[Rant] Do editing/proofreading errors drive you mad, too?

[AdmundfortGeographer]

Aw man. You're not supposed to bring cold numbers and actual industry experience to a discussion of warmed over theories and "what ifs".

 

[helium3]

For a book retailing at $30 and with a cost of goods sold (COGS) running $7, that leaves a gross profit of $5 per book when sold at wholesale. Slice away conventional operating expenses and you get down to maybe $2 left per book.

3rd party RPG product producers make $2 of profit on each book they sell?

 

[Mouseferatu]

3rd party RPG product producers make $2 of profit on each book they sell?

I have no up-to-date numbers. But as of about two or three years ago, the average profit margin on a softcover RPG supplement from a smaller company than WotC was between 5-8% of cover.

That's not a typo. Five-to-eight percent.

 

[w_earle_wheeler]

Who here believes the "average" RPG book will sell an extra 400 copies if only the editing was done better? Raise your hands please.

Perhaps it would be more economical to have one or two employees take a refresher course related to writing or editing at their local community college. Having qualified writers and designers, or, investing more in promising "rough" writers and designers could pay off in the long run.

There are three people I know of at my FLGS (including me) who won't purchase certain books because of the poor editing. I won't even try to guesstimate what that translates to for the whole city, county, state or country. 400 copies worth? Who knows. Probably not.

However, one bad book can sour a consumer on any other books put out by that publisher, even if the "consumer" didn't purchase the bad book (ie, they thumbed through it at their FLGS).

Every book a hobby game publisher puts out is, in a way, a promotion piece for that publisher.

When it comes down to a small press, it isn't a need for a team of copy editors, just a measure of care and professionalism among the writers and designers. If someone is going to publish books -- whether they are technical books, fiction books, or rulebooks -- that person (or group) should either have strong writing and editing skills or be willing to pay or defer to someone else who does.

Like I said in a previous reply: as a hobbyist, I understand why typos and errors happen. However, my willingness to tolerate them is based on the price of the book. If a publisher can't produce a professional product and make a profit off of a $30, $40 or $50 book, then they should get out of the game or develop a more realistic approach to their products.

 

[helium3]

I have no up-to-date numbers. But as of about two or three years ago, the average profit margin on a softcover RPG supplement from a smaller company than WotC was between 5-8% of cover.

That's not a typo. Five-to-eight percent.

Wow. Where would one go to get more up to date information?

 

[Peni Griffin]

The most time-efficient, and therefore cost-effective, method of fixing errors is to prevent them. The fewer errors introduced into the work, the fewer have to be corrected. Personnel with weak skills should find workarounds that will reduce their errors at the draft stage, and this will automatically reduce the man-hours spent proofing.

Each company needs to find its own best methods for doing this and many are handicapped by not having anyone on staff who grasps the nature of the problem. If, for example, a company has a bottleneck person - someone who does all the word processing, say - it might seem to be a simple matter to hire, for that position, someone who has strong grammar, punctuation, and spelling skills at the expense of the specialized technical skills of the people drafting the copy. But if the person hiring lacks those skills, how is he supposed to judge the competency of the word processor to correct errors in these matters during the typing phase? What if the bottleneck person is the actual editor, whose main concern needs to be rules consistency? And so on. Every small business is different and must solve, or not solve, the problems it recognizes as best it can. A lot of them won't do so before they go under. A lot of them will go under because they focus on a minor problem while not even noticing the existence of another problem under the weight of which they are sinking.

Most businesses fail. Mediocrity often succeeds in the market better than superiority. Ultimately, the consumer decides whether a product is "good enough" at the price charged, and he doesn't really care what the manufacturer went through to achieve it.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Wow. Where would one go to get more up to date information?

Couldn't say for certain. I only got even that much because, since I work in the industry, I sometimes talk to people who have access to such numbers.

I will say, however, that I've neither seen nor heard anything to suggest that those numbers have changed substantially in the last two or three years.

 

[guildofblades]

>>3rd party RPG product producers make $2 of profit on each book they sell?<<

Well, no, probably not. The "average" 3rd party RPG product producer probably loses money on each book they sell. Thats why the majority of them go out of business after just publishing one to a handful of books. In my years in game publishing I have seen at least 200 companies come and go.

In reality a great deal depends on the company and how it operates. Is it paying its staff salaries or not? What kind of money is it spending on artwork? On freelance writing? On advertising? I can't say because every company is different. Two companies could attempt to produce the exact same $30 hard cover and one could come out with a net profit of $6 per book while another loses $6 per book. Depends on many variable costs associated with the book and its production and other variable costs like salaries and other assorted overhead like warehousing, insurance, utility bills, mortgage or lease expenses, advertising, etc, etc.

I can tell you, ballpark, that the "average" new publisher that is professional enough to establish initial distribution for its products is doing "good" if it sells 500 copies of its new product upon release, followed up by a couple hundred copies thereafter. After that, you are getting into the veteran companies and non independents that are able to sell more than that. I can tell you that a $30 hard cover will typically have a printing cost in the $3.00 to $8.00 range or thereabouts if they are doing traditional printing, printing at least 2,000 and don't have full color interiors. I can tell you that the typical wholesale price on a $30 hard cover is $12.00. From that you can subtract shipping and printing costs off the top, but from there you get into a whole mess of variable costs that I could not begin to generalize.

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com
http://www.1483online.com
http://www.thermopylae-online.com

 

[The Human Target]

Perhaps it would be more economical to have one or two employees take a refresher course related to writing or editing at their local community college. Having qualified writers and designers, or, investing more in promising "rough" writers and designers could pay off in the long run.

There are three people I know of at my FLGS (including me) who won't purchase certain books because of the poor editing. I won't even try to guesstimate what that translates to for the whole city, county, state or country. 400 copies worth? Who knows. Probably not.

However, one bad book can sour a consumer on any other books put out by that publisher, even if the "consumer" didn't purchase the bad book (ie, they thumbed through it at their FLGS).

Every book a hobby game publisher puts out is, in a way, a promotion piece for that publisher.

When it comes down to a small press, it isn't a need for a team of copy editors, just a measure of care and professionalism among the writers and designers. If someone is going to publish books -- whether they are technical books, fiction books, or rulebooks -- that person (or group) should either have strong writing and editing skills or be willing to pay or defer to someone else who does.

Like I said in a previous reply: as a hobbyist, I understand why typos and errors happen. However, my willingness to tolerate them is based on the price of the book. If a publisher can't produce a professional product and make a profit off of a $30, $40 or $50 book, then they should get out of the game or develop a more realistic approach to their products.

Don't be so logical. It makes others look bad.

 

[evizaer]

An idea: Perhaps if they didn't have such insanely high production values for these books aside from the actual written content, they could jack up the quality of the writing significantly. I would gladly buy $15 softcover books printed on less extravagant paper stock with fewer illustrations and frills in greyscale. I will take care of my books even more meticulously and much appreciate the cheaper price. I don't care about the paper stock being ridiculously nice or the full color illustrations taking up a fourth (or more) of each page as they stand now. They do so little for me. Just give me well-edited writing that has no significant contradictions or errors of logic that damage playability or the credibility of the book.