Too much publishing

[Ron Edwards]

I have both too many existing titles and too many new projects. The problem with the first is that new technologies, new customer expectations, and changing print and shipping costs all call for revising product formats and sales-point formats - specifically to cut to PDF as the primary version. The problem with the second is that it costs money to get stuff made - especially layout, which you don't save on by going to PDF, far from it.

Where do I start? OK, with Sorcerer. I have written really awesome and extensive accompanying text for nearly every page of the core book. I want to publish it with the original text and layout completely unchanged, with the accompanying text on facing pages. But what about a new cover? That's money. What about the format for the new file? That's money. And what about customers who ordered the real core book, now finally and completely gone into the ether of the sales world? I'm hitting a grey zone between the old book - now no longer practical to print, at all - and the unfinished new one.

And then there's reprinting as we go along - of S/Lay w/Me, in particular, for which sales are brisk. It's hard to find the window here too, because I need to fulfill the orders for the book, but switch to PDF orders. And that takes re-formatting, because I'd like to offer a real PDF product and not just the print-this version that the printer gets.

Guess what: I finished Shahida! The version being translated into Italian is pretty good. I think that it's inevitable that I have to tweak it some more before proceeding with the English version, simply because no document is safe when it's in the author's hands, and because I don't think layout is even going to start on it for a few more weeks. But once it gets going, I'm going to want it in both PDF and book-print form.

Shipping, you don't want to know. I lose money on every international sale, and even domestically, I seem to have a talent for making books that are just a teensy bit too heavy for a given postal category, and hence cost as much to mail as books twice their size. I'm seriously considering switching all international orders to PDF, period.

Anyway. I figure I'll be able to nail all this down by the end of the year, so that I have saleable PDFs for all my books, a small stock of printed copies for domestic sales and conventions, and Shahida too. It's tough to strategize and organize.

Best, Ron

[Paul Czege]

I have to believe a print edition of The Annotated Sorcerer is quite Kickstarter-able.

Paul

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Paul,

Coming from the foe of all things kickstart, that's pretty striking. I'd thought a bit about it myself earlier this year, and Nathan brought it up too, upon reading my whiny-butt waaaaah post (the one above).

"Ohhh, I'm so successful, waaah, my books are still in print and being ordered so fast I don't know what to boo-hoo-hoo-dooooo!" Jesus eating beans.

Anyway, my only problem with the idea is my own lack of competence. I have to figure out some way to conduct the project without it being a daily hassle. For one thing, it's clear to me that part of running a good kickstart is keeping up a microculture of personal praise and appreciation for the people who are contributing. Which is kind of counter to my personality, but my personality has been known to be bought off on occasion. The effort is what really concerns me, though. How can this possibly not be an insane pain in the ass?

Nathan, if you get the chance: what's your point-by-point primer for running such a thing for a person like me, in short, cantankerous, creative, probably good-hearted, over-worked, and technically hopeless?

Oh, one last thing - in my ideal world, all my products will go to PDF only, as a default, with some sort of very expensive print-version available on demand. So it's not printing costs that concern me at this point, but rather the layout for the new stuff (or combined old-new like Sorcerer) and the conversion costs of the old ones. Which is of course not nothing, because if I'm not worrying about paying for print, then I'll probably get ambitious regarding classy art and similar features.

Best, Ron

[Steve Hickey]

I'm glad you're (reluctantly) considering Kickstarter for the Sorcerer annotations. I'm keen to read Nathan's comments, but four things immediately spring to mind in order to make the process less stressful:

1. Keep the amount you want to raise as low as possible. If you make your nut quickly, then you don't have to engage as much (I assume)

2. Shorten the time you kickstart for. Many people recommend 30 days. With your existing audience for the annotations, you might be able to drop that down to 20 or 15 days - which would be less demanding and means you'll hit F5 a few less times.

3. You can preview your Kickstarter. Kyle Simons was doing this on Story Games recently, and it looks like a good technique for avoiding a bunch of obvious errors and fine-tuning what you intend to do.

4. Get the word out early to your friends and people you know want to support it, so they can fund it on Day One, Hour One if they want to.

