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Message: <blockquote data-quote="guildofblades" data-source="post: 3445203" data-attributes="member: 27324">>>So, seeing those types of errors in 3rd party product leads me to believe that the producer is either too lazy to care or thinks they're stuff is so hot that people won't mind. Either way, I remain unimpressed.<<It is not that the publishers are lazy and rarely that that they think their stuff is the greatest thing since sliced bread, it is a issue of time and resources.Larger (game) companies may have one full time staff editor, but that person then becomes responsible for editing absolutely everything and staying on schedule, which makes for a hectic pace that is bound to let errors sneak in.Smaller companies can't afford full time editors so must chose between existing staffers pulling double duty and doing editing on top of their regular jobs, or they must farm out that work to freelancers. Both options come with a bag full of problems. Staffers might not be great editors and may suffer from work overload the same as the overworked single staff editor as the larger companies. Freelance editors can be either great or terrible and unless you have a solid work history with them, you simply can't predict which. The Guild of Blades used to use freelance editors and ran into all sorts of problems. Problems such as freelancers taking the advance pay and never doing the work, massively missing deadlines, handing in a manuscript having done virtually no editing, choosing to rewrite entire sections and changing trade names, races, character classes and even game mechanics without permission or telling us, etc. In the end, we chose that even though we have no professional staff editor, we would do editing in house by passing each manuscript across two desks and hoping we can catch most errors that way. Its not perfect and not even really close to perfect.How to provide perfect editing in our products?There are no good solutions. We could raise all of our prices by 50% and hire a full time editor, but somehow I suspect our sales levels by volume would not be maintained with a 50% price increase.The simple reality is, hobby game publishing is a very niche industry. Unit volumes are small. So small, in fact, that in most other industries a product facing those kinds of unit sales would never get the green light for production. Most hobby publishers, the full time operations and the one man part time operation alike, keep doing hobby publishing because they love hobby games. Generally we face a very passionate group of customers, which is a great thing, but we know it also comes with certain production expectations that realistically can rarely be met. Most companies who try to met such expectations tend to become very short lives and join the long list of defunct publishers.A practice we have begun is to do our initial publication, then after publication as we are made aware of mistakes, we have one copy here in house that we mark up and then those issues get corrected on future print runs. Its not perfect, but for the moment it seems the most viable option among several bad choices.Ryan S. JohnsonGuild of Blades Publishing Group<a href="http://www.guildofblades.com" target="_blank">http://www.guildofblades.com</a><a href="http://www.1483online.com" target="_blank">http://www.1483online.com</a><a href="http://www.thermopylae-online.com" target="_blank">http://www.thermopylae-online.com</a></blockquote>

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