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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 2409527" data-attributes="member: 63">I can only use my pdf publishing experience as an example. Sales are not incredibly high nowadays. We can assume a typical book will sell at least 100 copies in the first three months it's on sale. Now, let's say that's a 10,000 word book, about 25 pages. We'd normally sell that for $5.As a quick simplification of art, layout, vendor fees, etc., we'll say that the author makes about 25% of each sale. So if we just wanted to pay the author 3 cents a word (and I'd love to), the book has to make $1,200 (30,000 cents = $300, and he gets one-fourth). To do this reliably, one of two things would have to happen.1) That book would have to cost $12. Nobody but college students pay $12 for 25 pages of writing.2) The book (at $5) would have to sell 240 copies. This is doable -- it actually happens with some of our more popular books. But usually we're able to pay slightly over 1 cent per word. The good news is that pdfs have no shelf life, so eventually, the author will make up the money. Now, it's more efficient for us to sell cheap books. Elements of Magic - Revised was 70,000 words, about 100 pages of fairly dense text. It was a successful book, over 500 copies. For me to get $2,100 out of it, though, it would have to cost $17. For a pdf.I'd love it if people were willing to pay $17 for one of our pdf products, but we're pretty sure that's a little high. Also, heck, it took me a few months to write EOM-R, and even if I made $2,100 from it, I know it took me more than 200 hours to write. Basically, writing small-press gaming products is a difficult way to make a living. I'd need to write 12 EOMs a year to have a decent wage.And you'd all have to find them interesting.Maybe the problem is that there are too many writers. Too many people are trying to write books for fun, which means that the people who want to make a business out of it have odd competition. If you write a book for fun, and it doesn't sell, you're okay. At least you got published. If a guy who's trying to partially support himself off writing doesn't sell X-hundred copies of his book because people were buying other, similar books, he's a little unhappy.Anyway, this has been a bit rambling. I've got to call a friend now and discuss the next book I'm writing. I want to make $3000 from it, and I think it'll sell pretty well, so I'm going to sell this 60 page pdf for . . . oh, $60.</blockquote>

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