[Adept Press] A slowly-birthing new business model

[Ron Edwards]

Here's what I want to be doing. All my books need to be available in PDF, including both screen-optimized and print-optimized forms. I want their real-book versions to be strict POD, i.e., I never handle the books and the whole process of shipping costs and so on are handled by the printer. I'll keep a few hard copies around for give-aways or con sales.

Two details. First, no more shipping oversea. If I charged for shipping like I should, then it would actually be less expensive for overseas customers to get the print-ready PDF and take it to the local print shop, resulting in the same book. So for them, from now on, you can't get the book from me. (If the above-named POD process makes it possible, then this would be OK after all.) Second, all real-book orders will get the PDFs automatically. I like that model.

Did I mention cons? The point about that is, no more GenCon, and more effort on local events. The goal is not so much to move tons of product as to maintain ties and to contribute real-human input. Maybe I'll actually go to one or more of those coastal mini-cons, too.

So that's great, right? Vision all over the place. The trouble is that I'm either-or: either I'm sending books and PDFs out like gangbusters for months and years before realizing that interest rates or shipping costs have shifted again and I'm losing money faster than I'm breathing; or I have the lovely vision all set but implementation is like "A Hit by Var'se" from the Chicago V album, when the acid apparently kicked in nicely during the recording session. Right now it's the latter.

Production in progress, or is that the other way around?

Trollbabe, Elfs, It Was a Mutual Decision, and S/lay w/Me are now in their dual-format PDF states, with Spione in the works; I'm working through the process of updating the Bookshelf, Paypal, the Un-Store, and the buy-page at Adept Press. Shahida is about to start its layout in English. And as for the ongoing Sorcerer upgrade, the cover for the annotated core book is done and the supplement cover is now under way.

As usual, all my plans keep getting delayed or momentarily blocked in weird ways. At the moment, I'm in a little trap between the PDFs being completed and getting them set up in the Bookshelf, which I hope to wriggle out of by the end of this week.

Emergencies

I hope someday actually to see the Spione wiki un-spammed - I thought I had it a bit ago, but then something else happened to it and I am in despair again. I'm inclined to throw serious money at this problem now, so if you are (or know) someone who can unclog and protect a wiki, please let me know.

Some eventual modifications and distant ambitions

Eventually: S/Lay w/Me gets a text upgrade and a black cover, and It Was a Mutual Decision gets a game-in-a-box revision.

The reading and rough text for Amerikkka is proceeding frighteningly fast. It's as amibitious a project as Spione and Shahida, though, so I expect it to take at least a couple more years.

I think those three religion games might shape up very nicely to be classy, inexpensive products, along the lines of design that people like Nathan have been doing. If that were to go well, and if interest seems strong, I might consider a Kickstart to fund a deluxe version.

I developed a Shadow of Yesterday/Solar hack for a very bizarre fantasy/SF setting a couple of years ago, and I like it well enough to develop further.

The People's Hero seems like it could stand another round of development.

Finally, I am just beginning to conceive of something that could be called a Heartbreaker Redemption project, aimed at game designers who might have an embarrassing but brilliant game sitting in exile somewhere.

Trying to stay with it

My biggest issue is playtesting, both for my stuff and for others. Bluntly, family life is way too overwhelming right now. For example, the kids' bedtime is an ongoing disaster which means I'm stressed and unable to work or socialize in the evenings due to whichever one is staying up, and then up bright and early in the mornings with whichever one went to sleep on time. Until that gets under control, I can't maintain a decent schedule for gaming, and that means my usual multi-group blizzard of (i) my game ideas, (ii) cool older games, (iii) new games I like, and (iv) others' games in development isn't possible.

So I'm working on that.

Best, Ron
edited to fix display - RE

[Eero Tuovinen]

Here's what I want to be doing. All my books need to be available in PDF, including both screen-optimized and print-optimized forms. I want their real-book versions to be strict POD, i.e., I never handle the books and the whole process of shipping costs and so on are handled by the printer. I'll keep a few hard copies around for give-aways or con sales.

How is this PODing different from printing the stuff and giving it to a warehousing/fulfillment/storefront agency to take care of? Is it just the initial costs of funding a print run? I'm asking because the way I've figured it, you save about half in the unit cost by periodically printing e.g. 200 copies of your book and then selling that, as compared to selling POD through Lulu or similar. The workload doesn't look that different to me; I haven't had to care about the stuff I've sent to IPR at all since then - I assume they still have the units, as money comes in periodically, but that's about it. Of course the share of the warehouse-storefront cuts into the difference in costs, so I guess it's possible for a POD printer to reach near parity, at least in comparison to small print runs.

Ah, one other advantage a POD house can potentially provide: if you select a POD printer/fulfiller that operates trans-Atlantic, you get to cover both continents with one fulfillment company, so that's less bother if you care about European sales.

