You obviously need the money chief and seriously the god's of D&D (gygax et al) were surviving off campbells and such themselves before and TSR was ever a reality. I voted for the PDF option. See above comment about broader audience. You need to also think about your target audience. A small niche market likely to buy (but for cheap) something they can use in their own game. They'll pay cashee money for a good product but the whole book format thing is purely nostalgia related. You are providing a product that is purely mechanical and will be used by DM's only which are a portion of a market that is already small and widely spread so as to make to make store sales impossible as the overhead versus market is too thin a margin. But this print on demand and pdf market thing will still net you the same profit (or more as you don't have to pay a publisher) in a place where all your customers can come and get a PDF copy for a real good price or a print copy for a slight premium for those who want one. Also this happens without you having to put in your money to have a 1st print run. Now as far as content goes....well lets just say that there are people out there who will simply not pay for anything unless they have to so you may want to limit the free content availability of your products. While you can and should provide your content for free you would be providing a more professional finished product to your paying customers and may withold some special content for the book only. Plus you could write up full backgrounds for each map or maybe even a sort of random background/content table (tables) so that a randomly picked map (or series of linked maps) can have a random background/content. Also you can include a copy of those random map dice so that we the customers can make our own out of each map in the PDF on a printable on demand basis. Damn, that sounds shiny, I think I would buy that product. So as a good friend to Jay and Silent Bob once said "Go get you Moth^&* F*$#&@g movie check". Just do so with a product that will add something to the market that is something you bro's wanna buy.
Silvester - 13 years ago
I like the idea of a hard copy book, but I'd probably just be scanning the pages to PDF so I can print them to miniatures scale.
Doing PDF opens you up to the idea of selling the "book" on RPGNow where you will have a broader audience that is already accustomed to buying RPG related products in PDF format. A PDF could also be preformatted to print at "full" scale, either across seveal 8.5x11 pages or multiple 11x17 pages or even larger page sizes like 24x36or 36x48 - I have access to a plotter with a 48 inch roll feed and I often screen capture maps from PDFs, drop them into Visio and scale them up for printing...
Another Andrew - 13 years ago
Sounds like a terrific Kickstarter project ...
Andrew - 13 years ago
It's not selling out. You still have the maps available on the web site. You've been sharing for free, and likely will continue to do so. I think if you've made something that's yours that is compatible and useful for a wide variety of people... hell, get paid, son.
I'm currently living in Japan, so unless you give deals on shipping a PDF would be not only welcome but preferable.
You obviously need the money chief and seriously the god's of D&D (gygax et al) were surviving off campbells and such themselves before and TSR was ever a reality. I voted for the PDF option. See above comment about broader audience. You need to also think about your target audience. A small niche market likely to buy (but for cheap) something they can use in their own game. They'll pay cashee money for a good product but the whole book format thing is purely nostalgia related. You are providing a product that is purely mechanical and will be used by DM's only which are a portion of a market that is already small and widely spread so as to make to make store sales impossible as the overhead versus market is too thin a margin. But this print on demand and pdf market thing will still net you the same profit (or more as you don't have to pay a publisher) in a place where all your customers can come and get a PDF copy for a real good price or a print copy for a slight premium for those who want one. Also this happens without you having to put in your money to have a 1st print run. Now as far as content goes....well lets just say that there are people out there who will simply not pay for anything unless they have to so you may want to limit the free content availability of your products. While you can and should provide your content for free you would be providing a more professional finished product to your paying customers and may withold some special content for the book only. Plus you could write up full backgrounds for each map or maybe even a sort of random background/content table (tables) so that a randomly picked map (or series of linked maps) can have a random background/content. Also you can include a copy of those random map dice so that we the customers can make our own out of each map in the PDF on a printable on demand basis. Damn, that sounds shiny, I think I would buy that product. So as a good friend to Jay and Silent Bob once said "Go get you Moth^&* F*$#&@g movie check". Just do so with a product that will add something to the market that is something you bro's wanna buy.
I like the idea of a hard copy book, but I'd probably just be scanning the pages to PDF so I can print them to miniatures scale.
Doing PDF opens you up to the idea of selling the "book" on RPGNow where you will have a broader audience that is already accustomed to buying RPG related products in PDF format. A PDF could also be preformatted to print at "full" scale, either across seveal 8.5x11 pages or multiple 11x17 pages or even larger page sizes like 24x36or 36x48 - I have access to a plotter with a 48 inch roll feed and I often screen capture maps from PDFs, drop them into Visio and scale them up for printing...
Sounds like a terrific Kickstarter project ...
It's not selling out. You still have the maps available on the web site. You've been sharing for free, and likely will continue to do so. I think if you've made something that's yours that is compatible and useful for a wide variety of people... hell, get paid, son.