NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Erik Mona" data-source="post: 3999547" data-attributes="member: 2174">I don't have much time right now, so I'm going to try to cover this as swiftly as I can.• Nothing in our agreement with WotC precluded us from setting up another magazine. The whole non-compete thing is off base.• Despite lots of people talking about how Dragon was "only" reaching a small part of the D&D audience, we regularly sold 40,000-50,000 copies of the magazines, each and every month. Most d20 companies don't sell that many copies of their products in an entire year.• The magazine distribution business is much, much different than the hobby games business. In the hobby games business you sell a certain number of books to the distributor on a non-returnable basis. The distributor sells those books to retailers, and they either sell or don't sell. Either way the publisher has made its money usually within 30 days of sending the books to the distributor. In the magazine business, you send two to three times as many copies of the magazines to distributors, who often send them into terrible accounts where they sell something like 8%. Publishers don't get a penny until the magazine is 32 _weeks_ off sale, at which point you get the first quarter of the payments. And remember that only about half of the copies you've printed ever actually sell (but it'll take you about a year and a half or so to figure out exactly how well a certain issue did). We were happy to maintain that business with a "legacy" brand and an official license, but trying to pull it off with something new would have been a disaster. Wolfgang Baur is doing great with Kobold Quarterly, but he is one dude with a day job. Paizo employs six full-time editors and three full-time designers. And we had no intention to fire almost all of our staff on a gamble that would take a decade to get back to where we were just because Wizards decided to put the magazines online. No thanks!• To get a magazine on newsstands you actually have to pay a bribe (er, "authorization") that can run into the high thousands of dollars. There was little guarantee that our new magazine could slip right into the old Dragon and Dungeon authorizations, which further increased the start-up costs of launching a new magazine.• Ad revenue drives the business of most magazines (because you'd be a fool to drive the business on distribution, for reasons cited above). In the game industry, however, ad revenue pretty much just drives the publisher insane. Here's a little surprise secret of the game industry: Most of the companies in it are either failing or about to fail. I'd guess that something like 65% of our game industry ads, including and especially ones from names a lot of you would recognize as "healthy" companies in the industry, never paid a cent for their ads because they went out of business, because they "lost" the insertion orders, or whatever. A good half of our ad guy's time was tracking down tiny companies and sending them to collections, which was a giant waste of time. None of these factors was enough to kill the magazines outright, but all of them made the proposition of launching a new magazine without the three-decades of brand power Dragon had an extremely expensive and extremely risky affair.We decided to use the opportunity to build our business around a more stable and more predictable model, and as a result the company is more healthy now than it has ever been before.--Erik MonaPublisherPaizo Publishing, LLC</blockquote>

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