(The one advantage that I'll give to POD is that it makes for very fluid revisions, when you don't have to care about timing revisions to print runs. I don't really get the impression that you're planning to revise your products that often, though.)

edited to fix display - RE

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Eero,

I should have clarified my POD plans better. You're absolutely right that Lulu and similar services yield poor profit margins, and I haven't used them for that reason.* What I plan to do is set up my books at Publishers Graphics, meaning that the print cost will remain the same for me, and the shipping cost will go straight to the customer with exact postage. The cut they take for the service is quite small. The company has been around long enough to reduce my fears about POD companies suddenly vanishing, and since it's near me, I've been there and know the staff. This is probably the first arrangement I've found in which (true) POD** actually seemed commercially viable compared to printing short runs and handling the books myself or through a helper.

I need to double-check the terms, but I think Publishers Graphics does do international shipping, which would solve my whole problem with it. Although costs will be so high for the customer that I hope my print-ready PDF option will still be attractive.

Best, Ron

* Spione is available on Lulu as an artifact, as I was testing the system with it. I haven't bothered to discontinue it.

** As I wearily wrote over and over at the Forge, the term "POD" has come to mean "digital print" regardless of how the books are handled, so by "true POD," I mean the per-order book-printing method. In case anyone was confused.

[Ron Edwards]

Step by step, it's working out. I now have all of my books in-hand, in print at once for the first time in what seems like years. The new Sorcerer books are working out great, as Thomas moves into completing the second cover.

This is the transition period, when I still have a fair amount of physical copies and will be fulfilling from those stockpiles as I set up the POD process to replace that model. Ideally, I'll have completed that transition for all the non-Sorcerer books right when the two new Sorcerer books become available, and they'll be added right into that process. Which should leave me with a few dozen hard copies of each book for give-aways, con sales, and other promotional moments.

One issue does remain: the existing Sorcerer supplement stockpile, some of which I have at home and the rest being warehoused at Hero Games. At last count, it's about 1500 books total, which are just about to be completely obsolete. What to do with them?

There may exist a small market for them, at least for a while. I could bundle them as a pack and expect to unload a few. But I really doubt if enough people want these enough to justify their warehousing expense and logistic handling by others, and to ship them all to me would be grossly expensive and annoying. Given the tax laws in the U.S., at present they are a huge financial burden as they will be taxed as company assets. That's a given for 2012; the question is whether it should be the case for 2013 and going forward.

If the answer to that is "no," as it probably must be, then I'll have to decide how many of these things is a worthy sales-stock for the nostalgic or originalist customers ... and mulch the rest. A sobering thought, as I put a hell of a lot of sweat and blood into getting them printed, but that was a while ago, and new times are upon us.

Best, Ron

[Eero Tuovinen]

How about you give the excess books to Impressions to give out for the next Free RPG Day?

That specific solution might not work technically, as I seem to dimly remember that they require the Free RPG Day give-aways to be new, previously unpublished products, but the principle seems sound: if a properly cheap and effortless give-away method could be devised, the old books could serve as marketing material. In my experience people like to read them even without the core book, so it could generate visibility and sales.

It occurs to me that as the books already are with Hero Games, you could ask them whether they'd like to give them to IPR (the same warehouse) for use as customer gifts. They could e.g. slip in copies to customer parcels where there's space, and they could just take the rest with them to Gencon and give one to every customer at the booth. It wouldn't take much time for the books to be distributed to rpg enthusiasts this way. Depends on whether IPR would find this worthwhile, of course - I would, but my warehouse is a bit far from the American Midwest.

Mulching books seems like a shame when they could be used for marketing. The PDF market at least seems to indicate that giving out free stuff can be a powerful attention-getter - you gain more in new sales than you hypothetically lose. It's an interesting opportunity when you can do the same with paper books.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Eero,

That's a pretty good idea. I have to consider exactly when and how it should be done. Many people react negatively to the unexpected, and interpret it either as something they absolutely would not want (regardless of its qualities), as a sign of desperation on the part of the publisher, or as the first move of some hidden agenda.*

So I'm think including them as unannounced extras isn't as good a plan as some kind of check-box, "check to receive a free copy of ...." type thing. Especially if there is some kind of content box explaining the transition to a new format. I'll talk to Jason about it.

Best, Ron

* And there might be something to the idea that Americans tend to judge unsolicited free items as physically flawed and morally suspicious - unless they're only fake-free in which case that's OK. But that is a cultural issue to discuss some other time.

[Eero Tuovinen]

If you can think of nothing else, by all means put aside say a hundred copies of each book for me. (Jason can surely hold onto them.) I'll have them sent to Finland later when I'm next ordering stuff, and then distribute them to interested hobbyists in smart ways (give them to cons to give out as GM gifts, use them as prizes in little web projects, extras for our webstore customers, put them into the webstore for 0 ... for anybody interested, etc.). I imagine that'd be worth some sales for you via PDF. This is a 1-2 year time-span plan at this point, though, as I've got a moratorium on shipping new stuff for the webstore until I can find the time to redesign the store itself. It doesn't cost Jason anything to hold onto books, though, and it's not like Sorcerer's going to disappear as a commercial interest anytime soon.

