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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JimLotFP" data-source="post: 7734996" data-attributes="member: 44294">Owner of LotFP here. To clear up some things that have been brought up:Yes, I work out of my apartment and warehouse my books here. I have an extra room solely for that storage, and there are around 10,000 books and a few hundred t-shirts in there. I could have gotten a smaller apartment and then rented offsite space for the inventory, absolutely, but what a pain in the ass that would be for various reasons. It's here because it is easier. I write off all that square meterage as part of my home office deduction. (Similarly, a large number of books are warehoused in the US for distribution, because due my not being on the same continent as my distribution partners, it doesn't make sense to have my own space in the US, and it's much cheaper sending lots of books all at once across the ocean than on demand.)It's conceivable that I'll need offsite warehousing here. Maybe even this year if certain projects get completed and released. Maybe someday I'll even need to get a proper office and actual employees that need to go there to work.But the thing is, those things will be made necessary by the increased business activity of more releases and more sales. They'd have to pay for themselves. Or else it would be absolute insanity to take those steps and have that new business infrastructure.I can't see how I could ever tell someone "Oh, our business has grown and we've got all these expenses to deal with, so you people who make the stuff that make the growth possible have to get paid less." There are 33 projects in various stages of production over here at LotFP. Some of the people writing them got advances. Most didn't. If they start getting delivered in clusters, that may create a bottleneck as I'd have to pay for a bunch of art and layout etc at once (mostly those are negotiated one-time fees, as I consider the author to be the "creator" and everyone else involved is working from their creation). That's going to happen hopefully this summer as several projects are waiting on a particular rules supplement to be finished and tested because they need to reference those rules. Maybe books will have to be prioritized, but that just means books will need to be released in succession rathan than a pile all at once.But the idea that I need a bunch of money to start projects just isn't true once I established that the royalty model I use tends to pay out multiple times what freelancers get from the big companies.And I see it as a total point of pride when people who make stuff for me make two or three times (or more!) what they've made working with companies like Wizards of the Coast. When they pass the point of what they would have made with a flat-fee payment, I am happy. Happy the system is working for all of us. Happy I can tell creators that LotFP is a place you can come to make money. (And win awards, as it turns out.) Happy that I get to make a living facilitating the release of all this cool stuff.If they don't make more with me than they would have elsewhere, then I have failed them. Their jobs aren't to make money for me. It's my job to make money for them. Or else why would they do anything for me instead of for someone else, or on their own?And as time has passed, more and more projects are produced using the royalty model and I don't think it's a coincidence that the business has also grown, in terms of both units sold and money earned, every year.(The only projects that haven't pulled a nice profit have been those crowdfunded books that were budgeted and commissioned at specific wordcounts... and the author totally blew the wordcount, sometimes two or three times more than what they were commissioned for. And I just went with it, even though at that point hundreds of people had already paid for what was supposed to be a lot smaller book. But I couldn't pay the authors any more than promised, so on those projects the per-word rate is quite low, although I do give them a cut of the PDF sales.)I don't know a thing about the business workings at places like Evil Hat and Green Ronin. But I do know if they are larger and more successful companies than LotFP, the people who make their stuff should get paid more than the people who make LotFP stuff. (And I hope, if we could start comparing like to like, such as the definition of "creator", that they are.) What else is even the point of being a larger company?</blockquote>

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