# What's a Freelance RPG Writer Worth?



## Dioltach

Frankly, I'm shocked. These aren't rates that will allow anyone to make a decent living, even if you can produce 2000 words of publication-ready material _every single day of your working week_. I'm not a writer, but I'm a full-time freelance translator, and have been for more than 12 years. I find it hard to produce more than 2500-3000 words of translation (i.e. someone else's writing, not even my own original content) on a daily basis, and even that puts me at the upper end of the production scale for professional translators. And as a freelancer your income needs to cover time that you're not productive -- holidays, sick time, no work. (For the record, my rates range between EUR 0.12 if I work for agencies, to EUR 0.15/0.16 for small one-person businesses, to EUR 0.19 for large companies such as banks and larger law firms. Editing is EUR 0.03-0.04 -- which is significantly lower than the EUR 85-95/hour that many other editors charge. With the economy being what it is, there's been a lot of pressure on translation and editing rates in recent years, but I don't even reply to job offers that pay less than EUR 0.10.)

What are the reasons for these low rates? Is it a simple matter of supply and demand? Can the market not support higher rates? Are the established writers/designers being paid significantly more than newcomers? Are the publishers taking what they feel is a "fair" cut, at the expense of the writers?

The way things are now, talented fledging writers are _not_ being encouraged to dedicate their time and effort to producing content. Is there anything preventing newcomers from self-publishing or forming a publishing cooperative? Because publishers might say that writers need to prove their worth, but it works the other way too: without writers publishers have nothing to publish.

These are just the thoughts of an outsider. Like I said, I'm not a game writer, but I know what it is to earn a living as a freelancer, and _none_ of the rates listed above would offer a viable source of income.


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## Quatermane

Excellent article Morrus.

Writing...  ALL writing...  has been one of those "starving artists" industries where only a few really break out into big money.

Successful authors will constantly tell interviewers how lucky they feel to have been recognized for their work.  
The depressing part is that their responses are based on the truth that it is very difficult to write the right thing at the right time in the right way to a profitable audience.  
Even when that happens, it is often difficult to convince a publisher that what you have written is the right product to publish in the first place...  unless you already have some cred with them.  
And getting that cred is not easy either.

There are some things that writers... just like any artist... must always remember:
- For any art to be profitable, it has to appeal to an audience that is willing to pay for it.  Some aspiring writers seem to forget that bit.
- The only way to become really good at writing is...  to write.
- Find people to share your writing with.  If you write and do not share the results, it is almost as if it never happened in the world.
- Grow a thick skin...  a really really thick skin.  Critics abound in the arts...  including writing.
- Have low expectations...  it is easier to live when one keeps that mindset.


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## mach1.9pants

I am not surprised by LPJ's attitude. It is a company I wouldn't touch with a 10' pole after his so called 'April Fools Joke', that he took weeks setting up to disappoint those who pre-ordered Razor Coast. This is the attitude of someone I have no truck with "And there is the problem, you think this is an equal relationship. It isn't." ~ disgusting.


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## Mike Myler

For (more than) my first year as a freelance game designer I was producing an average of 8,000+ words a day to make my bills (and even then, was dipping into my savings habitually).

This is not something I recommend to anyone. 

Virtually all of my time was spent writing, revising, and designing game content (typically 14 hours a day). It was an enormous risk to approach a career like this because the abhorrent rates in the industry are what they are, but fortunately I'm established _N.O.W._ (get it? ;D) and it's not nearly as rough any more. 

That's for several reasons (90+ hour work weeks, good luck, working for the right people, being in the right places, and the support of milady and my folks) but predominantly because I _really_ lucked out and got into a hardcover (_Tome of Decay_ for _Black Crusade_ by Fantasy Flight Games) very early on because of an incredibly fortunate and impromptu run-in with a developer at (my first) GenCon. 
Otherwise the general turnaround time for publishers would have put me in the proverbial dirt months ago (one royalty pay out has been expected for a year, and my copy—turned over in 2013—only reached their development stage the other week).

Excellent article, good sir—this absolutely qualifies as a must-read for anyone else trying to make a go at game design as a career.


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## Qwillion

Greetings, I am Steven D. Russell head of Rite Publishing just to be clear on Rite Publishing's payment policies, we generally pay new writers either a royalty or a minimum of $0.01 cents a word, I have paid as high as $0.11 cents a word. We pay upon acceptance by the editor before publication.


