Bestiary: Print or PDF?

[Jake Norwood]

I've been planning to release Of Beasts and Men in print form since the beginning, but I've been wondering if an initial release on PDF wouldn't be wiser...a lot depends on how much the whole affair is going to cost me, but I was looking for opinions from two sources:

1) Customers...would you buy it as a PDF? As Print? Which would you prefer, knowing that the PDF will cost half, but will be a beast of a download (and might be delived on CD instead)

2) PDF/Print indie publishers (Ron and Jason)...what kind of response have your PDF supplements had in comparison to your Printed core rules/supplement books?

Jake

[Valamir]

Hmmm, I'd say this purely from my personal perspective as a customer.

Yes, I would buy it as a pdf download/CD.  but I would be gravely disappointed (and doubly so for Flower of Battle which I want even more) if it didn't eventually see print.

So if this is as a "lets do a PDF first and use the proceeds to help pay for the eventual print run"...yeah, I could get behind that.  If this is "lets do it as a PDF and it will probably never be an actual book"...that would disappoint me.  I'd likely still buy it as a PDF...but it would disappoint me...if only because RoS is such a big heavy kick ass imposing book to have on my shelf, that it deserves equally big heavy kick ass neighbors.

[Skywalker]

I would buy print only.  

I have brought pdfs and I think they can be a good format especially for small releases about specific topics.

For core releases (for TROS I see that as the rulebook, magic, combat and bestiary) I would like to see them all in print.  

Plus:

- print can sit on a shelf and entice new players, important for new games.

- if you have it in print you can normally easily cater for pdfs but its doesn't work the other way round.

[Jason L Blair]

The biggest drawback of print supplements? Recouping the costs. Your first supplement, historically, will sell to about 20% of your existing audience. That number decreases per supplement. This is based on what I've gleaned from industry lists and talking with larger publishers. If someone else has conflicting data or first-hand experience, please correct me.

Now, let's say you print and sell 3,000 copies of your core book. You can then expect to sell about 600 of your first supplement. Now, anyone who's looked over print quotes knows that you just can't print 600 (or a 1000) at a decent price point.

Of course, supplements are designed to stimulate interest and "support" the game. If you think Of Beasts and Men will draw new interest to TROS or is just so damn good that it will appeal (and sell) to far more than 20% of your existing audience, I certainly can't dispute it.

Another point to consider is that it's hard enough to get indie games on store shelves much less their supplements (though we're working on it!). It can't stimulate sales of your core book if the only people who know about it are looking specifically for it.

The bottom line is, can you afford to print the supplement and NEVER BACK A SINGLE DIME BACK? If so, print it. If not, tread cautiously, Jake.

This isn't to say you shouldn't print. That is ultimately up to you.

As far as my own PDF sales, they're nothing compared to my main book sales. I certainly appreciate them, and they're a great avenue for getting small supplements out to your audience but don't expect a deluge.

[Lance D. Allen]

Of Beasts and Men, as a .pdf, would make me groan. Even if I didn't have to pay for it, I would hesitate.

The reason for this has nothing to do with the quality of .pdfs, or any such. It's a personal reason; I have a standard dial-up modem, and the Sorcery Revision took over an hour to download.. and that was on the third try, due to lost connections. Printing it out also took an ungodly amount of time, due to print buffer issues.

And this is on my mother's computer, which has easily twice the RAM and a notably better processor and printer.

Would I buy it? Probably. Would I much rather see it in print? Definitely.

[Jürgen Mayer]

If you have the money, print it.

I would like to see it printed, but as a contributor to the book and a book-lover, that should be pretty obvious.

As a customer, I haven't bought a pdf yet (even those that interest me, like the new Little Fears sourcebook or the Norca/SouthAmerica book for White Wolf's Trinity, which I would buy immediately if they were printed), and I don't know if I'll ever do. It's just a personal preference. I want a book. Stupid, eh?

[Mike Holmes]

As a fan of electronic media, I am all for the PDF format. Personally, I'd prefer it if nothing were ever printed again (give the damn trees a break!). But then, as has been pointed out, I'm weird, and probably do not represent a large demographic.

