Don't think my title is conveying what I'm trying to, I'm brainfarting trying to come up with something better.
The Dwimmermount thread, and some recent comments in regards to advances got me thinking, remembering other discussions from other sites in the past.
I'm curious what ya'll think about how the RPG labor/compensation compares to other markets/industries, and if you think RPGs should be treated the same.
My understanding is that, in regards to RPG writing and art, advances don't get made, work is paid for at a pre-contracted rate (cents-per-word, or dollars-per-art-piece), paid upon completion/approval, no royalties/residuals, etc.
I've seen talk about how the pay in this industry is incredibly low when compared to others (i.e. writing for an RPG vs. writing a novel, etc.).
Any "insider information" regarding my assumptions (i.e. are they pretty accurate, or off-base)? Thoughts on how the industry is, if it's fine as it is, or if it should shift to something else?
Just curious about some of this.
Disclaimer: I'm only a part-time author and no expert on the business side of the RPG industry. What I've learned so far:
Best way to make a small fortune in the RPG industry: start out with a large fortune in the RPG industry. This business does not pay well, and I have no plans to quit my day job. (I like having health insurance. Groceries are nice, too.) Compared to other businesses: I've written RPGs for as little as $.01 a word. A friend of mine told me he could get up to $.13 a word writing for Penthouse Letters. Writing about elves and wizards and dragons just doesn't bring in the same sales numbers as writing smut, apparently. Go figure.
To paraphrase Dave Sim: They will never pay you more than it will cost them for the lawyers.
It's clear to me that there is money to be made in the industry but it's a hard and risky road and far too many companies die from internal fraud and theft.
Thanks for the input so far!
To clarify, I'm not actually looking for any kind of career in the field, just trying to get a better understanding of things.
I'm interested in word rates, art fees, etc. One of these days, I'd like to try my hand at publishing something, so I'd like to have more information ahead of time, but it's one of those things that a lot of folks seem to not really discuss.
That said, I've seen some RPG-folks-turned-"traditional"-writer comment on how horribly they were paid when writing RPGs, and I've seen a lot of RPG writers express a desire or end goal to "move up through the ranks" as it were into becoming a "real" writer instead of writing game stuff.
Quote from: kythri;584883I'm interested in word rates, art fees, etc. One of these days, I'd like to try my hand at publishing something, so I'd like to have more information ahead of time, but it's one of those things that a lot of folks seem to not really discuss.
When i freelanced for Green Ronin i got 4 cents a word. 3 or 4 is fairly common for mid-tier companies. I'm sure better rates are paid (i think WotC pay 7 for hired freelancers), but it's pretty poor unless you are salaried. Even then, i remember Mongoose advertising for an in-house writer expected to churn out 15k words a week for a yearly salary of £14k. Which is basically school leavers money.
Freelance writing for rpgs is low wage. I have worked as a reporter and an editor outside the rpg industry in the past, making decent money. But anything i have done in the rpg industry was done knowing that getting 3 cents a word is about average (and more often than not you get 1-2 cents a word). To me it didn't matter because I love RPGs and enjoy producing game material. If you want to make money as a writer, you are much better off looking into journalism or working in an editorial office for a publisher. If you start your own game company you might manage to make a living at it (or if you are someone like monty cook or mike mearls working for a larger company). But most people who get into the business barey break even if they are lucky.
Payrates are very low:
http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2011/11/rpg-professionals-rude-question-luckily.html
The basic skinny is you can make as much or more money putting out your own thing as you can freelancing at least until you get to be a big name:
http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2011/11/time-to-diy.html
A lot of big company freelancers with recognizable names confirmed these numbers when these blog entries went up.
The full-time big company people make a living wage. Otherwise it's pretty brutal.
That said, pretty much anybody who puts out their own stuff that I've heard about does way better than break even--it's just weighing that against dayjob pay.
Quote from: One Horse Town;584892Even then, i remember Mongoose advertising for an in-house writer expected to churn out 15k words a week for a yearly salary of £14k. Which is basically school leavers money.
Jesus. I'm a sort-of-school-leaver (took an extended break due to health crap, going back next year), and that's less than half my salary. :eek:
Even non-profit digs will pay more than that for entry-level work (and you'll do more for society in the process...sometimes).
Quote from: kythri;584860I'm curious what ya'll think about how the RPG labor/compensation compares to other markets/industries, and if you think RPGs should be treated the same.