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## barasawa

LPJ Designs statements sound like the standard villain dialog from a cheap flick.


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## ZombiePete

I got around $0.10 a word writing a stand-alone softcover sourcebook for Chaosium, and closer to $0.19 per word for an adventure in Dungeon for Paizo--both more than 10 years ago. (That second rate could be off; not sure how they figure stat blocks into the word count.) Now I get $0.27 and up writing movie "Art of..." books, and video game scripts are even better. If you're scrambling for $0.03 and $0.05 rates, I suggest you live with your parents.


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## OwenK.C.Stephens

A thought on Freelance RPG writing rates.
I have been a full-time freelance writer, who made 100% of my income (and the entire households income) purely through writing. It can be done. It's hard, and it sucks. That experience, over the course of several years, left me with strong opinions about what is, and is not, exploitative.
During that time, I sometimes took assignments as low as $0.005/word. To be clear, that's half-a-cent-per word. The reason I didn't feel exploited was that I was allowed to write anything whatsoever I wanted to, including reusing things rejected from other publishers, and the terms included being paid with 12 hours of the turnover. At that time, $50 in 12 hours was worth more than $750 in 12 weeks.
I did a fair amount of work at 1 cent/word and 2 cents/word. They were all for small companies I believed (and still do) could not afford to pay me more, and they were all pay upon acceptance. Good thing too, as something like half or more of those projects did not see the light of day.
I did a *lot* of work for 3 cents/ to 5 cents/word. Those projects normally were pay upon publication, and I took them because I'd rather write game material for 12 hours in a day than file paperwork for 8. Some were really fun. Some sucked. One, worth more than $2000, I still haven't been paid for more than a decade later. Not being paid is exploitative.
And where I could get it, I did work for 7 and 8 cents/word. Those nearly all took priority, but there just wasn't enough of it to make a living. Nor do I feel that's because people who could pay me more weren't. Making new RPG material for sale is a tiny, volatile, fringe market in the grand scheme of things. There aren't that many big companies, and there aren't that many *medium* sized companies either.
Obviously I turned to the publishing end of things as well, though that was mostly self-publishing for a long time. When I did the writing, and other people took % for editing, art, and layout, I started to make more money with my pdf publishing than with per-word-rate work from other companies. And when I tried to get a raise in my word rate, companies often agreed... and then offered me less work. When I was a full-time freelancer, I couldn't survive by making 80% as much money doing 75% as much work.
So, I have turned to a royalty system for more writing, and a lot (but not all) art. We take all the money we get from distributors and pay royalties on it in perpetuity.
I don't consider 3 cents a word exploitative. I don't consider royalties on gross income exploitative. I don't consider 2 cents, or even 1 cent/word automatically exploitative, since there can be other contract terms (when and how does the author get paid? What rights are retained and what are given up?) that make up for lower payouts.
Taking the people who just want to be "published" and offer you free work is exploitative. Being clear and up front about a pay rate you can afford isn't, even if that's a sadly lower rate. If you stick to that rate when you don't have to, that becomes exploiting, otherwise it's just being at the lower end of the economic model. I do think the suggestion to look at your business model if it dissatisfies you is a good one, and I do that regularly.


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## OwenK.C.Stephens

ZombiePete said:


> I got around $0.10 a word writing a stand-alone softcover sourcebook for Chaosium, and closer to $0.19 per word for an adventure in Dungeon for Paizo--both more than 10 years ago. (That second rate could be off; not sure how they figure stat blocks into the word count.) Now I get $0.27 and up writing movie "Art of..." books, and video game scripts are even better. If you're scrambling for $0.03 and $0.05 rates, I suggest you live with your parents.




I strongly suspect you are off with Paizo. That's way higher than any rate I am aware of, as a developer for the company. But they do pay on word counts in stats blocks.


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## Morrus

Yeah, Paizo never paid 19c per word. I think you're misremembering there, [MENTION=6782543]ZombiePete[/MENTION]!


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## OwenK.C.Stephens

Dioltach said:


> What are the reasons for these low rates? Is it a simple matter of supply and demand? Can the market not support higher rates?




If the upper end rates (7-10 cents/word) shock you, then yes the answer is the market doesn't support higher rates than that. The vast majority of freelance game writers cannot make a full-time living at that rate. I was a full-time freelancer for many years, and managed to buy a house, put my wife through college, and make a living, but it wasn't easy.