In any case, Jason points out the industry standard position, which is that supplements exist to support sales of the core book. But there is lots of evidence that this doesn't work at all. If I'm not mistaken, Ron has come out big against this model. I would agree, it doesn't make much sense. Have you ever been swayed into buying a product just because it has a lot of support on the shelf? How many sales do you suppose this really generates? Enough to make up the losses on the supplement that Jason assures you will occur? In any case, the PDF is support, just a theoretically less potent source of support. If you can make money on the PDF, but not on the print version, I'd say go PDF.

OTOH, there is the argument that Ralph has that says that proceeds from PDF sales can go to printing the book. This is a slower-starting proposition, but one that's certainly less risky. There's also the model Ron used with Sorcerer. Either of these represents a reasonable compromise, it seems to me. If you never make enough on PDF sales to support printing, then perhaps it would have been unwise to print in the first place. Such a tentative approach serves as marketing as you go.

Mike

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Couple things to say here.

1) Everyone would "prefer" a book. If you ask people what they prefer, that's what they'll tell you. It's not a very substantive question.

Sure, I'd like a row of TROS books on my shelf. Sure, I'd like that copy of my old white D&D box back (wherever it is). I'd like a couple of uninhibited 20-year-old babes in my bed tonight. I'd like a lot of things.

The question is, what is the best business practice for the best role-playing material you can provide.

2) (This is for Lance) For exceptionally wonderful supporters of the game, and if they happen not to have the bandwidth to handle the file size, I have been known to shell out the time and money to mail them a hard copy.

3) PDF sales cannot "count toward" the print cost. They exist on completely different scales. Print costs are comparatively huge and you have to go out-of-pocket to pay them, PDF sales or not. Please don't misperceive that I paid for the print cost of Sorcerer with the proceeds from PDF sales. There's a whole 'nother zero on the print-cost equation.

4) Supplement sales do *not* drive core book sales at the countertop level. Industry folks talk about "spikes" of core book sales when supplements are released; what they fail to mention is the pathetic absolute value of the baseline, such that a spike of nothing is still nothing.

Supplements are cost-ineffective to print. In theory, the presumed core book plus supplement sale is supposed to cover costs - in practice, they are a black hole of costs.

5) Buying habits of RPG customers do not reflect what they preach ("you need supplements, man!"). Releasing supplements because you think that will validate your "line" is a sure path to suicide. I cite *White Wolf* and *TSR* as major poster children for this point, and will back that up to anyone who wants to know. [Yes, boggled incomprehension from the crowd. Get in touch if you want.]

6) If you do go with PDF-first, print-later-maybe, keep strict records of your PDF customers and consider them to have pre-paid whatever the cost was. This is the fairest policy I could come up with and it seemed to work out very well.

Best,
Ron

[Jürgen Mayer]

As a fan of electronic media, I am all for the PDF format. Personally, I'd prefer it if nothing were ever printed again (give the damn trees a break!).

Sorry for going a bit off topic here: I see your point, Mike, but the majority of PDFs used for gaming will be printed out (one-sided & often multiple times) and brought to the table. Not many trees saved there.

If you never make enough on PDF sales to support printing, then perhaps it would have been unwise to print in the first place.

Ok, but one shouldn't assume that
number of sold PDF copies = potential number of sold books,
I think there are a lot of opinionated customers like me who would buy the book, but not the PDF.
But hey, it worked with Sorcerer (which I also didn't buy before the books were released), so it apparently can work. Did I say I want it printed?

[Jaif]

I'm not interested in the bestiary.  That said, if I was to impulse buy it, I'd be much more likely to do so if it was in print.

I'm more interested in the combat & magic expansions, but even then I'd prefer print.

Oh, and Mike, I printed out the revised sorcery section on single-sided paper.  You'll need replant those trees. :-)

-Jeff

[Mike Holmes]

I see your point, Mike, but the majority of PDFs used for gaming will be printed out (one-sided & often multiple times) and brought to the table. Not many trees saved there.

Sure, but at least I'll have the option.

