Business Plan Help.

[Tom Tom]

a kind forum member has taken the time to offer me advice and suggested i start a thread here for my business plan. i'll summarise it here and any help and advice people can give me is much appreciated.

first, my story:

i'm a guy who's played rpgs for nearly 30 years who finally decided to write his own and two and a half years after i made that decision, here i am. the game's weeks away from going to print and my mind is racing with all the possibilities.

second,my business plan:

i had the idea of releasing the game and if it sold in enough numbers to make it commercially viable, to expand it. to do this i thought i'd enlist the help of 3rd party writers and get them to write adventures and maybe supplements for my game, with them owning the copyright to their work and me taking a small commission. my logic here is that they'd be selling stuff because it's associated with my game and i'd be benefiting because my game would be expanding and i'd be getting a cut.

well, there you have it!

any suggestions?

[Seth M. Drebitko]

I would say if you had more market weight it might be realistic to take a cut; but, if your not doing any of the work on the supplements and other people have to pay you thats probably not going to fly. For example why should I pay you to make a supplement for you game when there are a plethora of OGL systems out there. Something more reasonable might be that you will also offer to sell the supplements from your website and what ever is sold by you directly gets a commission clip.

[Callan S.]

For example why should I pay you to make a supplement for you game when there are a plethora of OGL systems out there.

Because if his title is selling (as he describes) then the supplement is probably going to sell, unlike the plethora of ogl out there collecting dust. It's a bargaining chip.

Anyway, that's all on the horizon stuff.


Hi Tomas,

Any business plan in terms of attending conventions and such - they seem to be a vector to selling product, from what I've seen of publishers at the forge?

[Eero Tuovinen]

Tell us more, Tomas -

Are you publishing your game as a print product or PDF or something else? How long is it as a text? How large a print run? I'm mostly interested in your print run at this point because in this age of desktop publishing that's what's going to bite a guy in the ass - almost anything else one might care to do in publishing a roleplaying game is not that big a deal, but printing stuff takes real money, and it feels pretty sad to sit on a print run nobody wants to buy.

[Tom Tom]

other people have to pay you thats probably not going to fly.

it all hinges on the popularity of the game. if it doesn't sell, then nobody's going to want to write for it. if it does sell,  then if somebody writes something that becomes officially part of the game, they'll have a customer base to appeal to that they wouldn't ordinarily have had. in this case, i think a small commission on my part is only fair.

[Tom Tom]

as requested, here's some more info:

the book has 12 full-colour, full-page pictures as chapter dividers, various black and white illustrations throughout and a full-colour map done by a professional illustrator. if i print it A4, it'll be about 150pp, if i print A5, i guess it'll be similar as the print is 70% of normal size. it'll be available as book and pdf on it's own website, online rpg shops and bricks and mortar rpg shops. i've allowed some businesses to have previews and the feedback i've got is that they're very impressed with what i've done and they'd be happy to stock my book when it's in print. hardly going to challenge wizards of the coast but a promising start!

[Eero Tuovinen]

How many books are you printing?