Dioltach said:


> Are the established writers/designers being paid significantly more than newcomers?




No more than double, and generally no more than 25% to 50% more, though that varies by company.



Dioltach said:


> Are the publishers taking what they feel is a "fair" cut, at the expense of the writers?




There are, of course, many MANY more expenses than writing and paying the publisher. You need an editor, a layout artist, and art. If you are dealing with print books, printing is the biggest expense, and generally warehousing and shipping are #2 and #3. For bigger companies you have to pay the salaries of people doing taxes, payroll, customer service, and so on. For smaller, pdf-only publishers sales numbers are often so small the author makes more than the publisher (though again, it varies by company).



Dioltach said:


> The way things are now, talented fledging writers are _not_ being encouraged to dedicate their time and effort to producing content. Is there anything preventing newcomers from self-publishing or forming a publishing cooperative? Because publishers might say that writers need to prove their worth, but it works the other way too: without writers publishers have nothing to publish.




The only thing stopping them is putting in the time and effort, and having the needed skills. However, it's worth noting that I am bombarded with people desperate to get into game writing who ask if I'll just edit and publish them for free, for love of the game. So there is never going to be a shortage of people willing to work cheap, which reduces the pressure on publishers to pay more. (See my post on exploitative pay rates, above, for my thoughts on the subject).



Dioltach said:


> These are just the thoughts of an outsider. Like I said, I'm not a game writer, but I know what it is to earn a living as a freelancer, and _none_ of the rates listed above would offer a viable source of income.




It can be done, I have done it. But it requires a lot more work than taking the same skills and making a living sell ad copy to websites through cold-calling offers (for example).

There's a reason people who start as game designers and then begin to sell a few novels or work for computer companies almost never got back to tabletop RPG writing, and it's not because novelists and computer game designers are particularly wealthy.


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## crazy_cat

Morrus said:


> Yeah, Paizo never paid 19c per word. I think you're misremembering there, [MENTION=6782543]ZombiePete[/MENTION]!



Or more likley miscalculating - if stat block word count was excluded from the initial calculation it will have thrown the numbers wildly; a PF monster or NPC stat block can quickly run a significant word count.


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## Werebat

Man, oh man...  I tip my hat to you for using LPJ's own words so well.  You didn't make any negative comments because you didn't have to.  I'm still chuckling here.  Class act.


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## ZombiePete

I figured it was off, but I was going by what I was paid and the word count in the document, which I still have. I guess MS Word and Paizo count differently. But even at 1/2 or 1/3 that rate, it's still better than most companies 10 years later. Sad state of affairs.


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## Werebat

Long, long ago, before I had kids, I got a handful of things published in Dungeon and Dragon magazines.  I'm getting to be an old man who needs to remove his glasses to read, and even then I have a hard time making out the page numbers on the 5E books (who were the whippersnappers who decided to go with such light numbers?), but I seem to remember that the going rate then was about $0.10 per word.  This was in the late 1990s.  Does that sound about right to anyone who might have a better memory than I do?


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## Curmudjinn

Wow, LPJ has some balls. Hey new freelancer writer, I'll gladly publish your hard work for 1.25$ an hour!

What a complete asshat. I'll be boycotting him and each and every 1 cent publisher. I was just reading up on LPJ's Armageddon Bestiary contests, where he essentially steals your hard work. By submitting to the contest, you disregard current or future payment and royalties and it all becomes his property without exception. For the gracious opportunity to see your hard work make someone else money.

Louis Porter JR, you sir are a piece of crap.


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## Morrus

Curmudjinn said:


> Wow, LPJ has some balls. Hey new freelancer writer, I'll gladly publish your hard work for 1.25$ an hour!
> 
> What a complete asshat. I'll be boycotting him and each and every 1 cent publisher. I was just reading up on LPJ's Armageddon Bestiary contests, where he essentially steals your hard work. By submitting to the contest, you disregard current or future payment and royalties and it all becomes his property without exception. For the gracious opportunity to see your hard work make someone else money.
> 
> Louis Porter JR, you sir are a piece of crap.




Keep it civil, please.


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## OwenK.C.Stephens

Werebat said:


> Long, long ago, before I had kids, I got a handful of things published in Dungeon and Dragon magazines.  I'm getting to be an old man who needs to remove his glasses to read, and even then I have a hard time making out the page numbers on the 5E books (who were the whippersnappers who decided to go with such light numbers?), but I seem to remember that the going rate then was about $0.10 per word.  This was in the late 1990s.  Does that sound about right to anyone who might have a better memory than I do?