[Ron Edwards]

H'm. Off the top of my head: 30 days, beginning November 1, good-looking preview available for one of the chapters, contributors get the spiffy version and maybe anything else cool that isn't too hard to organize, basic version available for free afterwards.

I want to emphasize to people looking at the project that I'm seeking necessary funds to get it done decently, as opposed to the "ransom" idea, a concept that doesn't work for me, and that the writing is indeed done - this isn't one of those things where you pay a guy to work on something.

Does that seem like a decent plan? Any suggestions, and indeed instructions, would be welcome. I may be the single person involved in RPG publishing who doesn't even know what a kickstart website or process looks like.

Best, Ron

[ndpaoletta]

I think Keith's Kickstarter for COS: Apprentice is a good model for you - here's the link. He's treating it as a low-stakes art project, where the higher level goals are things he wants to create anyway, but limited in quantity, so he can actually achieve them. Also, he didn't do stretch goals or really much promotion other than just posting the link around a couple times a week.

In terms of minimum-pain-in-the-ass-ness, I would advise NOT having "stretch" goals (IE if we get to 10,000 then everyone gets a plush Sorcerer demon! if we get to 50,000 I'll make a movie!), keeping the timeframe short, and limiting higher-end rewards that require additional action on your part.

So what does that mean, in terms of how Kickstarter structurally works? I would:

- Do a two-week campaign. This is what I've done for my micro-games, and I think it's a manageable amount of maintenance. Most funding comes at the beginning and end of the campaign, and the extra time I think is mostly good for giving some time for the word to get out about a project. I don't know if you'll need a whole lot of word-of-mouth time.

- Have a low goal, the minimum you think is necessary, plus 10% (to cover Kickstarter+Amazon fees). It'll fund quickly (is what my spidey-sense tells me), and then you don't need to spend any energy on digging up more contributors.

- Structure your goals simply and clearly. Have the "meaty" goal (in this case, PDF of the newly-annotated text, right?) a little cheaper than you would sell it retail. Limit the higher-level rewards to what you know you can achieve in the next 3 months. If you're planning to print copies anyway, maybe that's an unlimited reward, but then stuff like personalized signed copies or whatever, limit those.

- Leverage your existing assets for higher reward levels. In your case, you could include your other games; do personalized signed copies; offer phone or skype conversations about game design/play/theory; offer game design analysis of a work-in-progress; ask folks who have created supplementary Sorcerer material or hacks if you can offer their work at higher reward levels, off the top of my head. Key points: stuff that you like doing anyway and that dont require overhead

- Reach out to your community and ask them to get the word out about the campaign. We'll do it for you. Maybe email your past customers, if you have their contact info still.

For actual reward levels, here's where I would start (adjust for what titles you actually have available/want to make available):

$1 - Thank you, name in PDF, early access to basic PDF

$10 (or whatever level is close to what you'd sell this for retail) - "Spiffy" PDF

$20 (again, or whatever's close to retail) - Printed Book + Spiffy PDF

$30 - Signed Book + Spiffy PDF (Limited to however many you'd want to sign?)

$50 - Signed Book + Spiffy PDF + Phone call/Skype Conversation (Limited as above)

$75 - Signed Book + Spiffy PDF + Sorcerer Supplements Bundle (all three supplements) - "The Complete Sorcerer", essentially + Phone call/Skype Conversation (Limited to however many sets-of-three supplements you have available/want to make available)


On the technological level, you need to: make an account with Kickstarter, link it/create an account with Amazon in order to accept the payments, use their interface to write up the project, create a video or still image for the project page (in this case, i bet a full-on video isn't necessary unless you want to make one), and then you submit it and wait to get it approved, which can take a couple hours to a couple days. You can share a link to the in-process page, if you want feedback on it before going live.

During the campaign, you'll get email notifications when people pledge, and you have the ability to modify the project page, adjust reward levels and post updates about the project. You can be as involved as you want, though generally it's good to send thank-you's and make at least occasional updates.

Also, did you know that Luke is working for Kickstarter now! Send him an email about it!