In fact I probably will print out some charts, and such. Given the PDF format, I can manipulate that text to just how I like it for printing purposes. Yet another advantage of electronic media. To both Jurgen and Jaif, my comment about the trees was somewhat facetious (I'm no tree hugger, I spent a lot of time blowing trees up while I was in the military; some very deliberately). Saving trees is to me just a nice side effect of using electronic media. I prefer electronic for all the advantages that I think it has. Not a subject that should be debated here; it's just my preference.

Again, I may be a minority, but I say this just to point out that there may be some who will actually prefer PDF to printed. The biggest draw for me is the reduction in cost on both ends. I know that the producer is probably making more money per unit sold, and certainly risking a lot less capital. And it costs me less. How could that be bad? We're just cutting out the printer, and middlemen's profits from the eqation. I'd call it a win/win, for all gamers involved.

But that's just me.

Mike

[Jason L Blair]

In any case, Jason points out the industry standard position, which is that supplements exist to support sales of the core book. But there is lots of evidence that this doesn't work at all. If I'm not mistaken, Ron has come out big against this model. I would agree, it doesn't make much sense.

I just wanted to clarify that I don't think it makes much sense, either. I was merely pointing out why you see so many supplements on store shelves.

Ron and I have discussed this before and hold pretty damn similar views on supplements.

[Lance D. Allen]

Well, for what it's worth... When I like a game, I will buy ALL of the corebooks. I may or may not pick up any specific sourcebooks and adventure books, but I make it a point to pick up the cores. As example, I own the entire corebook line for both 2nd and 3rd Ed. Shadowrun... And that's a hefty line.

If it comes out in .pdf with the possibility of print, I'll probably wait to see if it comes to print. If it comes out in .pdf with the intention that it will not go to print, I will probably buy the .pdf, so long as it is assured that I get the chance to DL it multiple times (as I will probably have to, to get it downloaded..). If it comes out in print, I will buy the print copy, regardless of whether or not I have already shelled out the cash on a .pdf copy, because a printed book is just so much cooler and more convenient. (I have the Revised Sorcery Chapter in a folder which takes up about as a much room as the core TRoS book...)

[Brian Leybourne]

I have to say, I'll be *extremely* disapointed if the book were to only come out in PDF format.

Even at half the cost, you can't compare a nice book sitting on my RPG shelf with a collection of papers I have had to print out myself and bind together. In fact, when you add the cost of printing and binding etc, it ends up not being much cheaper for the consumer than it would have cost them to buy the printed book. It's still a lot cheaper for you, the publisher of course, but all you're really doing is passing that cost saving along as extra cost to the consumer and some, like me, would be (very) unhappy with that.

Bottom line? I would still buy it in PDF, because I have submitted material to it, but if I hadn't... well, I probably still would buy it to support you Jake, because I love your game, but I would honestly feel a little cheated.

As a side issue, do a search through the internet and you can find pretty much any of the "buy and download" PDF's from rpgnow for free; people who have downloaded them have turned around and offered them for download themselves, so you may well find that if you release your book as PDF you'll end up giving a lot of free copies away. It's a reprehensible practice, but hard to prevent. Along similar thoughts, you'll find that most gaming groups will print out PDF books for each member, so at MOST you only sell one copy per group, where as in book form that's not going to happen - two of the guys in my rpg group are already talking about buying the main rulebook when it comes out in general release.

Brian.

[Valamir]

I agree completely Brian.  I have to say I'm not a real hard core fan of PDF publishing.  I think PDF publishing has a role, but its not the replacement of the printed game book (at least not yet).  For me the role is in taking the hordes of home grown stuff that is out there and kicking it up a notch.  By and large people will put more time and effort into playtesting and laying out a home brew that they plan on selling for $5 or $10 than they would for the same stuff offered for free as "notes on my game if your interested".  Plus the income from a PDF can recover some or all of the cost of professional quality art.

I buy PDF games, I've bought quite a few.  But what they basically are for me is better tested, better laid out, higher quality home brews.  I'm willing to pay $5 or $10 or even $15 for a quality compilation of such a game.  But for me that's not the same thing as a game that has heft and weight and a cover that doesn't come from kinkos or involve a 3 ring binder.