I was listening to the 2d6 Feet in a Random Direction podcast, where they talked about GURPS supplements being great source books even if you’re not playing {GURPS Generic Universal Role Playing System}. It reminded me of our own small foray into GURPS country using GURPS Lite. I didn’t quite like it at the time because it seemed *unintuitive*: I was playing a blacksmith with a heavy warhammer and realized that I could only hit every second round. On the other hand I was the only one who could penetrate the armor of one of the foes I encountered. And all of this surprised me. They seemed like unintended consequences to me. (There’s a short and readable GURPS introduction on Wikipedia.)
2d6 Feet in a Random Direction
Anyway, the publisher – Steve Jackson Games – has a Report to the Stakeholders: 2007 on the web that I enjoyed reading.
Report to the Stakeholders: 2007
Interesting points:
We don’t want e23 to become a pure company store, and we DO want to take advantage of the “long tail” effect. We’ll continue to offer PDF versions of our new GURPS books, but only after they are available in stores for three months. This was an experiment in 2006, and nothing bad has come of it. […] We’ll be doing more POD books in 2007. – Steve Jackson, Report to the Stakeholders: 2007
{POD Print On Demand} books, {PDF Portable Document Format} books – I think the ordinary book market and the roleplaying game market are parting ways. As long as ordinary books sell in higher numbers there’s just no need to adapt to small print runs. Perhaps the middle ground just needs to grow some more. Perhaps more individuals will start printing their own books, like my own little Flickr holiday photo album I printed for the family, picture books such as Christa’s Wicked Pixels, or short story collections such as Robin’s Circle Time and Other Stories.
#RPG #Podcast #Books #Publishing
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Thanks for the links 😄
I think that small press publication suits RPGs very well indeed. It doesn’t surprise me to see Steve Jackson going in this direction too - I’d expect more of the “big guys” (not that any of them *are* particularly large) will start to head this way over the coming year as well. After all, it makes financial sense to only print what’s already been paid for. The “Demand” part of print-on-demand is all important.
Where RPGs go, new fiction publishers will follow as well; I’d expect more novels to come out in this format over time as it puts control (and a larger share of the profits) into the hands of writers than traditional book publishing methods.
– GreyWulf 2007-06-06 09:22 UTC
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Yeah. I really liked ZorcererOfZo and they got very positive reviews all over the place, and yet when you look at the Zorcerer of Zo six month sales numbers you’ll notice that Chad Underkoffler sold a little over 300 copies.
Zorcerer of Zo six month sales numbers
That’s not a lot. Let’s assume he gets USD 10 per issue sold (download price is at USD 15). That’s a month of badly paid work in my book...
– Alex Schroeder 2007-06-06 11:46 UTC