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I don't think he's capable of introspection. Everything he's written indicates that he considers the actual harm of the speech (ie: potential repercussions to Chechen LGBT, game distributors, international relations) secondary to his own right to say it. He's definitely one of the free-speech over everything types, which was in favor decades ago when "...maybe the gays are people?" was a controversial idea that needed boosting. But he's clearly more fixated on the means than the message. And FWIW, he's not being "censored" in any real sense. Paradox has chosen not to amplify his speech. He's free to link real-world atrocities to homophobic vampire conspiracies, but the other people at Paradox have just a right not to be represented by or associated with this poo poo.
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Nov 18, 2018 16:17
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Honestly, even the bad WW books weren't this careless. Like, that was kind of the amazing thing about some of them, that they were so clearly earnest.
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Nov 18, 2018 17:22
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JohnnyCanuck posted:Look pals! We're helping! 
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Nov 18, 2018 22:52
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Can you imagine how jealous the SIGMATA guy must be of Mark Rein*Hagen right now? Also, it's really painful that the tagline for SIGMATA is 'this signal kills fascists' when from everything that's been discussed on this 'chemical toilet' he goes out of his way to minimize the contexts in which one is allowed to kill fascists, down to 'actively fascing right the hell now and as soon as they start losing you have to stop shooting.'
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Nov 18, 2018 23:27
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This Signal Kills Fascists, Metaphorically, In The Marketplace of Ideas
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Nov 18, 2018 23:45
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I mean, looking at the figures he posted, he could have called it 'This PoD-only book kills my bottom line'. It's all very well being like 'I only made $6000 from Sigmata, don't be mean to me' but with a reasonably-sized print run he would have at least triple the amount of money he's earning. It's a small thing, sure, but it kinda sucks that he's out there going 'this is the true face of the RPG industry' when no, dude, this is the true face of RPG hobbyists.
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Nov 19, 2018 00:04
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JohnnyCanuck posted:Look pals! We're helping! It's.... interesting that good or neutral things we say about his games are cool, but when talks about the problems in his writing, we're a chemical toilet full of neckbeards that sicced a tankie on him. Flavivirus posted:I mean, looking at the figures he posted, he could have called it 'This PoD-only book kills my bottom line'. It's all very well being like 'I only made $6000 from Sigmata, don't be mean to me' but with a reasonably-sized print run he would have at least triple the amount of money he's earning. So in your experience, doing print runs on books has been more profitable than PoD would be?
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Nov 19, 2018 00:24
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I've been thinking about doing a print run instead of PoD for my next project but I've not done it before and I'm not sure where to start. Has anyone written advice for that?
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Nov 19, 2018 00:41
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Print run's better for cons anyway, I know several times I've bought a book for American fiat dollars that I would have probably not bought if I wouldn't have had it right in my hands due to POD etc. Of course the established practice is probably to get some copies for them anyway... Joe Slowboat posted:Can you imagine how jealous the SIGMATA guy must be of Mark Rein*Hagen right now?
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Nov 19, 2018 00:51
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Nessus posted:Yeah I don't get why it seems like people forgot at some point that there is space between "literally kill every single person who was ever involved in the armed forces of an oppressive national government" and "only non-lethal takedowns and martyrdom acceptable." Then again maybe it's because of the fascination with being insurgents. This is why Spire is great, it's Umkhonto we Sizwe but for elves, and has the position of 'killing is a tool, be careful with it but don't forget you're here to win, not make friends.'
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Nov 19, 2018 00:55
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Nuns with Guns posted:So in your experience, doing print runs on books has been more profitable than PoD would be? Sure! Past about 250 copies, your per-unit printing costs are going to be better with a print run than a PoD. The difficulty is warehousing and shipping - you need a good fulfilment partner who knows their stuff, once you've moved on from letting DTRPG handle it. It also helps to be based outside the US, so that you don't have to deal with the lamentable state of UPS. But, to follow in Chad's footsteps above, I'll give you actual figures. Printing Legacy 2e PoD at a comparable quality to the KS edition would be £25.96, meaning a £35 sale would only net me £2 after DriveThruRPG takes their cut. The print run I did (2000 copies) lead to a unit cost of ~£2.50; at that rate I can sell into wholesale distributors, get £10 per copy, and take home more than triple the DriveThruRPG profit. And then your game is in game stores, selling your antifascist agenda to an order of magnitude more people!
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Nov 19, 2018 01:00
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Joe Slowboat posted:This is why Spire is great, it's Umkhonto we Sizwe but for elves, and has the position of 'killing is a tool, be careful with it but don't forget you're here to win, not make friends.'