Actually, no. Starting rate in Dungeon and Dragon in the late 1990s was 5 or 6 cents/word.


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## OwenK.C.Stephens

Curmudjinn said:


> I was just reading up on LPJ's Armageddon Bestiary contests, where he essentially steals your hard work. By submitting to the contest, you disregard current or future payment and royalties and it all becomes his property without exception. For the gracious opportunity to see your hard work make someone else money.




If he publishes it without paying, that's one thing. But just claiming ownership of all submissions is universal for all publishers running contests. otherwise, they'd contstantly be sued when they independently created something a contestant decided was similar to something submitted in a contest days/weeks/years earlier.


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## Fairman Rogers

Although I am a small publisher, I am trying to establish a precedent of paying $0.10 per word, with half paid in advance based on maximum estimated word count. I end up having to cut corners by doing a lot of my own editing and layout and by only hiring freelancers for portions of the book (I do a lot of my own writing), but I want to make people feel that it is worth their time to write even a small amount for me. I believe that the quality of effort that comes out of this will pay dividends in the long run.

Eric Simon
Four-in-Hand Games


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## dmccoy1693

Morrus said:
			
		

> I have no idea where the line lies, though personally I feel very uncomfortable these days offering anybody less than $0.03 per word, and would never consider paying $0.01 per word. But that's just what I choose to do.
> 
> ...
> 
> But it also feels important to give writers the information they need to arm themselves when negotiating, and ensure that the relationship _is an equal relationship. _




Ok, fine. Please post all your sales numbers please. I mean, if you are going to post all these numbers on your site, you should give the full picture. Please start with all of EN Publishing's sales numbers. Anything else and you are misrepresenting giving writers the information they need to arm themselves. Please highlight your sales numbers for a project written by an unknown author vs an established author. 

Also please publish your revenues from your ads. Can you show that your ads revenue does not supplement your RPG publishing costs? How much do you pay your Administrators and your Moderators?


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## Drumheller

Any word what Onyx Path pays?  They have a pretty big schedule these days.


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## dmccoy1693

Lastly, Morris. I can say your are misrepresenting the facts for my company. My company has not had $0.01/word listed on on the page you linked for over 3 years (yes, I just verified). 

We do not have a set published scale anymore. 

Take my site off your blog post.


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## Kamaloo

This is a very interesting article, and an interesting discussion. Thank you, Morrus.

Perhaps you could do one on rates for art, as well.


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## Morrus

dmccoy1693 said:


> Lastly, Morris. I can say your are misrepresenting the facts for my company. My company has not had $0.01/word listed on on the page you linked for over 3 years (yes, I just verified).
> 
> We do not have a set published scale anymore.
> 
> Take my site off your blog post.




It was either there this morning, or I imagined it. If the latter, I apologise. The aim of the page is to be accurate, so I'll update now you've kindly clarified. Thanks!


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## Morrus

K. Amaloo said:


> This is a very interesting article, and an interesting discussion. Thank you, Morrus.
> 
> Perhaps you could do one on rates for art, as well.




I might so at some point!


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## Werebat

OwenK.C.Stephens said:


> Actually, no. Starting rate in Dungeon and Dragon in the late 1990s was 5 or 6 cents/word.




It's quite likely that my old brain was just remembering poorly.  You get to be a certain age and you start thinking that back in the day, the summers were longer, the girls were prettier and freer with their charms, and WotC (or was it TSR?) paid more per word to freelance authors.


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## Curmudjinn

Morrus said:


> Keep it civil, please.




My apologies. I've been working against local liquor retailers heavily gouging craft beer sales, so my hackles have been up towards those that use underhanded methods against good people pushing into new hobbies and professions.

Just like these publishers, the store operators react poorly to making their methods public within their respective  communities.


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## Nellisir

Werebat said:


> It's quite likely that my old brain was just remembering poorly.  You get to be a certain age and you start thinking that back in the day, the summers were longer, the girls were prettier and freer with their charms, and WotC (or was it TSR?) paid more per word to freelance authors.




I know I got paid about $110 for my article in Dragon in 1998. Since that was the only thing I ever got published by TSR, I'm 99% sure I still have the contract around. I can check and see if it specifies rates.


