Books Sold with a Free PDF

[Tav_Behemoth]

It's interesting to see viewpoints from other industries. What kind of titles does the company you work for produce? It's hard to know what the best analog to RPG materials is; Baen Books, frex, credits David Weber's place on the bestseller lists to the fact that as each new novel in his series is released in print, they allow free electronic downloads of the previous installments. Whether the significant differences between novels and RPG books make this a viable strategy for game publishers is an open question.

We - and, I believe, many/all of the companies on this list - are doing both of the strategies you suggest. Buying the PDF gives you a discount on the print book equal to the price of the PDF. Buying the print gives you the PDF for free.

My reasoning is this:

1) The print edition costs more to produce, so it costs more. But the content is largely identical (each format has its advantages, like the portability of print and the hyperlinking of the PDF). I feel like requiring the customer to purchase the content twice to have it in both formats is validating a false dichotomy between print and electrons, when the content is what counts.

2) Since we're in hobby distribution, there are potentially people who will buy the book off the shelves without ever having been aware that PDFs existed. If we can get them to download the PDF and expose them to the virtues of that format, we can help grow the audience for PDFs (and create customers for things we release only electronically).

3) I'd like to have a sales strategy that appeals to all kinds of gamers: a PDF edition for the internet-savvy types who can learn about, seek out, and download excellent content; a mass market print edition for the types who need to see a tangible book in stores; and a deluxe edition with a correspondingly high price point for fetishists. It remains to be seen whether all of these can be done successfully by a company of our scale in the current environment, of course!

[Paul Czege]

Hey Tav,

I feel like requiring the customer to purchase the content twice to have it in both formats is validating a false dichotomy between print and electrons, when the content is what counts.

Nice rebuttal. If you're selling content, then deliver it so the user receives  functionality and usability, and don't arbitrarily withold functionality or usability just so you can charge more. So, what matches that vision best, customer buys the print version and gets the pdf for free, or customer buys the pdf and gets the print version for the cost of production plus shipping/handling? If you can't swallow the latter, are you really committed to "the content is what counts"?

(And hey, I consider this a friendly conversation. Just so you know. Not an attack. I'm not personally doing the latter either. No business decision is 100% pure principle. I like the sensibilities I worked into my book object too much to not value it beyond the cost of production plus shipping/handling. I personally buy way more print RPG books than pdfs. And so Half Meme Press requires the customer to choose and purchase the format they most want. And almost exactly 50% of them choose the pdf. I would not have ever guessed the number would be so high, based on my own purchasing preferences, and how great I think my book object is. But anyway, that's how I know the company I work for has it right. The future is content delivery. Normal people, and younger people aren't as grandly object fetishist as I am, or as my friends. And so my advice is to come up with a way of not sending the message that your target customer is someone for whom the object is the important part, and not the content.)

I work for a reference publishing company. So directories, encyclopedias, biographical encyclopedias, that kind of thing, products more closely analogous to RPGs, I think, than science fiction novels. Guys who buy science fiction novels are fetishists.

Paul

[Tav_Behemoth]

So, what matches that vision best, customer buys the print version and gets the pdf for free, or customer buys the pdf and gets the print version for the cost of production plus shipping/handling? If you can't swallow the latter, are you really committed to "the content is what counts"?

Well, here we're talking more about price points and marketplace factors than ideology, I think. IMHO the proper price point for PDFs has yet to be settled - with some players, like WotC, betting that the proper figure is 100% of the MSRP of the print edition, which would imply that we should charge 200% for a package that combines PDF and print. Rather than try to figure this out from first principles, we just charge what seems like the going rate for similar books and throw in the PDF as a value-add, and similarly charge the going rate for PDF and provide the option to buy the print later; if folks who are print-prejudiced use the less-expensive delivery system as a try-out of the content and then "upgrade" to their preferred format at a discount, I won't argue with them.

(And hey, I consider this a friendly conversation. Just so you know. Not an attack.

Not to worry, I am slow to anger and become soggy and hard to light if thrown into the urinal.

And so Half Meme Press requires the customer to choose and purchase the format they most want.

The highly evolved novel-publishing industry has worked out an exquisite array of formats that everyone from fetishists to cheapskates may choose from -- advance not-for-sale copies to reviewers, then a limited-edition collector's hardcover, then a "first edition" hardcover, then a trade paperback, then a paperback, then a book club edition, then remainders, etc., etc. (not to mention audiobooks, ebooks, etc) -- each with its own price point, and all with the aim of wringing as much profit from delivering the same content as possible. (I get my books from the library, the ultimate end of the cheapskate non-fetish spectrum, and as a percentage of all this profit-making goes to the author, I have no ideological problem with the system).

Some of this strategy might depend on a mass market - if only .01% of readers might want the limited-edition hardcover, that might not leave only one customer on our scale - but with POD, one could still print and sell a special copy for that one fetishist.