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.