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## Jeremy.Smith

I'd like to point out that the information on Dreamscarred Press was originally incredibly out of date and now is impartial. Our current rate is 2 cents per word if you have never been published before. If you have, it is higher based upon the individual. We haven't paid the rate originally for several years, as our success has grown, so has our pay rate. 

If we'd been asked first, this confusion might have been avoided.

thanks! 
Jeremy
Dreamscarred Press


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## Voneth

Just for those new to the biz, 5 cents a word is considered professional rate for short story fiction. For RPGs (and short story magazines) the turn around time to get paid is usually in the months long time frame.

Freelance for advertising and marketing copy is actually  a "day rate" where you charge the client for 8 hours of work at the level of a living wage and then some (to balance out that you have no benefits.) Turn around time for your invoice to get paid was in weeks.

Which is why until 2008, I _wanted _to write RPGs, but the money -- speedy paycheck --  from advertising allowed me to be a starving writer that starved a bit less. Now, I'm a nurse instead who is working on a second novel while I shopping my first around town.

Regardless, having a spouse help pay the bills is a godsend. But as a starving artist, it's a bit harder to woo Ms. Right. So if your partner is really in partnership with you to make your writing career work, take the plunge. Just do it with both eyes open.

Make no bones about it though, I respect and envy guys like Chuck Wendig and Matt Forebeck who, after 20 years of RPG and fiction writing, can now fully support their families doing what they love.


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## Curmudjinn

Jeremy.Smith said:


> I'd like to point out that the information on Dreamscarred Press was originally incredibly out of date and now is impartial. Our current rate is 2 cents per word if you have never been published before. If you have, it is higher based upon the individual. We haven't paid the rate originally for several years, as our success has grown, so has our pay rate.
> 
> If we'd been asked first, this confusion might have been avoided.
> 
> thanks!
> Jeremy
> Dreamscarred Press




Yikes, that's 2,900 words a day just to make minimum wage. That'd be 58USD for an 8 hour shift. Definitely not a primary job.


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## Jeremy.Smith

Curmudjinn said:


> Yikes, that's 2,900 words a day just to make minimum wage. That'd be 58USD for an 8 hour shift. Definitely not a primary job.




Considering I don't make enough publishing for it to be my primary job, I highly doubt I could ever pay someone enough for it to be THEIR primary job  My day job pays three times what I make publishing, and Dreamscarred Press is one of the "larger" third-party publishers.


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## arjomanes

I think this just proves that RPG players need to pay more for books, realize that pirating ruins their hobby worse than any other medium, and convince their players to try GMing (since GMs spend more on RPG books). Seeing comments on DriveThruRPG complaining about an $8 200-page book always makes me shake my head. How many RPG supplements from tiny third party publishers do you think they sell?


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## turkeygiant

arjomanes said:


> I think this just proves that RPG players need to pay more for books, realize that pirating ruins their hobby worse than any other medium, and convince their players to try GMing (since GMs spend more on RPG books). Seeing comments on DriveThruRPG complaining about an $8 200-page book always makes me shake my head. How many RPG supplements from tiny third party publishers do you think they sell?




The fact is there is a lot of super small publisher stuff that is never really going to be significantly profitable for its writers, they simply don't have the numerical demand for their products, and if they tried to raise prices to offset that fact, their books would probably have to be $100 each rather than $8 which would price them right out of the market. Most RPG writers out there will have to live with the fact that they are either going to be writing solely for the enjoyment they get out of the act and sharing their work, or working towards the slim chance they will get picked up by a bigger publisher who sells more books and has bigger margins to pay them from, while accepting that until that time they will make a pittance from their writing.

I don't like this fact...but it is simply a reality, the same one that most aspiring athletes, astronauts, and actors face... 

There simply isn't enough demand or profit in the industry to support more than a handful of writers in a substantial way, and the advent of self publishing has probably made it even worse by flooding the market with a lot of small fish who take nibbles from the big fish...but rarely get big enough themselves and grow the market with them.


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## SirAntoine

Thanks for this great thread!


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## mflayermonk

Great thread.


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## Ace

Great article . For what its worth, low pay is endemic is almost every creative industry.  And in fact many other unrelated  industries are suffering from lowered wages as well  . Wages are down by about half  in the US since the 1970's . Fixes, causes and all that are way off topic here but its causing a great deal of trouble even outside our little niche.


