jdrakeh said:
When Crafty Games first announced their plan to publish and distribute through a third party vanity press imprint, I stated that if you rely on a third-party to get them into print and out to publishers, there will likely be serious visibility and/or timely release issues.
I was told in rather blunt, unfriendly, terms by several Crafty Games employees
here that I had no idea what I was talking about. I was wrong, wrong, wrong and they were going to have a massive catalog with crazy support in 2007!
It is with no great pleasure that I say time has vindicated me. They were right about one thing, though -- the hammer
did drop in 2007 (but not in the way that they expected it to). While I ended up being right about several things, I really wish I hadn't been.
Mongoose Publishing is a vanity press? Somehow I have my doubts as to the veracity of that statement. (Babylon 5, Conan, RuneQuest, Traveller, Paranoia & etc.....)
For good or ill, Mongoose is finally getting the train of products rolling. They have had their share of disaster, sometimes inflicted by lack of oversight by some of the editors, sometimes by misgauging the difficulties of mastering new systems, but I hardly think that they qualify as a 'Vanity Press'.
Mongoose
has adopted a Print on Demand approach, and it
was an approach that they suffered numerous difficulties in adopting. This put a delay on a whole lot of projects, not just those for Crafty Games. Taking over printing tasks that they had formerly jobbed out was a lot harder than they expected, and the new equipment had quite a steep learning curve. (Been there, done that, ruined the tee shirt....)
So, in my not very humble opinion, both you and those who claimed that there would be a massive wave of products were wrong. Feel better now?
Me, I expected the task of taking over the printing aspect of the business
would be harder than they did. I have had to do my share of converting from one piece of publishing software (desktop or otherwise) to another to know that alone would be harder than they expected. (As has anyone who has had to convert between Pagemaker, QuarkXPress, and/or InDesign. Gods, I hated Quark.) Adding brand new printing equipment (which I
didn't have to deal with, thank the gods) made the job that much more daunting.
Crafty, meanwhile, is learning the business end of RPGs, rather than merely the creative end. Again, they are finding the task bigger than they thought. So, yes, they had a stumble or three.
So,
this year we get to find out whether you were right or wrong, not 2007.
The Auld Grump
*EDIT* Did I mention how much I hated Quark?
*EDIT 2* Mind you, the release that
I was most looking forward to has already come out - Fragile Minds, the rules for insanity and horror, perfect for my Spycraft/Delta Green campaign. You'd almost think that the supplement was custom made for just that purpose....