My understanding is that, in regards to RPG writing and art, advances don't get made, work is paid for at a pre-contracted rate (cents-per-word, or dollars-per-art-piece), paid upon completion/approval, no royalties/residuals, etc.
I've seen talk about how the pay in this industry is incredibly low when compared to others (i.e. writing for an RPG vs. writing a novel, etc.).
Some people at larger companies may land a good job writing RPGs, but what I know about the freelancing side is not exactly inviting. You often get paid the equivalent of H.P. Lovecraft (who essentially lived on the Ramen noodles of his day), R.E. Howard (who did odd jobs at oil projects and surveys) and C.A. Smith (who lived in a shed and picked oranges to make ends meet) did at a time when the dollar was several times more valuable than now. The pay per word system itself encourages bloat and continuous churn over inspired, playtested and carefully designed products, so it is also bad for the customer.
There is also an amount of uncertainty there. If you are working on someone else's IP, you are selling to the only buyer in town. No deal? No luck. My only freelancing project was delayed for years and eventually got lost in development hell - and I didn't receive a cent of what amounted to about five months of on and off writing and a
whole lot of playtesting. Nobody was to blame, but still. If I were depending on that money, I would have been
fucked.
Add to that that most publishers work on a for hire basis - sell the manuscript, get paid, lose ownership and revenues forever. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the God Emperor of shitty deals.
There are better terms out there (larger companies pay more), and there are alternate models: self-publishing, if you are good at it, can be viable. G.M. Skarka, for example, has mentioned making a living through knowing and adapting to his market, and owning his publishing house. And a lot of people make good beer money, if what you want is beer money. But some of the practices in the so-called "industry" are extremely shitty.
Frankly, I don't think there are many people producing anything for the RPG market who are not doing it at least partially for love. Most of the part-time writers I know of are also professionals with families for whom the "income" will never be worthwhile.
Quote from: Melan;584979Add to that that most publishers work on a for hire basis - sell the manuscript, get paid, lose ownership and revenues forever. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the God Emperor of shitty deals.
I disagree that work for hire is a shitty deal. With one proviso, that the author understand what he or she is getting into. There are publishers that pay fairly and there are work for hire contracts worth entering into. I will do the occasional work for hire if it is the right project. And currently doing so now.
What important that thanks to the communication technologies enabled by the internet, the rise of print on demand, and now Kickstarter there are alternatives for an aspiring author. That now we have a continuum of options that can be used by the first time amateur to a multi-million dollar corporation.
Quote from: kythri;584860I'm curious what ya'll think about how the RPG labor/compensation compares to other markets/industries, and if you think RPGs should be treated the same.
The freelance pay scale is fairly well documented and hasn't improved in 20 years. If anything, I'd say average rates have declined as people raised on the d20 boom compete with newcomers for gigs at mostly smaller shops. Except for SJG and some quasi-creator-owned shops like Raggi it's all straight work-for-hire, no royalty.
Fast or slow, a really driven writer can generate maybe $150 to $250 a day, which is actually minimum wage, but at that level the bottleneck isn't the magical limits of your "creativity" but finding that much work to do. There just aren't enough books to feed all the people, day in and day out.
Hourly and per-word rates are roughly what someone would get in the term paper mills, but while there's more work there, the quality standards are actually higher. (!)
Commercial blogs will cough up anywhere from double to eight times what gaming pays and there's near-infinite demand if you can craft copy to order. That's about what a news network, wire service or trade journal will pay a fairly junior full-time person. This is where someone with a normal work ethic can actually make a full-time living.
Moving up the scale there are still glossy magazines that pay $1 to $5 per word -- about 100 times what game writers earn -- and high-end editorial roles that pay six digits.
On the creator-owned side, deals are generally better. Figure a mid-list paperback novel can still sell 5,000 copies and earn the author a 50% royalty, that's the equivalent of maybe 20 cents a word for the same verbiage that would earn 1 to 5 cents down in the for-hire dungeons. Bigger sales equal bigger payouts but on the whole any stringer at Money or Time or People will still be better paid than the typical mid-list novelist. You see a lot of surprisingly high-profile novelists fight for magazine gigs as a way to make rent. Heck, this is why you see a lot of defrocked TV writer and novelists fighting for comic book gigs.