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## delericho

Wow, those numbers are scary!

By way of context, a five-second Google search suggests that McDonalds (in the US) pay their cashiers between $7 and $9 an hour (that's cashiers - fry cooks get slightly more). So if we accept the ballpark figure that a $0.01 per word rate is equivalent to $2.50 an hour, then the $0.03 rate Morrus is using is roughly equivalent to working for McDonalds.

(Though, given the choice, you're probably better off taking the job with McDonalds. Firstly because it's more likely to be stable. But also, while we tend not to think about careers with McDonalds, they _do_ have career paths available, and like to make noise about promoting from within. Working for McD wouldn't be my career of choice... but it probably beats freelance game design.)

On the flip-side, a person who is good at game writing probably has more than one skill: in addition to good literacy they probably need a decent understanding of probability (as well as other skills). And while having one such skill is reasonably common, the combination is much rarer.

Which means that a person likely to be good at game design can almost certainly make much more money elsewhere.

That's not good for the health of the industry. It probably means that it will have an awfully big turnover - people come into the industry to make a bit of extra cash while at university (or similar), stay a few years, and then move on. Either because they now have their 'real' job which makes more money (and takes up their time), or because they realise they just can't make a living at it. Those few who stay either get employment at WotC or Paizo, set up their own companies (and probably work at those part-time), or in some rare cases become big enough 'names' that they can command much higher rates.

As arjomanes says, it probably means that customers really should be paying more (a lot more) for our RPG materials. But given that the indications are that people just _aren't_ willing to do that, coupled with the fact that most of our games don't need any additional purchases beyond a Core Rulebook or three, I really don't see any prospect of it changing.


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## Creighton

Dioltach said:


> What are the reasons for these low rates? Is it a simple matter of supply and demand? Can the market not support higher rates? Are the established writers/designers being paid significantly more than newcomers? Are the publishers taking what they feel is a "fair" cut, at the expense of the writers?




My name is Creighton Broadhurst, and I run Raging Swan Press - a moderately successful (in that we still exist after five years) publisher of Pathfinder compatible products. Currently we pay 1 cent a word for freelance game design. I'd love to pay more, but the economics of 3PP don't support it. 

I've blogged about the reasons for low pay rates over at my blog.

Here's a direct link to my thoughts/ramblings. I'd love to get your thoughts on freelancer pay rates. Come on over and have a read!


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## Morrus

Creighton said:


> My name is Creighton Broadhurst, and I run Raging Swan Press - a moderately successful (in that we still exist after five years) publisher of Pathfinder compatible products. Currently we pay 1 cent a word for freelance game design. I'd love to pay more, but the economics of 3PP don't support it.
> 
> I've blogged about the reasons for low pay rates over at my blog.
> 
> Here's a direct link to my thoughts/ramblings. I'd love to get your thoughts on freelancer pay rates. Come on over and have a read!




As I mentioned to you elsewhere, I think it's great that folks are talking about this subject. Even if we don't agree on things, it's a conversation worth having. Creighton, I wonder if exploring other models might be the way forward. I'm trying a Patreon model soon for a pair of article platforms, and lots of people have had success with Kickstarter. They're not the only options, of course, just a couple of well-known ones. Kobold Press, IIRC was doing patron-based stuff long before Kickstarter even existed, and made that model work well.

As folks say, the economics of small press publishing doesn't work well. It might just be that the traditional model isn't supported well by the market for small publishers, and that we should use our flexibility and agility to adapt and stay ahead of the game. (Not that I'm especially successful at that).


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## knottyprof

As a tiny (one person) publisher/writer/artist I have been approached once by another free lance writer with some ideas he would be willing to create for my company and I knew there was no way I could afford him so I turned him down but thanked him for presenting the opportunity.  As with many other smaller and even successful companies (thanks Jeremy Smith on the reality check even for a company like Dreamscarred Press which is much more successful than my current run) I have to produce my own material, do my own editing, layout, and either rely on "cheap" stock art or make my own and work a full time "paying" job to make ends meet.

