Of the many little projects I find myself pulled into, I'm participating in a poetry book exchange through the Poetry Super Highway. Basically I agree to send a stranger a copy of my book, and in exchange a stranger sends me a copy of theirs.

So I got to thinking, why not start something like that for RPG publishers? Since I have the inclination and the time (well, I don't have the time, but I can cut into my two hours of sleep a night), I'd organize it if anyone was interested.

How it would work:

1. The book either has to be a PDF or actual bound book. No photocopies, notebooks, or looseleaf paper.
2. E-mail me with the name of your book and a brief description of it, as well as your mailing address and e-mail address. If you have an image of the book cover in jpg, tiff, bmp, or png form, send it with the description.
3. Once I get a bunch, I randomly shuffle them. And I'll create a page on my website with pix and descriptions of each book participating.
4. I send you and e-mail with the contact information of the person you are to send your PDF or book to. You are responsible for mailing it (or e-mailing it if its a PDF). No just supplying a link and telling someone to go to it, register, or anything like that. You agree to provide the item absolutely free to the other person with no strings attached.
5. In exchange, someone else agrees to the same thing and they send YOU a free book.
6. Optional: you write a review of the item and I'll post it on the website.
7. Also optional: put a link on your personal webpage to the list of participants to help promote everyone's work.

Any opinions or ideas? You guys interested?

I hadn't replied to this earlier because I'm not particularly interested and didn't want to discourage you or squelch a topic that other people might like more than I do. But, since no one else is replying either, I'll go into why I'm not interested. Maybe that will be useful.

The main thing that turns me off is the random aspect. I don't really want a random RPG from all those out there. I'm at a stage where I only buy new RPGs because I'm interested in a particular mechanic from a particular game for purposes of research. (This is motivated as much by limited shelf space as anything else).

Secondly, I'm fairly confident that the owners of those games would happily trade with me if I approached them about it. In fact, this is a major feature of the last day of GenCon. A friend of mine buys books from me at wholesale and then trades them around the con for other books he wants. So far as I know, he's only had to pay cash for one item there, out of more than a dozen things over the last few years. Similar trading generally goes on at the other major conventions.

So it seems to me like the RPG industry has an informal exchange system already in place and it's suiting my needs (at least) pretty well.

Hiya,

Good points, Justin. I have a slightly different perspective, but it's related to yours.

My outlook is that the most mutualistic, supportive thing I can do for another independent publisher is to buy the damn book. It's one of the several reasons I don't accept comp copies for reviews, and why I limit my trading to a very few people.

I'd much rather be a data point as an interested consumer and a source of legitimate revenue than an addition to the cost of promotion, which effectively is what trading is.

On a more general note, I think that any sort of industry which makes a usual practice out of giving away what it's selling in order to promote its sales, is pretty lame. Yet another reason for my habit of putting quotes around "the industry."

Best,
Ron

Yeah. I'd much rather drop $15 on your game and have you drop $15 on mine. We've effectively traded but doing it with actual $s has a number of advantages.

1) there's a lot of peer pressure and guilt involved in the GenCon trading days. I hate having people I don't know come up and offer me a copy of their game for a copy of mine. If it turns out their game is crap then I'm out my cost for my game on an item I'd never want. Or worse, what if I've already decided I don't want their game. Man, don't I feel like a heel then. The people I know just buy my game, and I buy theirs.

2) Plus, I don't really want a bunch of people having copies of my games who aren't really into it. I want people to play them, not just collect them. And they should want to play them enough to blow $15 buck on it.

So a book exchange doesn't really interest me either.

Of greater interest would be a web page that is a catalog for a wide range of indie games with links to the respective home pages and ordering spots. So much the same type of effort you were thinking of making, Bards...just without the physical copies.