regards to the "leaking bucket" you handed Dextra... In the ONE product I have layed out with an Index, the Index is done in word (by the authors of the book, not by myself), then redone in the layout software (Quark). Then I go through and add bookmarks in Adobe Acrobat - this can take a while. Also adding hyperlinks to EVERY entry in the Index is beyond my level of patience. Adding hyperlinks inside Acrobat is a slow and painful process in my experience.And as I said, I have only had ONE product that I've done layout on with an Index, so that leaky pucket of yours holds water a lot less than Dextra's argument about hours in the day. I don't do indexes, I don't hyperlink them either.---I've also priced getting a good character sheet made.$50 a pageNow, mind you, this is NOT an auto-calculating character sheet. Those are 99% useless since they can never handle every piece of optional rules that gaming group X uses. For example, I won't be able to inlcude anything from any of the WotC splatbooks in this character sheet, thus making it useless for most users as those are the most common supplements for most gaming groups.---Sure, maybe if we added all these bells and whistles we could increase the price as you say, but honestly, we are dealing with people who feel that PDFs are grossly overpriced already. A standard conversation with a gamer on-line asking how big a $5 PDF should be will get you a result in the 200 to 400 page range. The more we charge, the less we will sell.Therefore, if we make our downloads a multimedia experience that will appeal to those people who are not currently appealed to by the current PDFs we produce, we may well be alienating many of our current buyers... and I honestly don't believe that the new customers will outnumber the old ones.---Regarding Open Calls - I agree in most ways with this. Only very specific products can handle an open call and still come out well. Our only truly "open" call was the Librum Equitis contest, and I am re-writing all the flavor text for the classes... in fact, unless you know which classes were prize-winners, I doubt you will distinguish between the prize-winners and my own creations in the book.</blockquote>

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