In gaming the freelance system is mostly irrelevant now except among a few shops and the people who work with them. The less people compare word rates and the more they talk about their overall margins on creator-owned projects, the healthier the "industry" will be.
"It's a shit business. Glad I'm not in it anymore."
+1 thedungeondelver
Since I am clearly shaping up to be a mouthy person here, it strikes me that a few anecdotes might be useful.
In the mid-1990s, I was chirping along writing for the Wolf. No swine jokes, I've already said my mea culpas and was young, stupid, hungry, crazy, etc. Plus, when I was offered the most menial job available in "straight" publishing, I grabbed with both fists and let the gaming stuff go. The point is that the gap between the bottom of the "straight" publishing ladder and the middle of the work-for-hire gaming ladder was just that big.
Move up a decade, I get offered a contract that wasn't creator-owned but still represented what in gaming was a pretty generous royalty split. I tried to make the math work, but every hour I would've spent on it would have meant turning down work that paid at least 6 times as much, cash up front with benefits, and was still pretty fun. I had to turn it down. They actually couldn't afford me and I am not exactly a superstar or weighed down with a family to support.
Quote from: estar;585009I disagree that work for hire is a shitty deal. With one proviso, that the author understand what he or she is getting into. There are publishers that pay fairly and there are work for hire contracts worth entering into. I will do the occasional work for hire if it is the right project. And currently doing so now.
My position is that if I give up my IP forever - creative control, future revenue stream and all - I should at least be generously compensated for it. Game companies don't really do that. Obviously, I write from the perspective of someone with a steady and modest, but adequate income and no debts. Were that to change, the $0.02 per word shit sandwich might start looking delicious.
Quote from: Melan;585061My position is that if I give up my IP forever - creative control, future revenue stream and all - I should at least be
generously compensated for it.
And I agree, however it more complicated than saying all work for hire sucks because the average contract is pays low per word.
If the person has an an original idea not dependent on somebody else non-open IP, then I agree 100% that they should self publish or find a partner to split profits with.
However most work for hire involves a lump sum payment. While most self-published product involve getting a slightly smaller amount in the initial sale period and then rest coming through the long tail. The aggregate total is way more than what you could get on the work for hire but it is spread out over time. So that is a factor in deciding to accept a work for hire.
The big one those is getting to work on somebody else IP. As much of what we do is a labor of love, sometime a person's creative motivation at that time comes form working on Forgotten Realms, or Iron Kingdoms, or whatever. Typically the only change you get the play with that stuff is through a work for hire, although if you really lucky you can secure a licensing agreement involving royalties to the right holder.
I agree with basic gist of your post, it just the real world makes the situation more complicated.
Quote from: Melan;585061My position is that if I give up my IP forever - creative control, future revenue stream and all - I should at least be generously compensated for it.
But, if you're playing in someone else's sandbox, writing for someone else's established world/product, you're not really giving up you're IP, are you, as it wasn't your IP to begin with?
Quote from: estar;585071However most work for hire involves a lump sum payment. While most self-published product involve getting a slightly smaller amount in the initial sale period and then rest coming through the long tail. The aggregate total is way more than what you could get on the work for hire but it is spread out over time. So that is a factor in deciding to accept a work for hire.
Hey Rob, I just realized Majestic Wilderlands is a great example for this thread. Everything in italics is back-of-envelope estimates but feel free to correct us with specifics.
I figure it's
70,000 words so for hire you could've grossed maybe
$2,000 on it. Figure RPGnet and Lulu take
40% and your average PDF/POD retail price is about
$10, going the creator-owned route became a better deal for you once you sold
330 copies. Everything over that has been gravy, and the book is still making you money.
Moral: if you're not starving, working the tiniest of niches or desperate to work somebody else's IP, "DIY and enjoy."
Quote from: kythri;585074But, if you're playing in someone else's sandbox, writing for someone else's established world/product, you're not really giving up you're IP, are you, as it wasn't your IP to begin with?
That's correct. Of course, it comes with the dependency problems I have mentioned before. That's why I wouldn't take a deal like that again.
Quote from: econobus;585076Hey Rob, I just realized Majestic Wilderlands is a great example for this thread. Everything in italics is back-of-envelope estimates but feel free to correct us with specifics.
46,000 words. On 673* copies (half print, half PDF) I made about $2,200. Out of that I paid $100 in stock art (I did the cartography), and royalty to Judges Guild. An amount that is private. But the license is pretty generous something that I appreciate Robert Bledsaw Jr for granting.
