Sounding Board for Hardback/Softcover dilemma
hoefer:
Hi All,
I've been "ghosting" this forum for about 3 years now and want to start with thanks for all the great wisdom you've all imparted. Now the dilemma. My product is called Century's Edge (Wholesumentertainment.com), it is a late Victorian-age RPG that offers a broad canvas to its players (you can do detective stories, gothic horror, steam punk, westerns, "high adventure" jungle crawls, etc.). It utilizes a lot of the fiction of the time, and comes across (and I actually hate this comparison, but I suppose it serves as a quick summary) something like the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (though the players are running unique characters -not famous ones). Now that you have a sense of it, the basic rule book is close to being finished (I'm laying out the last 5 chapters in Adobe) and I need to decide if I should publish in hardback or soft cover. The book is nearly 400 pages long (see below before you jump on this number) and I am worried about the "solidity" of a soft cover with this many pages (though many printers are willing to do it). The very genre of the game seems to cry out for a hardcover release, but the rule of thumb is that "hardcover indie books are always heartbreakers." I would probably price the hardcover at $39.99 and it would cost me $14 to print it (please tell me if there's a better deal out there -my email is below). The best soft cover quote I reached is $9.00 and I figure I would price it for around $33 to $35. I don't figure I will make much (if any) money for the first year of business, as I have to get the product name out there (I've been getting demo booklets in the hands of every Podcaster that will take one), I have to pull ahead of this sudden cluster of Victorian/pulp games that have come out, and have to establish that I am one of the Indy Pubs that is here for the long game (and going to support the system with future products and multiple free downloads). What would you guys do? Does the "genre demands it" even fit into the equation? How concerned should I be with the 400 pages won't stay bound in a soft cover?
In case sales expectations come into question: the people I talked to at GenCon (some smaller publishers and a guy from Alliance) looked through the demo booklet I'm selling on my site and suggested that sales would probably be around 100-250 copies -I've got no idea if these numbers are sh*t, I've only sold a few Demo Booklets. I'm getting about 10 "actual" visitors a day to my website, and only a few downloads a month of the free "quick play rules." During my demos (which I've been running at conventions for the last few years) I get a very enthusiastic response (out of 8 players 3 typically ask where the book can be purchased immediately after the session, one guy even hunted me down at my hotel to buy a copy... Only a single sale but it really felt good...)
Many of the big industry regulars I talked to said that I needed to dissect the book down to smaller chunks and sell them separately -more profit. They also said that a 400 page book is too "scary" for the average gamer. I'm not sure that this is a reality. First, I have very limited starting capital so paying to bind 2 books means a smaller run of each than binding one big one. Also, some of my favorite purchases (the ones I really felt I got a good deal on) as a gamer were "big" books. As a youth I loved the expansive pages of my Champions rulebook and as a college student I loved going through all the options of the Palladium Super Heroes Book. My 400 pages include some fluff. I've got a lot of "locality" information and a good deal of "monster write-ups" but I can't release another CE product until I move a good portion of this run, so I felt I had to set up every buyer with a nice chunk of material to keep them gaming for the next year while I recover/build more capital. Further, I've heard many people complain about systems where the GM has to cart around 4 different books to feel "prepared" for a session -isn't this where my game could be different?
Please, I am a total newbie in this industry (though I have been a hardcore RPG consumer for 90% of my life); give me your best wisdom on where you would go with this project and why. I will take all comments and arguments either way with joy.
Thanks!
Louis Hoefer (hoefer@wholesumentertainment.com)
Whole Sum Entertainment
iago:
Have you considered doing an 'early release' as a full on print on demand thing ala Lulu, requiring no up-front capital, with you selling books directly from the Lulu website/storefront? You have a lot of questions that amount to you not knowing the level of interest in your product. You've also mentioned a relative lack of tolerance for risk. Lulu, while its unit costs work out pretty high, lets you pretty much eliminate those risk factors, and lets you dip a toe into the water instead of diving in.
I'd also point out that unless you have an established brand/name to work off of, it can be very hard to get folks to hear of you and your product and to come along and buy it. All the more reason to go for risk-minimizing solutions out the gate, and then "back into" doing something bigger and higher-risk once you've gained some momentum (this is essentially what I did for Evil Hat).
Eero Tuovinen:
The softcover-hardcover dilemma is not one of product identity, but one of sales channel choice. Different books do well in different sorts of environments. Are you going to sell the book yourself face-to-face at conventions? Are you going to sell through a web store? Retailer sales? All these react in different ways to different-looking books - insofar as I understand it, success depends on making your product work in the context it is represented in.
If you just want to have a couple of hardcover copies of the game at hand to show off at conventions and sell to a couple of collector-type fanatics, then you might consider specially printing those at Lulu or similar for a high per-copy cost. If your plan is to wow the average gamer in the average game store, then you might need to make a large print run of hardcover copies at affordable price, and also invest lots of money in marketing. (And prepare to lose it all - I can't remember the last time I saw a small press success with this strategy.)
If you're working with relatively limited capital and are risk-averse, I'd go in slow steps in your stead. As Fred suggests, POD printing and selling the game direct in the Internet and at conventions will give you some much-needed experience in how the market reacts to your sort of product and, more importantly, how you react to it; selling your game and making money on it for a year or so with a low-risk arrangement might allow you to find out where your heart really is as regards this whole rpg publishing thing. Also, PDF: nowadays many gamers appreciate the convenience of having a large game book in electronic format.
Ron Edwards:
Hello,
Eero's points are good, but my concern is that you may not be asking the right question at the moment. I'll quote myself from this thread: Scheduling for the '09 convention circuit:
Quote
you may be focusing too much on your book, which when all is said and done is merely a presetntation method, and not enough on your game, which when all is said and done is what you're selling.
...
The book is not the activity. The book is packaging. The question is whether the game is any good, and if good, does its subject matter inspire people to try the game. You need real feedback about the game before you even begin to think about the book.
Now, that may not be correct in your case. For all I know, your game is tip-top complete in the fullest sense. If so, then you're ready for the next point, which Eero has touched on already. That point is, you do not have to arrive at a single fixed form in which your book will appear for all eternity. All you need to concern yourself with is what it will be or look like for the next step. So it's not a matter of whether paperback or hardcover is better; it's a matter of what suits your current needs as a publisher and promoter.
In 2001, I chose to publish Sorcerer as a hardcover. It certainly wasn't the only such independent game (e.g. Obsidian in 2000), but it was an unusual size, being smaller than the standard looks-like-Vampire book design, and more oddly, with a clothbound surface and slipcover. At that time, internet printing and fulfillment were far more primitive than they are now, and I did have to consider retailer-based strategy. I decided to risk a relatively expensive form (actually, I did get a good deal on it) partly for novelty value, but also because I thought the game could back it up.
However, that is coming into the middle of the story. The game had been for sale in one strategy or another already for five years. It existed as a name-recognition object already, at least among a small subset of gamers including many publishers, and it wasn't even a book at all, but a PDF. Nor was the ultimated printed form a goal from the start. I didn't decide to print Sorcerer as a book at all until after August 2000, and didn't come up with my concept for the printed book until November or so.
My point is that the format of the book serves many purposes, and that one's purposes can change. The decision you're dealing with is not a door you walk through once.
Best, Ron
hoefer:
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