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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CardinalXimenes" data-source="post: 7659115" data-attributes="member: 58259">I think we're just disagreeing on the scope of success that can be expected. I don't expect that anyone, talented or otherwise, could just cargo-cult repeat my processes and profit as well as I have. I had the luck to choose the right market niche and supply a need that wasn't sufficiently scratched at the time. I was there with a POD core book the month that OBS started offering them. Stars Without Number had the luck to be pushed by many people at the right place and right time. After a certain point, hard work and moderate talent simply make luck possible rather than foreordained.But honestly, you're telling me that slapping a $4.99 mini-splat up on DTRPG won't catch at least three or four purchases while it's still sitting in the "Latest Products" listing? $10 may be nugatory, but if you're determined to write RPG material and have done it with free tools and resources, that's $10 of profit, and it's $10 of profit you chose to get. You were not obliged to find a publisher willing to pay you, which is a very non-trivial undertaking for many aspiring freelance writers.The harsh truth is that there is not an unlimited supply of publishers willing to pay even one cent a word for a freelance writer. An aspiring writer's choice is often not between freelance rates and trifling self-pub returns, but between nothing and self-pub. Learning how to use Scribus and how to lay out a basic, respectable RPG product is not a trivial undertaking, but I honestly don't believe that a reasonably-intelligent person willing to spend a few months of real, freelancer-worthy work with the product can't learn how to make a modest and adequate product with it. I've published several documents expressly to handhold newbie publishers through the process.I think the OSR community is exceptionally friendly to self-publishers because it has such low minimum standards for production quality. Some publishers actively seek to emulate bad or naive typography just to mimic the classics of the genre. Though to be truthful, given the extremely low book design standards of the RPG industry in general, this maybe isn't so much of a distinction from other sub-markets.Stand-alone RPGs undoubtedly give the best profit-to-page ratio for me, especially given the Kickstarter money they bring in. Even so, supplements normally pay off their modest art investments handsomely- short supplements of 32 pages or so average around 2K profit in the near term, while longer supplements of 64-100 pages net out about 4-6K. I'm going to try a Kickstart for a full-color 64 page supplement later this year and compare the take with my b/w full-game book KSes to see if Kickstarter might improve supplement profitability. The Pathfinder market ecosystem might be very different, and I get the impression that higher production values are expected, but it might be worth seeing what kind of wiggle room you have there on production costs.</blockquote>

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