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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jürgen Hubert" data-source="post: 7659732" data-attributes="member: 7177">As someone who has embarked on self-publication this past Sunday, this thread is directly relevant to my interests.First of all... I am not doing this for the money. I realize that only a small minority of RPG authors can make a living from their writings, and I suspect that all of them make less money than I do with my day job. Thus, I am not going to pretend that a profit is my primary motive - my financial goals are not to make a loss, and if something is left over that do reduce my not inconsiderable RPG-related bills then that's a nice bonus.I've long dreamed of publishing my own material, but for many years I had this vague notion of a huge magnum opus - releasing the fantasy world I've been working on ("Urbis") as a massive tome. Unsurprisingly, I never finalized it.Then I had the opportunity of publishing a smaller setting I had written ("Doomed Slayers") with a small publisher, back in 2012. A number of reviewers said some nice things about it and it managed to become a "Best Silver Seller" at DriveThruRPG, so there is that. However, the publisher decided to close down last year, which meant that this seemed to be a good opportunity for going into self-publication.Which I did. The second edition of "Doomed Slayers" was released past Sunday, and I hope to be able to release a first supplement early next month (the manuscript is in the final stages).Since I am a very small publisher and don't have much of a budget to work with, I have to do most things myself - therefore:- Layouting is done with LaTeX, since I am familiar with that from my academic years.- I still had the rights to some artwork from another artist from the previous edition. While the artist fully deserved his money, this also took an enormous amount of money out of my budget. Since I have started with dabbling in digital artwork again, I plan to do further illustrations on my own, saving me more money.- Instead of massive tomes, I will largely focus on smaller PDF supplements - these are far less of a hassle to create, and easier to cram into my busy schedule."The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good". I am still at the beginning of my RPG writing career - I will have to assume that all my relevant skills will improve over time. The main thing is that, right now, I am doing something which will give me experience and feedback - instead of thinking about it.So, what's the payoff like?Well, this gets a bit complicated - basically, I managed to get the "first edition" of Doomed Slayers transferred to my new imprint, and then updated the files with my new edition.The first edition had 136 "non-free" (that is, without comp copies) sales at a sales price of $3.99 - which was enough to make it a "Best Silver Seller" (that is, among the top 14.26% of products at DriveThruRPG). Subtracting the 35% that DriveThruRPG gets for the "non-exclusive" contract, that left $362.71 to be distributed between the publisher and myself. That probably counts as a "success story" in RPG publishing - remember, at least 85% of all products sell less than this!For the new edition, I decided to try out the "Pay What You Want" option and turned the $3.99 into the "suggested price". Obviously, after only five days there is not yet much hard sales data to evaluate. Nonetheless:- It has been "sold" 24 times- Of these, 18 "sales" were set at a price of $0.00.- The six others paid $0.25, 2x $3.99, $4.00, $5.00, and $7.85It is too early to say whether customers who first got it for free will repurchase it later at a higher price to show their appreciation (the DriveThruRPG sales reports do show customer numbers, so it's possible to track this). I also hope that they will consider giving money for future products. Furthermore, I hope that increasing my presence through the "Pay What You Want" option will increase my "brand name recognition" so to speak.I will probably publish some statistical analysis of the sales every month or so for the first few months - as a trained scientist, I find this interesting, and I hope some other aspiring publishers will find this useful as well.</blockquote>

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