The main effect of the money is that it effectively pays for my gaming stuff. Although I did use it to pay part of a car repair in 2010.
So far it has resulted in me earning $.05 a word roughly.
Blackmarsh has 2,500 downloads but only 100 sales. I am slightly disappointed in the sales (about half of what I would expect at this point) but very happy with the number of downloads. Also happy with reports of people adapting it to their own use which was one of the main reasons for releasing it.
I budgeted my upcoming Scourge of the Demon Wolf on the expectation that it would sell a 100 copies. Like Majestic Wilderlands I made it a combo product so the marketing strength of each half will cover the marketing weakness of the other. This resulted in me blowing my personal deadline by a year and a half.
In the case of the Majestic Wilderlands I released as a combination Rule Supplement and Campaign Guide. Scourge is a combination Adventure and Campaign Supplement.
Quote from: econobus;585076Moral: if you're not starving, working the tiniest of niches or desperate to work somebody else's IP, "DIY and enjoy."
Being able to keep my IP, is the main appeal.
As for the Majestic Wilderlands deal, Judges Guild and I share the copyright on any original content I make. So I was careful to preserve my rights for the stuff I created.
Points of Lights, and Blackmarsh reused the material I would have used if I never been able to get the Judges Guild license. For example Delaquain is Mitra, and Sarrath is Set. The presentation of both in the Points of Light are lifted directly from my Majestic Wilderlands notes with any Judges Guild IP stripped off.
Quote from: Xavier Onassiss;584873Compared to other businesses: I've written RPGs for as little as $.01 a word. A friend of mine told me he could get up to $.13 a word writing for Penthouse Letters. Writing about elves and wizards and dragons just doesn't bring in the same sales numbers as writing smut, apparently. Go figure.
In the early 90s, I worked for a literary agency in LA. The agency focused on romance novels, smut, and "hobbyist mags" - like Cat Fancy, Swimming Monthly, etc. Our specialty smut authors made the best money per hour.
We did have one badass dude who cranked out 10 Harlequin novels each year and we sold each for $5k. Yeah, full novel for $5000 flat fee, no royalties, loss of all rights.
BUT this was pre-Internet so I wonder if the smut mags still pay anything worthwhile when anyone who wants spank stories can get all kink imaginable for free on fanfic sites. In 1991, you had to buy good spankage.
Quote from: David Johansen;584881It's clear to me that there is money to be made in the industry but it's a hard and risky road and far too many companies die from internal fraud and theft.
The hobby is too small now for the risk to be worth the reward if you are looking for anything more than beer money. Anyone with the guts to go down a "hard and risky road" should go down a road with a real money potential.
Quote from: Zak S;584970The full-time big company people make a living wage. Otherwise it's pretty brutal.
And "living wage" is very subjective.
Quote from: Melan;584979But some of the practices in the so-called "industry" are extremely shitty.
No more shitty than I saw in the bigger publishing world. The romance novel world is pretty fucked up.
We had authors who actually lost the rights to their own writing name. AKA, after you built up a fanbase under the name "Stacy McLovelots" the company can snag your name and slap it on other books by other authors and you get paid nothing.
And did I mention that our author found out about it when he saw books by a different publisher (aka a subsidiary) with his name on the cover.
Quote from: estar;58508946,000 words. On 673* copies (half print, half PDF) I made about $2,200. Out of that I paid $100 in stock art (I did the cartography), and royalty to Judges Guild. An amount that is private. But the license is pretty generous something that I appreciate Robert Bledsaw Jr for granting.
This is nice, thank you. Not going to ask about what the Bledsaws are getting back but I'm happy it's in there.
So running the abacus I see that at this price point and this POD/PDF mix your WFH/DIY breakeven was ... 430 copies. Anything bigger, creator-owned gave you a better long-term deal, no questions asked. Anything smaller, we have to delve into the "intangibles" to make the argument one way or another.
(Personally I'm shocked that your price point is so low, you really
can charge more for this and people will pay it, but it's your call!)
Now whether a steady couple hundred copies a year will ever scale up to feed the kids is another question and I think it's been answered elsewhere. I think that's why Dwimmermount feels like such a huge payout to me. Theoretically it might actually add up to a living wage.