I would like to know what qualifies as an "established" writer.  After all I have been publishing for over a year now, have over 20 PF products out now and my yearly sales last year were over a grand so my numbers are not huge but I do get sales (that and most of my products range between .99 and 3.49).  For me, it is more about getting my ideas out there in a professionally looking product.  I haven't done print yet, all PDF but I try to use the latest technologies (mainly Adobe) and all of my current products include the ability to turn off background layers to make it easier for people to print out.  I do have a full time job that pays really well, but my passion there is quite lacking compared to what I put into creating game product material.  Right now I just try to make enough to pay for the subscriptions I have for the software (Adobe CC, Microsoft Office 365) and pick up other publisher's material on DriveThruRPG.

Also, in regards to the expectation that PDFs should be cheaper than print books I have a strong opinion (and not what you would think it would be as a publisher).  My hang up with pricing PDFs as much as actual print books is that the cost to produce such items is a lot less than a traditional book.  Sure there are costs for writers, art, editing, etc. but I know that a majority is in the actual production of the book itself.  If a publishing company can produce a hard cover book for $50 I know much of that is in the actual creation of the physical book.  For a PDF such costs are not incurred so as a consumer why should have to be charged for a cost that has essentially gone away.  I think Paizo gets that in that most of their core PDFs are much less than the actual physical product.  Also, from what I recall of my economics classes pricing is determined by supply and demand.  In this digital age, the supply of PDFs is infinite (there is no cost for production of individual files once the original one is created) so it is mainly a demand driven market.  If the demand is not there then no money is made.  Demand can be driven up by offering a cheaper pricing model, so a publisher has to determine what is the optimum price point based on demand.  Would you rather make $100 by selling a $1 product 100 times or $10 for selling a $10 product once.  And this would trickle down to paying freelance writers as well.  Just my two cents on the matter and how it relates to the original article.


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## Morrus

knottyprof said:


> My hang up with pricing PDFs as much as actual print books is that the cost to produce such items is a lot less than a traditional book.  Sure there are costs for writers, art, editing, etc. but I know that a majority is in the actual production of the book itself.  If a publishing company can produce a hard cover book for $50 I know much of that is in the actual creation of the physical book.




For a large print run, the shipping costs are the killer - way worse than the printing costs.  Printing gets cheaper the more you print; shipping doesn't!


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## turkeygiant

Creighton said:


> My name is Creighton Broadhurst, and I run Raging Swan Press - a moderately successful (in that we still exist after five years) publisher of Pathfinder compatible products. Currently we pay 1 cent a word for freelance game design. I'd love to pay more, but the economics of 3PP don't support it.
> 
> I've blogged about the reasons for low pay rates over at my blog.
> 
> Here's a direct link to my thoughts/ramblings. I'd love to get your thoughts on freelancer pay rates. Come on over and have a read!




Thats really interesting it ends up really coming down to how many copies you are able to move, also why paizo with such a huge market share has such good rates!


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## knottyprof

Morrus said:


> For a large print run, the shipping costs are the killer - way worse than the printing costs.  Printing gets cheaper the more you print; shipping doesn't!




I bet.  But bottom line is that there are more costs per book for a physical book that does not get factored in for a PDF.  I have a hard time coughing up more than $10 for a single PDF.

I guess to play devil's advocate, you are paying for convenience with PDF in that you don't have to carry around the physical book.  Back in the day I carried a duffle bag full of my books that probably weight 30 to 50 lbs.  Now I can carry an entire library's worth on a flash drive or portable drive that I can carry in my pocket.


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## ArcaneSpringboard

One thing that's interesting, is that you're more likely to have your work SEEN as a writer if you give it away for free, than as part of a very cheap, but non-free, PDF.

http://danariely.com/tag/free/


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## Fairman Rogers

knottyprof said:


> I bet.  But bottom line is that there are more costs per book for a physical book that does not get factored in for a PDF.  I have a hard time coughing up more than $10 for a single PDF.
> 
> I guess to play devil's advocate, you are paying for convenience with PDF in that you don't have to carry around the physical book.  Back in the day I carried a duffle bag full of my books that probably weight 30 to 50 lbs.  Now I can carry an entire library's worth on a flash drive or portable drive that I can carry in my pocket.




One other thing to consider is that as more and more people buy PDFs exclusively, publishers are looking to PDF sales to make back their investments. PDF is no longer a supplemental income, it's becoming the primary income or at least a strong secondary. So the cost of a PDF really does have to include the creative costs of making the book. It's becoming much harder to do a high-end PDF for $10.