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Nov 19, 2018 01:01
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Ettin posted:I've been thinking about doing a print run instead of PoD for my next project but I've not done it before and I'm not sure where to start. Has anyone written advice for that? It might be worth going through Caleb Stokes's (of Red Markets) work, as I recall he wrote (or talked) a bunch about doing a print run for Red Markets and how the economics of that worked out. What I can recall directly is that Red Markets was only originally supposed to be a PoD book, but he set the print run as a stretch goal.
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Nov 19, 2018 01:28
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Kevin Crawford has been written about KS and POD economics before as well
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Nov 19, 2018 02:29
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Flavivirus posted:Sure! Past about 250 copies, your per-unit printing costs are going to be better with a print run than a PoD. The difficulty is warehousing and shipping - you need a good fulfilment partner who knows their stuff, once you've moved on from letting DTRPG handle it. It also helps to be based outside the US, so that you don't have to deal with the lamentable state of UPS. That's cool! How hard is it to get an indie RPG into your game stores? If you do end up shipping internationally/to the US, how does that hit your bottom line? Is Indie Press Revolution a good start for storage/shipping, or do you use other venues? Also, do you mean the USPS, or is there something specifically terrible about UPS? Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 03:41 on Nov 19, 2018 |
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Nov 19, 2018 03:38
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Nuns with Guns posted:That's cool! How hard is it to get an indie RPG into your game stores? If you do end up shipping internationally/to the US, how does that hit your bottom line? Is Indie Press Revolution a good start for storage/shipping, or do you use other venues? Yeah, sorry, I meant USPS. Posting into the US is fine - it's posting out of the US to individual customers in other countries that you need to avoid at all costs. IPR is a great way of fulfilling US Kickstarter orders, and they can then hold onto your books and sell them to customers and game shops afterwards.
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Nov 19, 2018 07:53
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Ultimately an TRPG project for a company like Paradox is essentially a vanity project / IP farm, I'm not certain sales would be that big a deal as long as it least turns a profit. The thing is, I'd presume they were probably being tossed more money than most RPG companies would know what to do with - or, at least, the amount of publicity spending they were doing seemed to well exceed what they were actually releasing? I can't speak as an authority, but they were going around doing international flights to shows for years trying to hype folks up before they had even an inkling of a dead tree product to show off. Is V5 even on book shelves even? Like did they have get a presence on the retail market, even if it was FLGS?
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Nov 19, 2018 08:05
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NutritiousSnack posted:Is V5 even on book shelves even? Like did they have get a presence on the retail market, even if it was FLGS? Yes.
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Nov 19, 2018 08:12
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Flavivirus posted:Printing Legacy 2e PoD at a comparable quality to the KS edition would be £25.96, meaning a £35 sale would only net me £2 after DriveThruRPG takes their cut. The print run I did (2000 copies) lead to a unit cost of ~£2.50; That can't be right. Is it full color?
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Nov 19, 2018 11:41
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ravenkult posted:That can't be right. Is it full color? Yup! It's a full-colour, hardback, 6.14"x9.21" 320 page book. Using DTRPG's print calculator outputs a per-book printing cost of $38.58/£25.72. Meanwhile, the traditional print run I just signed off – which also has head+tail bands and bookmark ribbons – came out to €3.31 per book (i.e. £2.95).
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Nov 19, 2018 12:35
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It's one of those 'having money makes it easier to make money' things. Like, my RPG business makes me ~$50 a month. I absolutely cannot scale to warehousing and fulfillment -- which means I'm stuck with POD for the moment.
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Nov 19, 2018 12:51
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potatocubed posted:It's one of those 'having money makes it easier to make money' things. Yeah, to be clear, I'm not saying that PoD is for chumps. I wouldn't be in the position where I can order 2000-book print runs if I hadn't had PoD fulfilment when I was starting out, and it makes a lot of sense for the great majority of RPG folks. Just, the Sigmata guy absolutely could afford to use it and the fact he doesn't rather undercuts the point of his thread. Also - if you haven't looked into warehousing/fulfilment costs, you might be surprised. I pay £20 a month, for example, to store thousands of books. Though now I say that I suppose it's more a question of having the volume of sales to justify a print run of the size you can't manage sales/posting out of your home.
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Nov 19, 2018 13:17
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Flavivirus posted:Yeah, to be clear, I'm not saying that PoD is for chumps. I wouldn't be in the position where I can order 2000-book print runs if I hadn't had PoD fulfilment when I was starting out, and it makes a lot of sense for the great majority of RPG folks. Just, the Sigmata guy absolutely could afford to use it and the fact he doesn't rather undercuts the point of his thread. Is that £20/mo for a given volume of books and will trend lower as your sales diminish the existing stock? Example: I have 200 books and I sell 180 of them in a year. Am I still paying £20 for storing 20 books?
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Nov 19, 2018 13:33
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Nystral posted:Is that £20/mo for a given volume of books and will trend lower as your sales diminish the existing stock? Yeah, it's based on a given volume of books. Warehouses will generally charge you a flat fee per square meter (or square foot) you take up, plus a certain fee for each delivery you have them do.