Finally, you could take a hard look at what doing all this would actually get you in the end, and just do a "traditional" pre-order instead. Which would probably get you less money, but would also not put you in the position of owing people stuff beyond the thing itself.

[Steve Hickey]

Nathan: That's a great list. I like the idea of leveraging existing assets.

Ron: this thread, Kickstarter: Expectations, Best Practices, and Risks, has links to a lot of the tips and ways of managing things that you're looking for.

[Ron Edwards]

As I dig through Joe's article and other information, here are some things going through my head.

What I'd do is so close to plain old pre-order that I'm practically co-opting the sexiness of "Kickstarter OMG" for no real reason. The romance of participation or even the "cannnnnn he do it? Oh golly the excitement" are absent - the creative side of the project, its content, is simply (boringly) finished. I'm funding production. I'm willing to go ahead and adopt the Kickstart mystique for this thing, but I'd like actually be adding value by doing so.

So something much like Keith's project does in fact seem right. I'm turning over Nathan's outline/suggestion in my mind now.

More to come after I read through the linked articles.

Best, Ron

[Ron Edwards]

The hardest thing: "... limiting higher-end rewards that require additional action on your part."

If I'm understanding all this decently, then I'm looking at two things to reconcile:

1. Without higher-end rewards, this is merely pre-ordering. To make it a good Kickstart, I have to have some things for people to get.

2. I don't have anything for people to get. And making, ordering, producing, authoring, or otherwise organizing such things is exactly the kind of extra work I cannot afford. (Time is truly my enemy at this point in my life.)

So! My problem is to deconstruct #2 such that (i) I have things for them to get after all, and (ii) those things are fun and possible for me to do.

Fun widgets? Me, I am very partial to custom-made hard-rubber little demons. (James, STFU this once, OK? Not that I don't love you.)

Standard accessories? Shirts, coffee cups, the whole Cafe Press style deal. Seems a little too ordinary; after all, if someone really wanted one of these, they could take any image they wanted and set it up themselves.

Personal RPG-assessment services? In past years, I was playing so frequently with so many groups that casual playtesting was standard, all the time, and I could fairly say "send it and I'll play it." I can't do that now. But I can try! Or set up some way to make it happen.

Event planning? Maybe funds could go toward something really distinctive at Forge Midwest.

I'm pretty sure that "a phone chat with Ron" is not very high on anyone's list.

Clearly I am not good at this! Ideas, suggestions, flights of fancy, et cetera ... all are welcome. But the hard constraint is that if whatever-it-is is, itself, a whole production/organization project of its own, then it's working against my primary aim, which is to get the play, products, and continued work on Adept Press games back on track.

Best, Ron

P.S. Oh yeah - it also seems important that I explain to everyone that exceeding the goal - as if - would turn into plain old profit for me. But the good thing is that all Adept profits feed straight into my ability to keep making games. Maybe I could name three or four things that the money would be slated toward, and see whether people would like to name which one their money goes to, if the contributions go that far.

[bankuei]

Hi Ron,

An easy offer to add is the "group/store pack" offer - usually something like 4 - 6 copies of the game bundled together at a discount.

Another easy offer is to bundle on some of the games you already have out on PDF - "Adept Press Classics Pack" where you have Elfs, Trollbabe, etc. with the game.

Beyond that, it seems like it becomes a juggle between prizes vs. work into prizes.  Do you have something like an extra few scenarios/demos you've saved over the years you can add as extras?

Chris

[Steve Hickey]

I'm wondering whether you frame the initial Kickstarter as being for the Annotated Sorcerer as a .pdf, but the stretch goals are for the conversion of other Adept Press products into .pdf.

That way there is a bit of excitement: "How much stuff of Ron's can we convert into electronic form" and it's totally on-mission with your Adept Press focus. However, it doesn't prevent you from doing subsequent Kickstarters to convert other titles into .pdf later (because you weren't specifically trying to kick-start them).

Of course, you'd have to clearly spell out expected delivery dates for the .pdfication of the other titles, in order to not get overwhelmed.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Package deals ("five copies at the price of three" or whatever) are explicitly forbidden by the Kickstarter rules. Of course many things are forbidden by those rules, but still happen. The rules are an interesting read, not many popular Kickstarter projects would actually get through that sieve if it was applied consistently.

