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.

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.

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.

Yeah, I've read that and it was rubbish. Not a single Tiefling in there.