I do my own work from vague whimsey to POD-ready file, barring the art I commission. I have no doubt that my work would be improved with outside layout and editing help, but the price of that kind of assistance would shred the margin on my products and I'm unconvinced that my market would actually care enough to bump up the sales meaningfully. If I'm willing to resort to stock art, I run about the cheapest one-man publishing model you can run these days.
Art is the real margin killer for a gaming product. For a novel you need a cover design and illo and you're set. For a gaming product, people expect to see art, and that art costs money. Quarter-page b/w illos range from $20-$40 apiece and scale up from there for half/full pages. If you want those prices you will also be prepared to deal with hobbyist gamer artist quirks. Cheap, reliable, good; hope for three, settle for two. I can't speak to color prices, since color interiors are pointless unless you leverage it with your layout, and I don't have the chops to do that well yet. Color covers will run you $500 and up from a good, experienced artist, and here you need to be willing to spend the money because a glance at a cover thumbnail is often all you've got to attract attention.
At a lightly-illustrated average of one quarter-page illo per two pages, a 128-page product with cover comes in at an absolute minimum of $1,780 in art costs. Also, unlike editing or layout, art is not something a clueless person can fake their way through in any remotely acceptable way. One look at the art costs is plenty to explain why indie publishers have a passionate love affair with public domain and stock art. I was able to put stock and PD art into Stars Without Number for a few hundred bucks. When I commissioned art for Other Dust a year later, a book of almost exactly the same size, I paid about $2,500. You have to sell a lot of additional books to justify that kind of outlay.
So here I am with this 128-page product which has cost me about $1,800 to make- and that's on a good day. If it's more toward the average art costs, I'm looking at $2,500 outlay before I've made a dime off of anything. If I were to enlist even gaming-pay-scale layout designers or editors on the product, I'd be looking at an extra $500 apiece for them if they were feeling charitable, so unless I'm trying to make a work of real beauty I'm better off just improving my own skills and doing the work myself.
Now I need to price the product. For print, call it $24.99 for softcover+PDF and half that for PDF-only. Working through OneBookshelf's DTRPG/RPGNow frontends, you make about two-thirds of the cover after print costs. Print to PDF ratios go about 1:4 in my experience, and a 128-page 8.5x11 b/w softcover costs about $4.20 in POD print. Thus, the average gross profit on a sale is about $9. With that in mind, it becomes clear that the putative $1,800 rock-bottom production needs to sell 200 copies to break even.
On average, this won't happen. If you look at DTRPG/RPGNow, you'll see they have a medal system for best-sellers. Each site tracks sales separately against the medal for that site, and last time I checked Copper rings in at about 50 sales or so. You also see that roughly 75% of products on DTRPG and 80% of products on RPGNow never even hit ~50 sales on that particular storefront. Assuming an extremely charitable reading of 49 sales on both sites, the average release is looking at 100 sales tops. In practice, this number is actually closer to 50.
At $9 average profit per sale and by ruthlessly keeping your custom art costs as low as possible, congrats- you've just lost $900 dollars. On an optimistic projection, on a project that probably has about 100,000 words worth of effort. So if you're lucky, you'll only pay about a cent a word to make your product.
On the other hand, let's run these numbers assuming public-domain art at $0. Even assuming a typical non-optimistic 50-sale take, you've just made $450, earning half a cent a word. Which is laughably bad pay for 100,000 words worth of writing, but hey, it's money.
Quote from: SineNomine;585110Extensive detailed text
How did Red Tide and the other LL books you did (which I'll be getting when I'm back in the US) break down for you, if you don't mind the curiosity?
Very interesting thread, but what about the effect the internet has on publishing, not to mention cheap and ubiquitous IT hardware of a shockingly sophisticated level?
Layout is simple, just pick your three favourite RPG books and mash them into something you like. The software is there and free if you want to go open source. If you're able to write, write up your game, playtest it with your friends and iron out the wrinkles/edit as you go.
Art is the kicker for a lot of people, that stuff ain't cheap, and even if you do go to the Philippines or somewhere your odds of getting what you ordered are variable at best. I'm getting past that by learning how to do it myself as is my habit, learning to draw, then sketch, then colourise in photoshop, illustrator and blender.
Worst thing that can happen is I come out the other side with a whole new skillset, and believe me these are skills not magical gifts from the Muses.
