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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CardinalXimenes" data-source="post: 7659026" data-attributes="member: 58259">I'm the one-man shop that is Sine Nomine Publishing. Last year, between monthly sales through DTRPG, two Kickstarters, and a couple appearances in Allen Varney's Bundle of Holding offers I netted a little north of sixty thousand, before very substantial taxes. Even if I didn't have a day job it still would've been enough to have supported me comfortably. And I never have hired a freelance writer and don't see any obvious occasion in which I would.From a publisher's perspective, writers are either fungible or they aren't. Either you have a Name that draws an existing audience that will seek out your work and purchase it, or you don't have such a following. In the latter case, from a marketing perspective, you're basically creating Bulk RPG Product #7 and the publisher's role is just to swaddle the log in an attractive package for shipment. Generic Joe Smith can't drive any sales, so while his writing might make the project possible, it's not enough to actually make it especially salable in the absence of some other selling proposition. Any payment at this level is an act of conspicuous financial optimism rather than something grounded on a return on the investment.New writers can reasonably point out that the only way to get a following is to actually put something out there. A publisher who recognizes real potential in a writer can pay them until their genius is clear and they actually drive sales with their name... at which point the writer will quite reasonably demand higher rates, because very few indie publishers can afford salaried positions. Thus, there's not a lot of upside in cultivating new talent. By the time they get big, they cost the same as existing names that already can whip up notice.The raw numbers have to be recollected here. A slab of generic RPG product can expect to sell between 50-100 copies over its short-term lifespan. If it's got a notable publisher or hot buzz, it might sell 500+, or 1000+ if it's a real hit. So let's run some numbers from the publisher side of things.Assume it's a 64-page supplement, since those sell well and are manageable for small publishers. Call it a $9.99 PDF + $19.99 print, since those prices are what the market will generally bear. Be conservative and assume that profits average out to about $8 a sale after OBS' cut. Be overly generous and assume that you can put this 64-page supplement together for zero dollars in art cost, layout, and editing, because you're a renaissance publisher who undervalues editing and uses Scribus and free art. If you do your own writing of circa 50K words and the product sells 75 copies over the near term, you've made $600 pre-tax. You're paying yourself the handsome rate of 1.2 cents a word there.Now let's bring in a Name writer, one whose mere presence on the cover can turn the book into a modest hit of 500 copies sold. How much can you pay that Name writer before you're better off just doing it yourself? 500 copies @ $8 = $4,000 gross sales - $600 for the alternate case = $3,400 over 50,000 words = 6.8 cents a word. So less than 7 cents per word. And that's with excessively optimistic assessment of art, layout, and editing costs.Honestly, I don't know if there's a healthy place in the publishing ecosystem for non-Name freelancers. If I were in their shoes, I'd ditch the publishers entirely and just self-publish until I'd built up a following and had a demonstrable value to a publisher. This requires developing a whole suite of new skills in layout and business management, yes, but the capital outlays are very small. You can get a subscription to Adobe InDesign for $20 a month, grab free stock art from DTRPG, and use guides and templates to get a basic grasp of layout design. Then you get to keep all the money, and I can assure you that that is a very happy place to be.Such freelancers can eyeball some of the free resources I've put out:<a href="http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/142192/The-Smoking-Pillar-of-Lan-Yu" target="_blank">An example template module for laying out 1980-style AD&D modules.</a><a href="http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/143764/The-Sandbox-1" target="_blank">A recap of my production sequence for Kickstarters.</a><a href="https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B4qCWY8UnLrcVVVNWG5qUTUySjg&usp=sharing" target="_blank">My publisher resources Google Drive folder, with some layout and creation guides.</a></blockquote>

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