But yeah, it's best to do a give-away like this in a way that doesn't cause people to just throw away perfectly good and interesting books. IPR could get far by simply putting the books up in their webstore as a limited free give-away: a customer comes in, sees a "just pay postage" offer, and takes a book if it's something they would be interested in. Of course a limit of one set per customer would be appropriate - or one book per customer, in fact, as you want them to turn around and buy your collected set. I could see worse fates for the excess books than a thin scatter over the active IPR customer base. IPR should have no objections - that's at least as much marketing for them as it would be for you.

edited to fix display - RE

[greyorm]

How about just dropping the things onto "free book" tables and shelves and so forth you can find all over the place? Guerrilla marketing.

[Moreno R.]

Hi!

There is a very real stigma attached to things given as a "free gifts" by people you don't know. The usual assumption is that they want to "sell you something" (and usually is the truth), and the books could end up in waste bin, or unread in some shelf under a lot of stuff.

What value these books have? One thing to remind people is that the new book it's only a collection of the previous three, so a bundle of all three is functionally the same as the new book, and some people would even prefer a three books edition (or "the original ones")

Ron, do you have a similar amount of the three books (around 500 each)? How many "bundles" of the three books together could be left?

Then, there are all the people who brought only one or two of the supplements, and would like an option to be able to buy only the one they miss, instead of the new book

So the problem, as I see it, it's not that these books are devalued, but that they don't agree with your new business model: they means having to bother again with warehousing, shipping, and inventory taxes. 

I think that you should keep a certain number of copies to sell, signed, to sell directly at conventions. How many, it depends on how many copies you usually sell, but don't underestimate the appeal of having a signed sold-out edition of a "collector's item". (especially if the pdf of the new edition could be included). For the rest, it depends if there is interest in buying them from brick-and-mortar and online shops, at a greater discount. If this interest exists, it could be the better solution.

Other uses:
- Prizes in promotional contests or activities.
- Promotional gifts (but not given away to random people at a big convention: you could sent them to specific people, or to shops, or give copies to the attendants of smaller indie convention, similar to the Shahida ashcan at Internoscon: in this way you would give a third of the supplement book to "taste" to a selected audience of indie-friendly gamers)
- Give them to public libraries, if they are interested, or to gaming clubs and associations (literary clubs, too)
- Use them them as higher-level benefits in your new kickstarter (knowing you had all these copies around, I would have suggested to use them directly in  the sorcerer kickstarter, but I don't think it will be your last...)
- Offer a big bundle of the copies you really don't know what to do on ebay (this way you leave to the prospective buyers the work of finding other people to share the boos and the cost, or to sell the rest)
- Recycle them as holidays gifts.
- Trade them book-for-book with other indie rpgs publishers, so you save money and get new books.
- If you still will have copies left next time you go to Italy, I think I can take 4-5 each to resell...  :-)

In general, if you can't sell them and you don't want to keep them, and you have to use therm as a gift, It's always better to give a specific reason for giving that book exactly to that person, and not to "every prospective customer around"

[Ron Edwards]

Two steps forward, one step back, and that's on a good day.

The server outage included not only this forum, but the Un-Store and the Bookshelf too. Fortunately it all came back without stress, but I'm a week or two behind in getting Spione, Spione-in-German, and It Was a Mutual Decision all set at the Bookshelf, and purchases have piled up. I was thinking, too, that there must be a better way than forcing the administrator, who is Vincent, to set stuff up there, title by title. I'll see whether Vincent agrees.

On the plus side, it looks like the whole world wants PDFs of my titles, so even at their low price-point ($5.00 for my shorter titles), I think the PDFs will be a solid piece of my plan.

The next thing has got to be Shahida, print & PDF. Its layout has also been delayed, and there's a lot to do, especially various maps and graphics. Plus the title. For Spione, a casual snapshot from my first trip to Berlin turned out to be the perfect cover image, but I have not been allowed to go to Beirut,* so that lucky moment didn't even get a chance. Nathan and I batted around some ideas which seem cool, though, and this is one of those things he's really good at.

I'm looking forward to having both Spione and Shahida available, the former in German as well, and both in Italian too. Obviously an Arabic translation of Shahida will have to be organized one day. But the real program will be some sort of social network, some kind of internet coming-together, which permits open political and play discussion. The original Spione forum did manage this every so often, until it got spammed beyond belief. Maybe a special section of this forum one day, but with supportive material at the Adept site. If that can get under way to any extent while I work on Amerikkka (that title seems to have stuck), then perhaps my long-ago dream of play-centered creative dialogue about actual politics has a chance.

Best, Ron

* Wife. Not helped by Israel in 2006, thanks so much, guys.

[Ron Edwards]

Yay! All books and associated PDFs are finally listed at the Un-Store, mirrored at Adept, and loaded into the Bookshelf.

Now this is all transitional, or at least for the books. The PDFs will stay as they are, but the next step is to transfer all the books to POD processing at Publishers Graphics. And at last, I actually have all the files in hand at once, which has never happened before, including Spione auf Deutsch.

And then the last step, as it's shaped up, will be to do the same with the two new Sorcerer books and PDFs. And then! Ahhhh, sweet heaven.

Any bets on what will stall out or go all cock-eyed next?

Best, Ron