Vondy

I'd still have to come up with money for art (and probably layout).

Assuming 500 total copies, its about $3,500 for printing at book patch. If you put in $1,000 for editing and double the art, for $3,800 total, you've got $8,300 before writers and IP owners (in this case combined). Add in shipping and taxes! They did raise $15,000. I would not presume anything I would write would have the same draw something Steve would write, however. So I'm left with, "is there a market?" And, how do I test that market before just digging into a kick starter? Of course, these are POD numbers... a traditional slow-boat printer may well be cheaper.

Brainstorming. A single copy of an 8x11 96-page POD book with a color exterior and black and white interior can be had for $5.32. The price goes down as the volume goes up. This does not include art and layout costs a writer has to come up with. For gaming books to compete in this market, the art cost is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. DC:TAS (119 pg) for example example, has 47 pages with art on them. I counted 6-7 instances of art being reused. Let's assume we need 1 cover, 4 chapter intro pieces, and 35 portraits or mood pieces for art (96 page book) Assuming $45 for portraits (about average), $80 for chapter headings, and $100 for a cover... $1,915. That doesn't include layout and copyediting. How much? No idea. Let's assume you can get it done for $500. Without the writing (presuming you do that yourself), that makes bringing a professionally formatted art-laden book to print not cheap. Printing $200 copies of said book would, at book patch, end up costing $904.40 + shipping. So, we're at $3,319 + shipping before we talk licensing with Jason. On the other hand, from a kick starter perspective, if you can get 200 backers to pledge $20, you should be able to break even. That means you, the writer, did not make any money - but did get something out. On the other hand, anything sold via the Hero store or POD after that could have profit attached. The kick-starter for Book of the Empress was for $10,000, but the book was twice the number of pages I mentioned. It would have more art, but you are printing half as many copies. They also 1) had known creators on the project, and 2) only printed 100 copies with the lowest level getting a pdf. Still, with a solid idea and a clear vision it could be done!

$52,000 in 1980 adjusted for inflation is worth $160,355.93 today. So, Avengers get paid slightly less than Congressmen do. But then, even when the Battle of New York is taken into account, they also do less damage than Congress.

And, on top of that, it even blocks out the content of my post in this thread! And informs me the pornography is Norwegian. We know who you are!

The wireless access point at my daughters middle school won't let me access the Dark Champions forums on the Hero Boards. It says... Weighted phrase limit exceeded. Categories: Weapons, Violence, Pornography, Pornografia, Violence (Portuguese) Apparently PORTUGUESE VIOLENCE is worse than other violence. Would American violence be acceptable?

FFG has a POD page for products. It would certainly be a way to get out of print books that are currently only .pdf's back into print. It would also be a way of putting related, shorter .pdf products into print by bundling them for POD.

While Steve might believe those things, he would never express them that way. He is not that crass or codescending. He has to much dignity and class to behave that way.

I do get the sense the writers conflated "amping up angst and drama" with "keeping it fresh."

Well, one example of a very successful botique game shop with outsourced work is the savage world's crowd. The Giants are stable because their table top RPG'S are only one of a diverse brand. FFG, for instance, makes a ton of money on board and tactical games and leverages licensing (star wars! and cthulu). Wizards? Magic is a huge revenue stream. And they STILL outsource art and a lot of writing on the RPG side. Hero is Jason and zero full time staff. Green Ronin doesn't have much staff, either. They have a license that drives the sakes they pay their freelancers with (DC). Hero is Jason and a warehouse. Without a big license infusion, it's fan - driven products and profit sharing that will get product to market. The only problem I see is that means there isn't a line developer building a consistent set of products.

One simple answer is competition and ease of bringing a product to market. In the "old days" you were restricted to traditional publishing, had limited production tools to DIY with, and had to have the capital in hand. As a result, there were a few big publishers who dominated the market. Today, any johnny come lately with gumption, a layout program, and an internet connection can publish. There is electronic format, POD, and traditional publishing. On top of that, there are platforms like kickstarter and their ilk that allow you to push an idea without capital in hand. The result? There are a gazillion tiny DIY shops flooding the market for games. The answer to your question is simply MARKET SHARE. The market may be the same size or slightly larger, but consumers are dividing their dollars between a greater variety of products (and producers). Traditional table top gaming has very much become a boutique / cottage industry rather than a "publishing house" industry. Unless you have the dollars to support a publishing house (and that means its one part of a bigger business in most cases) your option is to be a writer-editor who outsources a lot of work (and crowd-sources a lot of funding). Unless you are a big company that has product well-beyond your table-top game, you probably don't have the deep pockets to support a full-time staff.

I'm not that fast. Will PM you.

Interested in layout work?

Does anyone have a publication format .pdf or word file with sidebars?

Personally, I'd be happy to break even on a supplement. Worst case scenario: the sales pay for me to get some cool art done.

I did like the Originals. I just have a limited number of hours in the day and it didn't make the final cut.

Very slick.

You might take a second look at how I spelled that...

Primus: TAS AKA Go Joe.

Personally, Vampire Diaries vamps are fine. I like the AR vamps more or less. And the WW vamps. They are the "basic black" of the vamp fashion world. Far better than Twilight sparklypires, who are the cheap sequined cocktail dress. And, if I'm being honest, my supers games often vibe telenovela. Its just, I'm not the target demographic for VD...

When I glanced at the CW comics (didn't read) I thought it was being used euthenistically.

Avengers: Copyright War.

100%.

Its a difference of extremes. And, this will sound weird, its subtle mechanical shifts that create big psychological departures. 5e was a significant move towards where we ended up during 6e, but it hadn't gone "Full Monty." If you look at the ultimate books, Steve talks a lot about different ways of using the system and makes it clear you can adjust granuality to taste. He presents his way in most of the published materials (which is totally understandable), but remained very accommodating to the rest of us. I felt a distinct shift (on the boards at least) during the 6e development threads. There was a very vocal group of old timers who wanted the system used in a very specific way, and broken down into ever more discreet and granular parts. For me, I felt they were taking the system to logical extremes that were not, from a play-ability perspective, necessarily reasonable. 5e read like a gloss on 4e. It cleaned some things up and said, "hey, look at what you can do with the underlying mechanics!" Yet, it was presented with a clear "if you want to." 6e mechanically encoded a lot of that gloss, and optional granularity, into the system so that it was no longer "if you want to!" A lot of what is in 6e now could have been optional add ins rather than default settings for a new edition. It turned the system into work, added a layer of hard-coded granularity that did not accommodate "less-fiddly" users, and is harder to ignore than it was in 5e. Is 6e logical? Absolutely. Extremely so. Is it reasonable? Only for some. Its harder to take RAW out than to add options in, and that is the key issue I keep running up against with 5e vs. 6e. The wonks won.

It's not just you, but I think part of that is that most of the people who stuck around adopted 6e and the 6e zeitgeist. 6e represents a very specific set of thinking about how to use Hero. It's not wrong, but it is at odds with how many of us use the system. The 5e era was more varied in part because the dynamic tension of different approaches was unresolved. You had people with more varied styles and a more freewheeling gaming culture. 6e is mechanically compatible with older editions, but it's not necessarily stylistically and philosophically compatible. Edit: it could also just be that 4e and 5e folk don't put their ideas up because they are playing "older editions." There tends to be an implicit sneer in the gaming world (not necessarily hero) for people who don't adopt the latest edition of a game.