I picked up a wacom inkling for that purpose the last day. Piece of shit I can tell you, I draw two parallel lines on a page and I'm lucky if I get a square out of it. I'm figuring out how it works though (hold the pen at the same angle whatever you are drawing, try to keep the same face towards the receptors, etc). I've a pretty damn good idea how this stuff is engineered and I wouldn't be surprised if they had hobbled it so it wouldn't interfere with their tablet sales. I guess its good for prototyping at least.
Marketing and channels, well take your pick. Your biggest problem is that there's a surplus of useful free advice and avenues available. Anyone ever looked into setting up a facebook viral marketing campaign? Its really easy.
Anyway, the point is you don't need a team of layout guys, two designers, a publisher, two copyists and three artists to make the magic anymore. One dedicated individual can work wonders with a lot of patience, effort, and some time.
So the takeaway tl;dr, if you want to be employed in gaming publish your own thing.
Quote from: SineNomine;585110Art is the real margin killer for a gaming product.
Yes.
Quote from: SineNomine;585110Art is the real margin killer for a gaming product.
Double yes.
Quote from: SineNomine;585110Art is the real margin killer for a gaming product.
Which is why I put together this Kickstarter several months back:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inkwellideas/monster-stock-art
I really wanted to help other publishers cut their budgets and/or put more of their art budget to some better/more custom pieces.
I'm very close to doing a sequel to that project. (The big differences are: 1. Different creatures; 2. It will include B&W lineart versions of the creatures.) Drop me a note if interested.
Of course that's only fantasy.. and even if you are doing a fantasy project, maybe the style doesn't match and/or you may want a custom look, etc.
Quote from: SowelBlack;585122I'm very close to doing a sequel to that project. (The big differences are: 1. Different creatures; 2. It will include B&W lineart versions of the creatures.) Drop me a note if interested.
Officer thinking sir, what would be nice would be a vast archive of random sketches that could be sprinkled throughout a fantasy book, dungeon doors, swords leaned up against a table, a coin with an interesting design on it, that sort of thing. Really helps to bulk out a book and add atmosphere, but you need loads of them to avoid repetition across different products. Happily they are usually very small and simple. A few funky dividers too.
Quote from: The Traveller;585125Officer thinking sir, what would be nice would be a vast archive of random sketches that could be sprinkled throughout a fantasy book, dungeon doors, swords leaned up against a table, a coin with an interesting design on it, that sort of thing. Really helps to bulk out a book and add atmosphere, but you need loads of them to avoid repetition across different products. Happily they are usually very small and simple. A few funky dividers too.
Here are a couple of stock art products along those lines:
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/100265/Fantasy-Clip-Inks%3A%3A-Spot-Art-set-4
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/94754/Stock-Art-Shields%3A-Swords
(Since the first is volume 4, I'm guessing there is a slew of them.)
Also, my Coat of Arms Design Studio program uses all public domain art, so there's that too.
And of course wikimedia commons has a bunch of things you can use if you double-check the license.
openclipart.org has some things too.
Finally there's a site that specialized is PD art from old books, but I don't have the address handy.
Quote from: Panzerkraken;585115How did Red Tide and the other LL books you did (which I'll be getting when I'm back in the US) break down for you, if you don't mind the curiosity?
So far, Red Tide's moved ~500 copies over about 18 months, An Echo Resounding's done ~300 copies in about 9 months, and the Crimson Pandect has sold ~100 in 4 months. None of them beat my all-time winner for cheap production outlay, Skyward Steel, which cost me about $50 for a cover and a couple interior illos, but none of them cost more than a couple hundred bucks for stock art. All of them broke even in the first few days of sales and everything past that has been gravy.
Which is good, because they finance my projects which are
not stock art. Other Dust cost me $2,500, and I've currently scheduled about $3,000 worth of material for Spears of the Dawn. Once the draft is complete, I'm going to kickstart SotD just to find out whether or not there's actually a market for an old-school African-based B/X equivalent. If there is, then the investment will be for the good. If there isn't, well, I'll have bought $3K worth of market wisdom. Either way I'll be releasing all of SotD's art into the public domain after it's published so that other indie publishers can actually get access to some art that works for products set south of Sicily.
Quote from: SowelBlack;585122Which is why I put together this Kickstarter several months back:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inkwellideas/monster-stock-art
I really wanted to help other publishers cut their budgets and/or put more of their art budget to some better/more custom pieces.
