I'll still order it because I want a print copy, but the whole notion of exclusivity really rubs me the wrong way. It would be one thing if the book was made available to people who went to Gen Con or something. Thats something I have an opportunity to get but chose not to. Thats on me.
But when I don't even find out about a book until its already sold out, and then I'm told well we'll make it available but we'll essentially stamp "SOL edition" on the new cover, that kind of ticks me off.
I get what Clark is saying, that hey we said this is a limited edition, but I'd rather they just sign all the copies of the first printing, but otherwise keep it identical.
That's totally understandable, at least as long as you realize that the second printing isn't about deliberately creating a situation of artificial scarcity. Publishers don't benefit from artificial scarcity, it's scalpers and collectors who benefit from scarcity. There was no limit on the pre-orders, that was a fluid number until right at the end of the process.
At the outset, FGG knew that because of the high up-front cost of the books, only a very few could be ordered as inventory -- most of it would have to be funded by the pre-orders. And there was no expectation of a second print run, because those run a very serious risk of ending up with inventory that -- at best -- ties up capital needed for printing the new stuff.
Therefore, it was very, very important to warn people that the pre-ordering would be the only way to get a copy if they wanted one. All projections of the demand pointed to a situation where this would be a one-time thing. People would be pissed off if they expected to see FGG hold lots of inventory for later purchases and then discovered that this wasn't the model being used.
Which is why there was so much talk of only 1500 PF copies being available. And there was a *lot* of talk about this on every communication channel FGG could reach. Not to create scarcity, but to try and increase the base number of books in the print run so that everyone who wanted one could get one. That's the opposite of creating scarcity.
When Paizo sent that email around, it was a total game-changer in terms of demand. In fact, the results surprised Paizo as well. But the email went out long after the printing, and long after the disclosures of the limited size of the print run. All the planning and all the disclosure and all the budgeting suddenly turned out to be woefully small, even though they were based on the best possible information that was available at the time.
Given all that, FGG was left with the earlier warning-disclosures being turned into something unexpected -- a lot of collectors (true collectors, not scalpers) had expectations about what they were getting, and it would be pretty dishonorable to just say, "sorry, you guys are screwed." With respect to scalpers, that wouldn't be an issue -- no company goes out of its way to transfer value from the publisher to an ebay scalper. But long-term dealers and collectors should be able to rely on what a company tells them in advance.
That was the conundrum. A warning that was intended to *avoid* a scarcity situation suddenly morphed unexpectedly into a commitment to a group of those buyers, the good-faith collectors, and it was a commitment that couldn't honorably be ignored.
So the scarcity was accidental, not engineered, which (IMO) makes a huge difference. Every effort was made to avoid a scarcity situation, it's just that those efforts were utterly blown out of the water by the publicity of that Paizo email.
The Paizo email was a good thing, because it's causing the book's content to be much more widely distributed to gamers who want it. But it was a sudden and radical alteration to all the planning and promises that had been made earlier in an effort to get the book out to everyone who wanted one.
The fact is that even if FGG had bought advertisements or done something else to get the word out, a general email from Paizo with a scarcity alert in it and a clear indication that the book is going to be tied in many ways to future Paizo products ... that's going to reach further and have more clout than all the advertisement you could possibly buy in the gaming world. It simply altered the entire landscape of the release.
