GURPS Social Engineering

[Rendu]

Months of "When Social Engineering comes out, it will cover X in greater detail", and when it finally comes out, it doesn't even rate a mention on the DI? or even Twitter? Wait! I know! They released it with a Tactical Shooting cover! Happy Hallowe'en!!

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by Rendu

when it finally comes out, it doesn't even rate a mention on the DI? or even Twitter?

There's a routine for this. I think it goes something like this: when a new book is released, Steven posts about it more or less immediately on the e23 forum, Kromm posts about it by the end of the day on the GURPS forum, there's a DI post on the following Monday, and that post is echoed on Twitter and Facebook at some point that day. That appears to hold for pretty much every book no matter how hotly anticipated it may or may not be. However, there may be incidental mentions by individual staffers; frex, Steven mentioned SE last night on his own twitter feed.

[Steven Marsh]

For as long as I can remember, the DI announcement for new e23 items has been the Monday after release. As far as I know, that's still the plan this time.

We tend not to do much same-day plugging of e23 items via Twitter, although I'll probably do a mention later today. (I'm still doing research into exactly how well Social Engineering did its first day.)

I heard rumors that Bill Stoddard was planning on going door-to-door to every residency on Earth, making sure the word got out... but those plans might have been tweaked as being somewhat impractical. :-)

EDIT: NINJA'D!!!

[Jürgen Hubert]

Now I will have to give it a good reading and then figure out how to add epic feats of mass manipulation to my GURPS Exalted conversion...

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Figleaf23

It could be a hardcover by the sounds of it.

Social Engineering is as much a core GURPS release as the other "rules tool kits": Martial Arts, Powers, Thaumatology, etc. However, what determines hardcover eligibility is page count, not core status. For instance, we consider Psionic Powers to be as important as Magic, but we can't justify releasing it in hardback – it's too short. At 88 pages, Social Engineering has 55% of the necessary page count for consideration. We would need to double the interior (non-endpapers) content, not merely add "some additional material to fill it out a bit"! Needless to say, that isn't in the cards.

Originally Posted by SCAR

[...] it isn't just about the numbers!

As I said in another post, it is about the numbers, but there are lots of numbers. A set of values among which no one figure is especially unremarkable can put the kibosh on a print release. On the other hand, small print runs for convention sales fall outside the math I did (in effect, we're our own distributor and retailer there, and have been known to ship the books in staff luggage!). Deliberate marketing efforts are another exception; marketing money is hardly a huge slush fund, but there is some cash for marketing GURPS, and it's often better spent printing a high-profile product that we can sell than on, say, ads.

Originally Posted by Ts_

I guess opening day numbers measure "anticipation" more than future sales.

That is correct. They're important to our morale, but we don't start making plans around anything less than first-month or first-quarter sales.

Originally Posted by Rendu

Months of "When Social Engineering comes out, it will cover X in greater detail", and when it finally comes out, it doesn't even rate a mention on the DI?

Our feeds and blogs are mostly queued in advance. As it happens, the Social Engineering release date was moved up from November 3 to October 27 on . . . October 25. So it jumped the queue to be the week's e23 release, which is fine, but that doesn't let it jump the news queues. I suspect that its news spotlight is a week away, as originally planned. Which is fine by us. As I said, we look at first-month and first-quarter figures, so release-day sales aren't the be-all, end-all, and two kicks (release-day hype and release-announcement hype) are better than one.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by Kromm

However, what determines hardcover eligibility is page count, not core status.

I wonder if people are conflating hard cover with hard copy. Those terms might seem very similar to someone outside publishing, but to someone in it, it's the difference between the flesh and the spirit.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

I wonder if people are conflating hard cover with hard copy. Those terms might seem very similar to someone outside publishing, but to someone in it, it's the difference between the flesh and the spirit.

That's possible! What we call a "hardback," "hardcover," or "hardbound" book is a printed work with a rigid cardboard cover; the minimum length fluctuates between 160 and 176 pages, depending on (highly commoditized) print prices. What we call a "softback," "softcover," or "paperback" book means a printed work with a flexible cover of heavy paper or light cardboard; the minimum length is in the neighborhood of 80 pages. Both are "hard copies," but the latter term is one that bookkeepers, lawyers, and spies use more often than publishers. Our preferred collective term is "printed book" or "printed product."

[Langy]

Originally Posted by Kromm

Social Engineering is as much a core GURPS release as the other "rules tool kits": Martial Arts, Powers, Thaumatology, etc. However, what determines hardcover eligibility is page count, not core status. For instance, we consider Psionic Powers to be as important as Magic, but we can't justify releasing it in hardback – it's too short.

That's mostly a matter of how Psionic Powers got published, though, not due to it not having enough content. Psionic Powers + Psionic Campaigns + Psis + Psi-Tech easily fits within the 'hardback size range' (it comes to over 200 pages when you include everything in the PDFs, which should come out to around 180 after removing the extra covers, introductions, etc).

I don't expect you to release Psionic Powers in hardback, but if you had an infinite amount of money to spend on bashing the different Psionic Powers books together you could certainly still meet your length-criteria for hardback release.

Sadly, you can't quite do the same with Gun Fu/Tactical Shooting. You'd need about one more supplement to make it hardback-sized. Adding in something like the Firearms chapter from High-Tech (or just expanding the ones already in TS), or adding in the ever-wanted 'Gun Design System' might flesh out that 'potential hardback'.

You would need to find a lot more stuff to add to Social Engineering to justify it as a hardback. Not sure what you could add. Maybe something like a City Stats take on organizations in general, though that'd be, what, 10 pages at most? May be best fit as a Pyramid article. Social Engineer templates could be nice, or maybe Social Styles. Eh.

Anyways, my point was that if you had infinite funds you could bash some things together in order to expand book-length into full-on hardcover-size, so it's not entirely a matter of content. It's also that the PDF model means you're selling things that might have been hardbacks 'back in the day' in bite-sized chunks. And hey, I'm happy with that! I like my PDFs, and I've been gobbling them up. If this 'bite-sized chunk' model means you release more cool stuff, I'm all for it, even if it means fewer hardbacks (and I have doubts that it does).

[SCAR]

Originally Posted by Kromm

As I said ... it is about the numbers, ..

OK, I mean't 'it's not just about the PDF sales numbers' - which is the only 'number' we really have available to base such speculations on!

Originally Posted by Kromm

{(Books printed)×[(Printing cost/book) + (Shipping cost/book)]}

Out of curiosty, what sort of range does (Books printed) ,for a 'reasonable' first print run, have these days for GURPS?

[Peter V. Dell'Orto]

The book is nice. I'm already going to use the expanded reaction tables, especially for pre- and peri- combat reaction rolls. :)