I'm very close to doing a sequel to that project. (The big differences are: 1. Different creatures; 2. It will include B&W lineart versions of the creatures.) Drop me a note if interested.
I noticed that project, and anything that gets more stock art into the pipeline is all for the good as far as I'm concerned. In my own case, though, I'm just going to put the art out free once it's complete. I got so blisteringly irritated with the monthly "D&D Art Is Too Eurocentric" whinge threads that I wrote Spears of the Dawn just as an example of what anybody with a library card and a pulse can do if they really want to have more of a certain sort of game. People want more non-Euro games? Great.
Go write them. Do things that actually
make more such games. And from my perspective as a publisher, the best way to induce more salable projects with non-Euro characters and settings is to make a bunch of free art pertaining to it. Maybe the kickstarter will cover it and maybe it won't, but one of the luxuries of being a one-man outfit is that you can indulge your aggravations without any need to justify the bottom line.
Quote from: One Horse Town;584892When i freelanced for Green Ronin i got 4 cents a word. 3 or 4 is fairly common for mid-tier companies. I'm sure better rates are paid (i think WotC pay 7 for hired freelancers), but it's pretty poor unless you are salaried. Even then, i remember Mongoose advertising for an in-house writer expected to churn out 15k words a week for a yearly salary of £14k. Which is basically school leavers money.
FWIW, SFF magazines like F&SF, Analog, and Asimov's pay about $0.05 - $0.07 per word for a story. I presume that's a similar cost structure to what's in the Mystery magazine market like Ellery Queen and Hitchcock's.
Quote from: SowelBlack;585128Here are a couple of stock art products along those lines:
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/100265/Fantasy-Clip-Inks%3A%3A-Spot-Art-set-4
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/94754/Stock-Art-Shields%3A-Swords
(Since the first is volume 4, I'm guessing there is a slew of them.)
Also, my Coat of Arms Design Studio program uses all public domain art, so there's that too.
And of course wikimedia commons has a bunch of things you can use if you double-check the license.
openclipart.org has some things too.
Finally there's a site that specialized is PD art from old books, but I don't have the address handy.
This post should probably be stickied in the Design forum.
Quote from: econobus;585107This is nice, thank you. Not going to ask about what the Bledsaws are getting back but I'm happy it's in there.
So running the abacus I see that at this price point and this POD/PDF mix your WFH/DIY breakeven was ... 430 copies. Anything bigger, creator-owned gave you a better long-term deal, no questions asked. Anything smaller, we have to delve into the "intangibles" to make the argument one way or another.
I was expecting to sell 100 copies in a year. Then 25 per year afterward. So the sales figures are nice. My standard advice is that if you thin
Quote from: econobus;585107(Personally I'm shocked that your price point is so low, you really can charge more for this and people will pay it, but it's your call!)
The way I price things is I ask myself how much I want to take home on each copy. $5 is what I wanted on MW. So that worked out to $12 for Print, and $7 for PDF. I also believe that a purchaser of a Print Copy should get the PDF for free. Scourge is going to be $15 for print, and $10 for PDF.
On something like Scourge, and MW, I base what I want to make per book on what I feel would be the most profitable. Basically the higher the price the less you sell. There is a sweet point where you don't sell as many but you make the most amount of money. Blackmarsh
Quote from: econobus;585107I think that's why Dwimmermount feels like such a huge payout to me. Theoretically it might actually add up to a living wage.
It is a huge payout, and I have no insight to what profit is going to be realized from it. I have so far avoided doing anything involving formal print runs.
Speaking for myself, when I looked into Kickstarter these are the things I see myself using it for.
1) To print a product needing a poster sized map. The Kickstarter would pay for art, and print runs for both the book and the poster map. The challenge for me would be to get a good deal on traditional print runs. And shipping of the completed products. I have space for a proper shipping desk but I lack experience.
2) To pay for art for a product I felt really needed it.
In either case I would have completed the manuscript and the cartography before launch and try to have quotes on hand.
No clue what I would do for bonus goals. As part of the research for this I would have to see how much cost reduction there is moving up each tier of print runs. That would determine how much money I would have to add on for bonus goals and possibilities of what the bonus goals could be.
I got more than few project to complete before I want test out Kickstarter. It could be that I miss the "boat" on it. But I rather keep my reputation intact rather than go in half-ass.
