Quote:
Originally Posted by Kromm
Especially for people in my line of work. Perception is "We, the gamers, pay you well for this!"
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Just to pile on a bit, a recent comment on reddit about Hall of Judgment, and my reply, may be worth considering:
the comment was (paraphrased): "There's no reason why Cole wouldn't put HoJ on POD!" (specifically at DriveThruRPG)
Quote:
"DriveThruRPG is an interesting beast. On the one hand, super convenient. On the other, super expensive. A premium color (70# paper) 8x10" book at 128 pages . . .which is to say, Hall of Judgment costs $16 to print. Subtract that from the $25 retail price of the book and you get $9, of which DTRPG keeps $3. I also have to pay a licensing fee, which is between me and SJG. In the end, there's not much left for me.
I will certainly put PDFs up on DriveThru. Print books I will likely need to find another way once I run out of stock. The stock I'm getting is 93# silk matte-coated paper, which is very nice to handle.
We'll see, but the DriveThru POD costs and the 35% cut they take make print via that platform very challenging for thicker books.
(For reference: check out PrintNinja, which is an offset print company with not the best prices but an excellent online quote generator. If I order 1,000 books, the price per book is less than $7.50; if I order 2,000 it drops to less than $4.65. Obviously I'd need to have enough hope of selling them, but having the cost of the book be less than 1/5 the retail price means I could go into distribution, which typically pays 40-45% of cover price, and make enough so that sales both pay for a future print run to keep it evergreen AND make me a bit of money so that I can afford to make the NEXT title. In fact, PrintNinja isn't that good for pricing, either, so the quantities needed aren't quite that high, but they're not too far off this either. In short, while POD is great to put it out there and let it kinda hang out, it's fairly awful if you want those sales to generate not profits, but *future books*)"
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What I would love to see - but don't expect to see - as a publisher of material who wants to see his hobby business succeed, is enough sales velocity and orders so that I can continually get offset print runs of new titles.
That means one or two runs of 1,000 to 1,500 books, so that the sell-through of one print run pays for the next AND generates sufficient income to pay for the next book or so after that.
And in order to get games back on shelves rather than just available on my website or Amazon (100% and 70% royalties, respectively; W23 is in the list of favored sales channels as well for PDF, need to ask about physical product), that means the cost of production needs to be *less than* 1/5 retail price of the book.
Truly, at the end of the day there's not much left in the bucket.