[Christoph]

An intermezzo from the Kickstarter discussion:

Shipping, you don't want to know. I lose money on every international sale, and even domestically, I seem to have a talent for making books that are just a teensy bit too heavy for a given postal category, and hence cost as much to mail as books twice their size. I'm seriously considering switching all international orders to PDF, period.

Actually, I do want to know, if you care to explain: do you really loose money, or do you miss out on potential benefit? How much would you have to raise the P&P fees for international mailing in order to make the same buck as off domestic orders? I remember you suggesting we add $3 or something when ordering S/lay w/me if we wanted to help you do something about the problem. That's not a problem for me, and I'd rather have that option than have to default to PDF only.

edited to fix quote format - RE

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Steve,

It's a real problem. I genuinely lose money on some of those orders. The fault is mine, because I don't know how to set up little tricks on a website like Joe does - see how you can choose from a drop-down menu when you buy the print version?

Or to organize my buy-buttons at the Un-Store so that international orders have their own buttons. It nearly killed me to set up those titles there in the first place, even with Vincent's careful step-by-step instructions, and a couple of them still aren't right. The thought of correcting them is totally exhausting. What I need is some friend who will sit down with me, at the keyboard, for a few hours and make sure I get it all done correctly, in one go. Seriously, that would do it.

As far as the difference in price goes, that is one of those fulfillment questions that similarly exhausts and repels me even from trying to figure out, especially location by location. Even prices within the U.S. vary so much that I just throw up my hands ... I believe I have ranted in the past about how much I hate, absolutely hate, despise, and loathe fulfillment.

OK, looking in Meg's recorded info from Independently Fulfilling, two examples. (1) Best-case scenario: a guy in Finland bought Spione. Meg's (very reasonable) fee is $1.00, packing is $0.45, postage is $11.60, for a total of $13.05. The book costs (from memory, probably not 100% accurate) $5.00 to print. He paid the $24.95 price as listed. So that means I made $6.35. That's actually a problem, because although it's enough to pay for another copy to get printed (and that assumes the $5 print-cost was right), it adds no real value to my ability to do more with the profits from Spione. That's why going to a con or anything extra turns into massive debits for me for that year.

(2) Disaster scenario: a guy in Denmark bought The Sorcerer's Soul, which was printed in traditional plates-based old-school fashion, for something like $8.00 per book. Total shipping cost (fee + package + post) was $11.45. He paid $18.00. I'd have to increase shipping from $3.00 to $4.45 just to break even, not even to have the book pay for the production of another like it.

I love my international customers. A lot of my sales are world-wide, and I'd hate to cut them out. I'd even be happy taking some of the weight of shipping along with them. But I'm realizing that unless I were to literally print and warehouse in Europe, I'd have to start charging as much as twice the U.S. price to make this pay. And doing that doesn't solve the problem for the Australian and South American orders, both of which are good markets for me too. It seems to me that the very best value I can give is to make those PDFs available, and then international customers who really, really want physical books can get in touch with me about it.

Another reason I'm really contemplating going to full PDF for the Sorcerer books especially (with the hyper-expensive fancy physical option) is that it would cost insane amounts of money, like 5 or 6 thousand, to get them all re-printed in numbers that are practical with my sales needs. And then there's warehousing such a wad, which is another massive pain in the ass, and all of that would be on top of revising stuff like the dated ads and other incidental text. You know about taxes for this stuff in the U.S., right? Whatever is warehoused at the end of the fiscal year is counted as an asset and taxed accordingly - i.e., now you're effectively raising a books production cost by a factor of two. I can contemplate revising them all for PDF and occasional print; I can't face dealing with books as physical objects in those quantities.

Best, Ron

P.S. You guys all know what Independently Fulfilling and the Un-Store are, right? Two different things? And not only that, using IF doesn't itself necessarily mean Meg Baker does it; anyone can do the work-part, including yourself? Or that the Un-Store is not an alternative to having buy-buttons at your site or anywhere else, just an add-on? More people ought to be using these.