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Nov 19, 2018 13:56
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I wish Crawford would do print runs. Both my SWN and Godbound books are falling apart.
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Nov 19, 2018 15:25
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gradenko_2000 posted:It might be worth going through Caleb Stokes's (of Red Markets) work, as I recall he wrote (or talked) a bunch about doing a print run for Red Markets and how the economics of that worked out. If I recall that turned out to be a bit of a disaster though. The print run was in China and so all the KS backers were hit with large shipping bills as unexpected price increases.
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Nov 19, 2018 16:48
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potatocubed posted:It's one of those 'having money makes it easier to make money' things. It's advice for Kickstarters, rather than just "go print up a bunch of books right this instant."
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Nov 19, 2018 19:42
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Just do PDF's, they're superior in every way. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Nov 19, 2018 23:17
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Biomute posted:Just do PDF's, they're superior in every way. this thread is like a bad time loop episode of star trek: voyager
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Nov 19, 2018 23:47
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Zurui posted:this thread is like a bad time loop episode of star trek: voyager No this is clearly mirror world Biomute.
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Nov 19, 2018 23:53
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Biomute posted:Just do PDF's, they're superior in every way. You've really decided to plant your flag on this particular dumb rear end in a top hat hill, huh?
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Nov 20, 2018 00:00
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Flavivirus posted:Sure! Past about 250 copies, your per-unit printing costs are going to be better with a print run than a PoD. The difficulty is warehousing and shipping - you need a good fulfilment partner who knows their stuff, once you've moved on from letting DTRPG handle it. It also helps to be based outside the US, so that you don't have to deal with the lamentable state of UPS. When I did POD, my cut was $15/book from the kickstarter. With no risk to me or the backers if international shipping went crazy (which it did, and I could have potentially been in a position where I would have to decide between sucking it up and losing money or having to ask backers to pay the difference if they wanted their books. Not to mention all the horror stories I've heard about indie board games and books getting made abroad and creators losing all their money because of one problem or another.) So framing this like the only alternative is to keep it the same price and take a tiny margin isn't totally accurate. Of course you will have to charge a few bucks more for POD to keep a decent margin, but the benefits to the customer are significant (reducing the chance of the project failing to deliver down to near-zero, not having to pay full price until the game is complete and ready to ship, reliable delivery). Even if everything went to poo poo with Strike and I lost all the drat money somehow, I could still have put out a product - obviously with less art or whatever, but still a real game - and delivered it to all my backers. What I'm interested in is the returns on having your game be in distribution. That's where it seems like the real benefit to a print run might lie. Can you talk numbers of sales via various channels? How many KS sales, how many pdf and print sales via each channel, etc? You said an order of magnitude more - that sounds amazing! I know I'm asking you to dig up a bunch of numbers you may not have to hand, but it really would be helpful for those of us in this thread who have been doing the POD thing to get a sense of the possible upsides to doing a print run. Edit: Uh, Ettin just asked us to stop with the PDF talk with biomute like a week ago. I ate a few hours of probation because I didn't refresh the page and see the warning. Probably best for us not to engage this time! Just report and move on. Jimbozig fucked around with this message at 00:04 on Nov 20, 2018 |
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Nov 20, 2018 00:01
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I was wondering how POD via DTRPG could be worse when you've got someone like Rob Schwalb using it extensively, but also having DTRPG be his primary way of shipping out print books for his Kickstarters.
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Nov 20, 2018 08:52
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Arthil posted:I was wondering how POD via DTRPG could be worse when you've got someone like Rob Schwalb using it extensively, but also having DTRPG be his primary way of shipping out print books for his Kickstarters. Does he? I thought all his non-stretch Kickstarted books got traditional print runs, which is the format I imagine the majority of people get if they want a physical copy. Standard print cores are $50 on Schwalb's storefront, and roughly comparable DTRPG copies are $75, because PoD doesn't get the benefit of economy of scale. You could go with the softcover, muted color $40 PoD, though, but I can't believe there are that many people that want to save a whole $10 for a flatly inferior product with an elongated shipping time.
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Nov 20, 2018 09:06
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That Old Tree posted:Does he? I thought all his non-stretch Kickstarted books got traditional print runs, which is the format I imagine the majority of people get if they want a physical copy. Standard print cores are $50 on Schwalb's storefront, and roughly comparable DTRPG copies are $75, because PoD doesn't get the benefit of economy of scale. You could go with the softcover, muted color $40 PoD, though, but I can't believe there are that many people that want to save a whole $10 for a flatly inferior product with an elongated shipping time. At least for the new one, DTRPG is entirely handling the printing/storage/shipping/etc.
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Nov 20, 2018 09:59
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I have to imagine that DTRPG has at least a small physical stock for things they know are going to move some units, like a newly-released OPP book or something. They're not literally printing every single book on a bespoke basis, are they?
