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

[guildofblades]

>>The current consensus (if that's what it is) is sad. It's like an auto manufacturer choosing to pull money away from engine R&D in order to pay for fancy exterior styling research and a gonzo marketing campaign. Not necessarily the best choice in the long run, but maybe what you have to do to survive in the short term. Oh well.<<

You pegged it right there. Most of them are doing just what they can to survive.

We slowed our RPG production down to almost nil for a long time and switched gears to focus on our board games productions precisely because we weren't thrilled with the capabilities we could offer in RPG production. After a three year gap in RPG production we're planning on gearing up designs on them again.

The big companies just can't afford the extra labor to make perfect editing a priority and maintain the profit margins the company will require to keep the line in print. Smaller companies can afford to do it right only because many of them are part time operations and maybe they put out one or two books a year, but they too will often fail if they overspend relative to expected revenues. And thats exactly what happens to so many small companies that enter the market only to fold up shop within two years. Mid sized companies feel the pinch on both ends, lacking the time allowed to focus on a limited number of releases and feeling the absolute need to maximize the revenues vs investment or they won't be able to afford to pay the few staff they have.

The simple solution....double the sales on all products across the industry and then the operational budgets will be there.

So, who has the plan to double sales volumes across the board? Please share it with us. No, really, please share it with me first and give me a year's head start.

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

 

[Ceresco]

I mean this in the kindest way possible, but that's insane.

Sorry, the facitious button wasn't working. I do know the realities of RPG publishing. It's the thinnest profit margin I've ever seen. I recognize that it's a labor of love for a majority of gaming companies. I wish it were different. It's a tough gig, one I would never depend upon for my sole means of income. But, it would be cool to do the occasional free lance bit now and then, just for the love of the game.

I have the greatest respect for those authors who are working in this industry. I couldn't do it full time and would never encourage anyone to try to make a go at it. The pressure of completing a project on time and where is the next assignment coming from would be too much for me.

But that was only the most off handed remark. What remains is the question of what it means to be a professional in the RPG industry. It seems the standard of excellence is regretably low. I let my opinion be heard to publishers who dissapoint me, either with an email, or by never spending my money on their products again.

Respectfully,

Edward Kopp: Arcaniac at Large

 

[Gerion of Mercadia]

So, who has the plan to double sales volumes across the board? Please share it with us. No, really, please share it with me first and give me a year's head start.

Ladies ?

Much of The RPG market is "male dominated". I would guess, roughly, that at least 70% of En World are of the Male gender. The actual figure is probably somewhere in the 85% or better range.

Kids ?

The whole concept of Pokemon - IMHO was invented strictly to bring people to MtG as a product line. It started working, and somebody saw something at Hasbro. That kind of product hit the Marketing/Distribution capabilites of Hasbro and what was the end result?

When you make the mechanics simple enough for the 14-18 year old to pick up, read completely - and play alongside Dad...

You have the niche. Why can't the gaming industry look to expand it?

 

[Cassandra]

Editing and typographical errors drive me crazy. One of the first electronic products I ever read was so riddled with errors that I couldn't stand it - I had to start marking them all on my printout. Now I read game books with a pencil in my hand and circle the errors as I see them, so that I can go past and keep reading instead of obsessing over them. (Yes, that is not obsessing.) I would like to think that the products I edit would be error free - but they're not. I have had to accept that it is not humanly possible to produce error-free products in a finite amount of time.

We wrote one book of about 160 pages which was printed. (Most of our products are available electronically.) We edited the heck out of it, trying to get everything right, and I know other people worked on it as well at the company that did the layout - nine people total. Every page was edited once or twice, read through by someone else, and then proofread by at least two people. Months after the proofs had been corrected and returned, I was looking through our printout of the proofs and discovered glaring errors that had been missed in the proofread. There were strange symbols that had been introduced by the layout program in replacing some punctuation marks it did not recognize - and no one had caught them. I didn't have a printed copy of the book available at the time to see if they had made it through into print, so sometimes I still wonder.

The problem is, no method is infallible and sometimes using multiple methods introduces new errors. A spell-check needs a human check on it, but hand-correcting something can leave another error. All of the located errors can be corrected, but in making changes one crucial formatting code is removed, resulting in paragraphs being in the wrong order on a page. It can potentially be a never-ending cycle, and at some point a company just has to say, Enough! (That is not my job here, incidentally; I'm in charge of obsessing.)

The problem though is such shoddy quality is largely INEXCUSABLE for any sort of publisher.

