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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Monte At Home" data-source="post: 1177677" data-attributes="member: 1335">That may be my new favorite game industry analogy.But before we were talking about getting on your shelf, not getting customers to buy. From a publisher's POV, these are actually often very different goals, and require different strategies. Which is why my job is so complicated (and interesting). <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Once I'm on your shelf, I've got to recognize that I've got two different potential customers:1. The guy who's dissatisfied with what WotC's offering him. 2. The guy who's satisfied with what WotC's offering him, but is interested, willing and able to purchase still more.When I got into the d20 market, it seemed like most of my customers were #2. Now, #1 seems to be on the increase, but still not the majority.In either case, I'm still not going head to head with WotC. I'm not putting out a campaign setting to try to out-FR them (don't laugh, I've talked with more than one publisher who claimed to have been trying to do just that). I try to put out the products that WotC isn't doing, or that I know they won't do. Even products that look the same, such as say, Book of Eldritch Might and Tome and Blood, are only similar on the surface (at best). I intentionally try to go a little farther afield in many cases with my material, to try to catch my two potential customer groups with material they simply cannot get anywhere else.(Arguably, there may be a third customer. That being the guy who enjoyed my work before I started Malhavoc, or perhaps later, and will always look for my work in the future, regardless of what WotC's offering. It would be hubris for me to rely on that, though. It's a much better strategy to rely on consistent, quality work--that will keep the #3 guy coming back and hopefully attract #1 and #2. But in addressing your point of me vs. WotC on the shelf, even quality work isn't enough, because WotC also puts out quality work. It's really got to be quality work with a difference.)Right. So the whole point of my first post can be boiled down to this: The smart d20 publisher doesn't look at your shelf and see 12 open slots. He sees 9.</blockquote>

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