I have enough challenges being a writer as is. I am 50% deaf because of nerve damage sustained from Scarlet Fever when I was young, And to make it more fun it must have nailed the nerve where it enters the brain because I have language difficulties. I was pretty much an honors student for every thing BUT english where I was learning disabled.
If folks wonder where my "Cookie Monster" style of writing posts comes from that why. I will transpose words, drop words, flip numbers, etc. I swear on the bible I thought it was correct. But when I read it back it not that the way I thought I wrote it. Very frustrating. But I managed to work around it and for professional be very careful have my stuff thoroughly edited. Although MW was a learning curve and I missed the boat on a lot of stuff. Blackmarsh and Scourge are way better.
Quote from: Spinachcat;585103We had authors who actually lost the rights to their own writing name. AKA, after you built up a fanbase under the name "Stacy McLovelots" the company can snag your name and slap it on other books by other authors and you get paid nothing.
Oh, I think TSR tried that in the mid 90s. To their (and their protesting authors') credit, it did not happen.
Quote from: Vile;584994Frankly, I don't think there are many people producing anything for the RPG market who are not doing it at least partially for love. Most of the part-time writers I know of are also professionals with families for whom the "income" will never be worthwhile.
Absolutely true, in my case. I occasionally make a little extra money, but that's not why I do it. I'm effectively working a second job that hardly pays anything because that's what I love doing. And fortunately I've got a family willing to tolerate my insanity.
Quote from: Melan;584979The pay per word system itself encourages bloat and continuous churn over inspired, playtested and carefully designed products, so it is also bad for the customer.
Oh god, that is why Pathfinder adventures have me shitting poison nails of frustration.
Take a decent adventures and envelope it in layer within layer of useless, counter-productive bloat text.
Basically, I have a hobby that occasionally nets me some money to spend on my hobby. But it's not even self-financing.
Quote from: Xavier Onassiss;584873A friend of mine told me he could get up to $.13 a word writing for Penthouse Letters. Writing about elves and wizards and dragons just doesn't bring in the same sales numbers as writing smut, apparently. Go figure.
I don't know if it males me a bad person, but I think I'd actually be quite disappointed in the human race if instruction manuals on how to pretend to be an elf regularly outsold sex stories.
Quote from: loseth;585305I don't know if it males me a bad person, but I think I'd actually be quite disappointed in the human race if instruction manuals on how to pretend to be an elf regularly outsold sex stories.
I've occasionally wondered if there's any market for a combination of the two. Most likely there isn't, at least not with elves. Tieflings, maybe....
Quote from: Xavier Onassiss;585453I've occasionally wondered if there's any market for a combination of the two. Most likely there isn't, at least not with elves. Tieflings, maybe....
I wish I didn't know this existed. I wish this
didn't exist. (http://www.amazon.com/Book-Erotic-Fantasy-Gwendolyn-Kestrel/dp/1588463990/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1348607916&sr=8-1&keywords=book+of+erotic+fantasy)
I think the thing is there was a time when people thought being an RPG freelancer was the end point of an RPG "career", that this was the viable place where you could rest on your laurels.
I don't think anyone thinks that today; in this day and age, what you want to do is make non-freelancing work, either building up your name brand until the point where publishers will cut you a better deal for your work, or to self-publish your work. If freelancing still belongs in that world at all, it is only perhaps as a means to "build up your reputation" as a step towards one of those two things.
RPGPundit
Quote from: thedungeondelver;585455I wish I didn't know this existed. I wish this didn't exist. (http://www.amazon.com/Book-Erotic-Fantasy-Gwendolyn-Kestrel/dp/1588463990/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1348607916&sr=8-1&keywords=book+of+erotic+fantasy)
LOL
Reminds of an old text adventure back in '79 for TRS-80 & Apple II. Wish I could remember the name, but it was rather funny.
Quote from: thedungeondelver;585455I wish I didn't know this existed. I wish this didn't exist. (http://www.amazon.com/Book-Erotic-Fantasy-Gwendolyn-Kestrel/dp/1588463990/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1348607916&sr=8-1&keywords=book+of+erotic+fantasy)
Yeah, I've read that and it was rubbish. Not a single Tiefling in there. :D
Quote from: BillDowns;585612LOL
Reminds of an old text adventure back in '79 for TRS-80 & Apple II. Wish I could remember the name, but it was rather funny.
Zorg