We try very hard to be professional. However, the process this writer described from his company for us involves two or three people, all of whom are also doing other important jobs in the company, and none of whom are being paid to do this full time. For instance, how does editing compare in priority with communicating with artists so that the book has art when the text is done? Or to... [Made Will save; rant avoided. I think you get the idea.]

I just hope that people will avoid making sweeping generalizations about how things could obviously be better. ("Have all the writers do proofreading" - how do you think those errors got in there in the first place, eh?) Do let companies know when you're disappointed. Voting with your money is fine, but if a company doesn't realize that you're objecting to the editing rather than the content, you may not be getting your point across. Also speak up when you find something to admire; it will give publishers a reason to maintain or set high standards. I believe encouraging good editing will do more to improve standards than complaining about bad editing.

 

[w_earle_wheeler]

From the back of the Shadizar box set:

"A 32 page Player's Guide
Detailing everything you need to know to create chrater who hails from this nest of vipers."

High production values. Retail price: $39.95. Laughed at by everyone in the game store who saw it. Eventually unloaded to me for 1/4 of the retail price by a very annoyed game store owner.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

In no particular order...

1) The size of the publishing company doesn't matter...according to the forewards in their 30th Anniversary Sci-Fi and Fantasy books, DAW is basically a 6 person company- I imagine most of their non-editing staff is outsourced.

2) I agree about having someone else edit the work- editing your own work invariably results in missed errors. While I'm not a professional editor, I've done serious editing work at the graduate school level- in my penultimate project for my MBA, I was the only native English speaker on the team, and everyone had a section of the research results to write up. Had we simply assembled the assorted pieces and submitted them, we wouldn't have done very well- it would have been unintelligible. I took over the editing process, but with each section I edited, I made sure the original authors took one final look at their edited work before submission. In my final project, we went through more than 20 revisions, with each team member editing the presentation independently, and with each of those edits compared to each other and the original document. Fresh eyes really make a difference.

3) The Fresh Eyes need not be pros as long as they are at least competent spellers. Even if the guy just delivers the mail in your building, if he's reasonably educated, he'll probably catch stuff you never noticed. Heck, he doesn't even have to be familiar with the subject matter- anyone can potentially notice that a chart is missing, or that your pagination is off. The aformentioned DAW anniversary editions? The softcover Sci-Fi edition has a table of contents that is at least 20 pages off- apparently, nobody checked to see if they had changed it after the forewards had been inserted.

 

[Ghostwind]

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.

I'll back this up with up-to-date numbers based on actual sales. The profit margin is actually closer to 4% now given the lack of initial order numbers of new products and the almost nonexistent reorders.

I hear you that editing is important to you. And it is obvious it is important to other people as well. I am just saying that for the average publisher the sales and revenues simply aren't there to put the total resources into every area of product development that would be absolutely ideal. It becomes a choice of prioritization for each publisher and generally of 5-8 important design and production points, most successful publishers will manage to hit all but one or two of them. But its nigh to impossible to hit them all.

Bingo.

People really have no conception of how small, and how poorly paid, an industry tabletop RPGs really are.

People also like to think that publishers have an endless supply of capital. The truth of the matter is that much of the expenses, like printing, get put on a Visa or Mastercard and stack up quickly. Making money in the RPG industry for thrid-party publishers is difficult at best and usually doesn't happen. You all just think it does.

 

[Cam Banks]

1) The size of the publishing company doesn't matter...according to the forewards in their 30th Anniversary Sci-Fi and Fantasy books, DAW is basically a 6 person company- I imagine most of their non-editing staff is outsourced.

You know, Green Ronin got the spelling of "foreword" wrong in their True20 core rulebook, too. Just thought I'd point that out.

Cheers,
Cam

 

[Odhanan]

Then the question becomes, is shipping a quality product more important to you than being a day behind on your shipping and billing? IMO it should be, because companies who ship lots of sloppy product on time are still shipping sloppy product that's not worth the $30 price tag they are charging.

I so agree with Ourph on everything he says. Seriously. The problem isn't "can/can't I afford it". The problem is the hierarchy of priorities. If you want a quality product, you have to afford it. No "ifs" or "buts".

 

[helium3]

I'll back this up with up-to-date numbers based on actual sales. The profit margin is actually closer to 4% now given the lack of initial order numbers of new products and the almost nonexistent reorders.

Where'd these numbers come from? Also, how do pre-orders and re-orders affect the profit margin? I thought the margin was set by cogs and distribution and shipping costs. I'm not being critical here, just curious. This is like, the most interesting thread I've read on ENWorld in years.