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Nov 20, 2018 11:26
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Nessus posted:I have to imagine that DTRPG has at least a small physical stock for things they know are going to move some units, like a newly-released OPP book or something. They're not literally printing every single book on a bespoke basis, are they? Yes, they are. Or rather, they are sending the print order to one of their Print On Demand fulfillment printers who then print the book to order and ship it to you.
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Nov 20, 2018 11:36
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Jimbozig posted:When I did POD, my cut was $15/book from the kickstarter. With no risk to me or the backers if international shipping went crazy (which it did, and I could have potentially been in a position where I would have to decide between sucking it up and losing money or having to ask backers to pay the difference if they wanted their books. Not to mention all the horror stories I've heard about indie board games and books getting made abroad and creators losing all their money because of one problem or another.) That's fair! You can always charge more for your books, to make up for the lower margin of PoD sales. And as you say, fulfilling through DTRPG has several benefits to publishers and backers. It's just important to emphasise that you're not doomed to stay in PoD-land unless you're a huge titan of the RPG sphere. You asked for data and I'll try and put some together. So, for Legacy 2e:
So, I might have been a bit over-excited with my 'order of magnitude' comment, but importantly those 700 are just two wholesale orders; we've not even properly launched the game in stores yet. Theory is, getting the book in shops provides advertising, draws in new players, and helps the line become self-sustaining. Not to mention, that's all at a much better print quality than DriveThruRPG can manage.
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Nov 20, 2018 12:47
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Nessus posted:I have to imagine that DTRPG has at least a small physical stock for things they know are going to move some units, like a newly-released OPP book or something. They're not literally printing every single book on a bespoke basis, are they? GimpInBlack posted:Yes, they are. Or rather, they are sending the print order to one of their Print On Demand fulfillment printers who then print the book to order and ship it to you. In traditional printing you do have to prepare the machines for each page spread, run each spread separately, then sort before binding. The advantage here is that you do get better quality, and at-scale there are enormous savings. Improvements in technology have continued to lower "at-scale" thresholds to the point that a print run of a couple thousand books starts to be feasible. The downside is that there are price floors that remain pretty high in an industry where your sales might be on the order of a few hundreds or less. Additionally you're going to end up a big chunk of product being produced in one go at one place, so then you have to figure out storage and then shipping from one central location. POD is using fundamentally different technology, at least from the perspective of the printer. In this case the printer can treat any page of the same size and paper weight and broad color/ink choice as essentially the same thing, whether it's a cook book, textbook, RPG manual, or whatever else. In other words, printing a single page no longer requires a bespoke process and is pretty much industrialized. There's still set up but now the scaling question is "am I going to run a couple thousand pages of this type?" This is what drives POD pricing schemes. The upside is you don't have to worry about inventory or storage, and theoretically can set up group schemes so you can print to centers closer to your customer to reduce shipping costs. The downside is that there's not really savings from scaling up - the cost is the cost whether you sell two copies or ten thousand copies. It's a balancing act. For small print runs, especially when you have a internationally scattered customer base, POD is pretty routinely cheaper overall and a lot easier for an individual creator or small group to manage - to the point that POD is possible for people who flat out could not manage a traditional print run due to time, skill, capital, or even just space constraints. On the flip side, as soon as you start hitting those price thresholds in traditional printing, the savings get really big really fast. There's still a tricky grey area because storage and (especially international) shipping costs have been pretty volatile recently, enough that they can devour the nominal savings in a traditional print run. Remember that shipping cost increase that creamed a bunch of KickStarters a few years ago as an example. Again, it's all very much in flux. Some of the newer POD is even more modular and can treat different sizes as the more or less the same, or switch between color and grayscale and b&w on the fly. Meanwhile "traditional" printing is getting closer and closer to POD in terms of commoditization, and even when it's not the machines are getting smaller, faster, quicker to reconfigure, and more efficient overall.
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Nov 20, 2018 18:02
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hyphz posted:If I recall that turned out to be a bit of a disaster though. The print run was in China and so all the KS backers were hit with large shipping bills as unexpected price increases. There was a little more to it than that. The print run was in China as you mention, and the initial quotes for international shipping ended up being high for many countries. The author Caleb Stokes then put in a tremendous amount of work to find other shipping partners and drive the prices down as far as possible. Some people remained angry (as is generally the case with kickstarters) but the majority of backers were ultimately satisfied by the reduced rates after that. It seemed really stressful for the author and it took a bit longer, but I wouldn't call it a disaster in the end. People got their books and most of them realized that internationally shipping a 500 page hardcover was going to be spendy. Many other kickstarters have struggled with the same logistics. But it is a good lesson to keep in mind - a print run will also dramatically affect shipping and it's better to do the research on shipping early.
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