Sell me on creating new d20 fantasy PDFs . . .

philreed said:
This is a bit unusual for a "sell me" thread but after chatting with various people I thought I'd give it a shot.

It has now reached the point that I cannot justify spending my time writing new d20 fantasty PDFs. The drop in the market has reached a point that I cannot make enough money to cover the amount of time it takes to write one of these. Where I once sold 80 of a new release over the first 30-45 days I can now sell about 20-25 in that time.

This is unfortunate since I enjoy writing new material for d20 fantasy (I especially enjoy writing releases in the A Dozen . . . series). For now, though, I must spend my time on other projects (including looking at more projects outside of the game industry).

So "sell me" (convince me) on writing new releases . . . even though I cannot make enough money selling them to cover my writing time.

My advice?

Train mokeys lots n lots of monkeys and give each of them typewriters,
(you know where I'm going with this right?)

Or better still hire me to come up with lots of ideas (I'm at least twice as smart as a monkey, sorta) you write them, we both get rich, I buy an island and rename it "Alticana"
yeah baby! :D


Na, best thing is just write if you still enjoy it,
 

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One thing I've noticed, with my own buying patterns about reviews...

I don't really care whether or not the reviewer liked or disliked something.
(aside from the technical bits, like none of the stats work right, or it looks like it was written in crayon by a retarted kobold...)

What I seem to use the reviews for is more of an explanation of what's in the book.

On the sites, drivethrough et al all there tends to be is that little sales pitch blurb about the product... But for me that's like just reading the back cover of a book... Doesn't really give you the meat.

In a real store, I'd pick the book up, flip through the pages, kick the tires, and see what's in there. Actually take a moment to diggest exactly what the back cover means when it says "Rules for naked elf tossing!!!"

The reviews tend to be the closest I can get to doing that when buying books or PDFs online.
 

A couple of ideas:
1.) It was fun while it lasted! The industry is in a bit of a dryspill, don't be afraid to go on a hyatus instead of burning out and going under due to lack of sales.
2.) Get a job that makes a lot of money per hour. Guarentee your income with a job you find remotely interesting and pays well. I'm pretty certain that you can generate an income in three days a week to live comfortably, this removes a lot of worry and stress. I have done this for a year or two in the past and was very relaxing (four day weekend), i earned enough to live comfortably and got a lot of work done on private projects and endevours (some programming, some web design, some game design, even started my own webshop). I'm currently back to a four day work week, but i'm considering going back to three days later this year...
3.) Try a different approach to generate income with your writing. You might try publishing your work on a website and generate an income with ads (such as google adsense). A volume such as a 101 feats could easily cover 10-14 webpages (that's 10-14 impressions per viewer reading your work), and by making it free you will increase the userbase enormously. Chances are that each user will view certain pages more than once (as reference), imagine the ENworld userbase reading your work, that's a lot of impressions. A membership fee (for example $20 user/year) would remove the ads for that user, a premium account (for example $30 user/year) would also give users access to all the material in pdf (plus updates) for a year. You could make deals with certain print publisher to include an ad in your pdf for a fee.

Just spewing some ideas...
 

Runequest OGL

I'd think there might be a large demand for fresh Runequest material that you could sate your fantasy appetite on. It's a venerable system and being opened up could create a little PDF mini-boom.
 

Bluntly, I think your market may be full, tapped out, and overdone. Your rep is primarily based on short 5-10 page pdfs and the like. Those, to my mind, are like pennies on the street. You pick up one. You pick up two. But after a hundred, it's just annoying. It's too much effort and hassle to find, organize, and store. I'd rather pick up the dollar bills (which are also in short supply).

In short - finding ways to repackage your catalog isn't a bad idea. But otherwise, don't do it for the money.
 


I'll have to chime in and say that you need to look elsewhere than gaming if you aren't realizing the income you want from your products. That said, I would really like to see your whole demiplane collection. Would you consider finishing the rest of your material and releasing it on a ransom model?
 


Nellisir said:
In short - finding ways to repackage your catalog isn't a bad idea. But otherwise, don't do it for the money.

Well, now there's an idea! A "Baker's Dozen" of all the "A Dozen..." for a slightly discounted price (very little work to put together, increased income for you, and a new way to re-introduce old products to folks who don't have them all, AND it makes things easier to find, too)! The bad news is, it will be large, take a long time to download, and probably be pricey... but it would clear out the old catalog!

Feasible?
 

I'm wondering... are all d20 fantasy products suffer from reduced sales the same way? Or is there some sort of variety depending on the specific product category?

In other words, is there a difference between (say) d20 settings, d20 adventures, and new d20 rules material or "genre books" (such as generic books on horror, dungeons, cities, oceans or whatever)?

I'm asking because I am currently pondering publishing a setting or two, and I'd like to know how the market works for those...
 

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