GURPS Tactical Shooting: Extreme Conditions

[Kromm]

We contract an author to write supplements that follow up and support a work only if the initial work was at least a modest sales and/or critical success. If so, continuity of subject matter and identification with the successful creator strongly encourage us to treat the follow-ups as part of a series that began with the initial success. So, we'll just about always follow GURPS Thing with GURPS Thing: Clever Title. Following with GURPS Something Else and hoping people will guess that it continues the author's thinking in GURPS Thing needlessly burns the bridge of continuity and makes zero marketing sense.

Stepping away from that and looking at, say, GURPS Action 2: Exploits or GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 16: Wilderness Adventures: Sure, lots of people like those volumes now, even for games that aren't in the genres of the associated series. That success was unknown and unknowable when I wrote them. They could've been stinkers, too – it happens to every writer, me included. I didn't have the ego to say, "No, these will be amazing, so we need to make them standalones and not part of their series!" And when they proved popular, it would've been bad marketing to change the title . . . "Never change the title" is Marketing 101, too.

Anyway, we go to great lengths to offer lists of books, capsule descriptions, free previews, recommendations for less obvious uses of each book on its page, pointers to less obvious useful books on other books' pages, and so on. We have to assume that people who buy books can read all this stuff. If they're going by series title alone, we can't do much to save them . . .