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 . . .

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Rupert

How is Underground Adventures under a 'niche line'? As far as I can see it's not part of any particular line.

It is part of the GURPS line. It is not part of any GURPS series. The fact that anyone thinks it's part of a series despite this illustrates why we don't lose much sleep over series labels or their absence.

Originally Posted by Farmer

From one point to another is a line? More than one makes a series of sorts.

Yes. "Lines" are things like Car Wars, GURPS, Munchkin, and Ogre. "Series" are at least superficially related if not truly sequential products within a line, like GURPS Action, GURPS Creatures of the Night, and GURPS WWII. The distinction matters mainly to distributors and retailers, not to customers, but it's a distinction all the same.

Originally Posted by HANS

[...] sometimes (or rather, I suspect, usually) books aren't planned, but just happen.

"Usually" nails it. As I said in my previous post: The broad success of GURPS Action 2: Exploits and GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 16: Wilderness Adventures was unknowable. When I wrote them, they basically "just happened."

It makes the most sense to put things where their intended genre and subject, and their author's name and sales power, suggest they should go. Gambling that everybody will like them and not doing that is exchanging effortless marketing for possible success no one can guarantee.

GURPS is a huge toolkit. Series labels are valuable for organizing it for the vast majority of readers who find the line impossible to navigate. We trust veterans to be smart enough to look beyond labels when putting together their own personal toolkits, even if some see labels where they don't exist. ;)

[cupbearer]

Hi

The book looks good but the pricing and the way you guys dont bundle pdf and physical copy is ridiculous.

$20 for pdf
$20 for Amazon copy

No bundle. Ok fine you want to charge $25/30 for bundle, fair enough. But no option?

If you look at DCC rpg, they include download code in physical copy. It’s crazy to ask people to pay twice at full price when the majority dont charge at all.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by cupbearer

Hi

The book looks good but the pricing and the way you guys dont bundle pdf and physical copy is ridiculous.

$20 for pdf
$20 for Amazon copy

No bundle. Ok fine you want to charge $25/30 for bundle, fair enough. But no option?

If you look at DCC rpg, they include download code in physical copy. It’s crazy to ask people to pay twice at full price when the majority dont charge at all.

I'm seeing it as $9.00 for the pdf on Warehouse23, and $14.95 for the paperback on Amazon, so I'm not sure where you're getting $20 each from. I'll admit that "complementary pdf with every physical book purchase" would be ideal, however, and maybe some bundle option would be decent.

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by Varyon

I'm seeing it as $9.00 for the pdf on Warehouse23, and $14.95 for the paperback on Amazon, so I'm not sure where you're getting $20 each from. I'll admit that "complementary pdf with every physical book purchase" would be ideal, however, and maybe some bundle option would be decent.

I don't know, to me the basic price is cheap enough I don't really see the issue. Also there are additional costs, fees, taxes, etc, involved.
Lets say the author gets a royalty payment, call it $1 for simplicity.
I do not know how much a cut Amazon takes in this case but it ap[ears they range from 6% to 45% plus a VAT fee from .99 per item to $39.99 per month.
So were looking at about $2 per PDF going elsewhere. Then you have administrative overhead and taxes.
Seems like each PDF looses about $3 on Amazon, less on W23 (but still have to pay taxes and royalties if that was the deal with the author).
Taxes can be pretty complicated but I bet that you pay based on the official price and wont get a discount per special bundle - taking the difference as a tax deduction and business expense. Tax deductions are not tax credits though.

So the question becomes, is all that extra time and expense going to be worth it? And of course its far less worthwhile on low volume items where the administrative overhead is more significant.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Refplace

So the question becomes, is all that extra time and expense going to be worth it? And of course its far less worthwhile on low volume items where the administrative overhead is more significant.

Yeah, as great as it would be to just automatically get the pdf added to your account upon purchasing the physical book, or being able to bundle the two together for a discount, I'd imagine SJGames has some very good reasons to not do that. Not least of which being, I'm not sure you really even could do that when purchasing off Amazon.

[Kromm]

I believe the reasons for not bundling a PDF download with each physical copy boil down to "the tech and tech support needed cost more than GURPS earns," but I could be mistaken. I do know that it has nothing to do with us taking money baths while laughing like Dr. Evil.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Varyon

Not least of which being, I'm not sure you really even could do that when purchasing off Amazon.

That's a separate issue. Amazon has lots of rules that vary according to their different levels and packages for would-be sellers. In their pond, we're not even fish; we're bacteria.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Kromm

I believe the reasons for not bundling a PDF download with each physical copy boil down to "the tech and tech support needed cost more than GURPS earns," but I could be mistaken. I do know that it has nothing to do with us taking money baths while laughing like Dr. Evil.

There's really no viable technology for "buy it in the store and get a digital copy with your purchase". It's not particularly hard to do "buy it from the online store and get a package of the physical and electronic copies", you probably have the tech to do it already, but is "even less reason to buy from the FLGS" what SJG actually wants?

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Anthony

There's really no viable technology for "buy it in the store and get a digital copy with your purchase". It's not particularly hard to do "buy it from the online store and get a package of the physical and electronic copies", you probably have the tech to do it already, but is "even less reason to buy from the FLGS" what SJG actually wants?

In theory you could have a download code included in the book, but in practice this would be a massive headache - you either use the same code in each copy of the book, in which case the code will probably be leaked online within hours of the book becoming available for purchase (possibly earlier if you aren't shrinkwrapping all of your books), or you have a unique code for each and you wind up needing a decent amount of overhead to cover providing such, preventing multiple people from using the same code, dealing with the aftermath of people purchasing a physical book but then finding they can't get the digital version because someone else has already used their code (from brute-forcing it or opening the book at the store, taking a picture of the code, and using it there), etc.