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## CardinalXimenes

I'm the one-man shop that is Sine Nomine Publishing. Last year, between monthly sales through DTRPG, two Kickstarters, and a couple appearances in Allen Varney's Bundle of Holding offers I netted a little north of sixty thousand, before very substantial taxes. Even if I didn't have a day job it still would've been enough to have supported me comfortably. And I never have hired a freelance writer and don't see any obvious occasion in which I would.

From a publisher's perspective, writers are either fungible or they aren't. Either you have a Name that draws an existing audience that will seek out your work and purchase it, or you don't have such a following. In the latter case, from a marketing perspective, you're basically creating Bulk RPG Product #7 and the publisher's role is just to swaddle the log in an attractive package for shipment. Generic Joe Smith can't drive any sales, so while his writing might make the project possible, it's not enough to actually make it especially salable in the absence of some other selling proposition. _Any _payment at this level is an act of conspicuous financial optimism rather than something grounded on a return on the investment.

New writers can reasonably point out that the only way to get a following is to actually put something out there. A publisher who recognizes real potential in a writer can pay them until their genius is clear and they actually drive sales with their name... at which point the writer will quite reasonably demand higher rates, because very few indie publishers can afford salaried positions. Thus, there's not a lot of upside in cultivating new talent. By the time they get big, they cost the same as existing names that already can whip up notice.

The raw numbers have to be recollected here. A slab of generic RPG product can expect to sell between 50-100 copies over its short-term lifespan. If it's got a notable publisher or hot buzz, it might sell 500+, or 1000+ if it's a real hit. So let's run some numbers from the publisher side of things.

Assume it's a 64-page supplement, since those sell well and are manageable for small publishers. Call it a $9.99 PDF + $19.99 print, since those prices are what the market will generally bear. Be conservative and assume that profits average out to about $8 a sale after OBS' cut. Be overly generous and assume that you can put this 64-page supplement together for zero dollars in art cost, layout, and editing, because you're a renaissance publisher who undervalues editing and uses Scribus and free art. If you do your own writing of circa 50K words and the product sells 75 copies over the near term, you've made $600 pre-tax. You're paying yourself the handsome rate of 1.2 cents a word there.

Now let's bring in a Name writer, one whose mere presence on the cover can turn the book into a modest hit of 500 copies sold. How much can you pay that Name writer before you're better off just doing it yourself? 500 copies @ $8 = $4,000 gross sales - $600 for the alternate case = $3,400 over 50,000 words = 6.8 cents a word. So less than 7 cents per word. And that's with excessively optimistic assessment of art, layout, and editing costs.

Honestly, I don't know if there's a healthy place in the publishing ecosystem for non-Name freelancers. If I were in their shoes, I'd ditch the publishers entirely and just self-publish until I'd built up a following and had a demonstrable value to a publisher. This requires developing a whole suite of new skills in layout and business management, yes, but the capital outlays are very small. You can get a subscription to Adobe InDesign for $20 a month, grab free stock art from DTRPG, and use guides and templates to get a basic grasp of layout design. Then you get to keep _all _the money, and I can assure you that that is a very happy place to be.

Such freelancers can eyeball some of the free resources I've put out:
An example template module for laying out 1980-style AD&D modules.
A recap of my production sequence for Kickstarters.
My publisher resources Google Drive folder, with some layout and creation guides.


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## knottyprof

CardinalXimenes said:


> I'm the one-man shop that is Sine Nomine Publishing. Last year, between monthly sales through DTRPG, two Kickstarters, and a couple appearances in Allen Varney's Bundle of Holding offers I netted a little north of sixty thousand, before very substantial taxes. Even if I didn't have a day job it still would've been enough to have supported me comfortably. And I never have hired a freelance writer and don't see any obvious occasion in which I would.
> 
> From a publisher's perspective, writers are either fungible or they aren't. Either you have a Name that draws an existing audience that will seek out your work and purchase it, or you don't have such a following. In the latter case, from a marketing perspective, you're basically creating Bulk RPG Product #7 and the publisher's role is just to swaddle the log in an attractive package for shipment. Generic Joe Smith can't drive any sales, so while his writing might make the project possible, it's not enough to actually make it especially salable in the absence of some other selling proposition. _Any _payment at this level is an act of conspicuous financial optimism rather than something grounded on a return on the investment.
> 
> New writers can reasonably point out that the only way to get a following is to actually put something out there. A publisher who recognizes real potential in a writer can pay them until their genius is clear and they actually drive sales with their name... at which point the writer will quite reasonably demand higher rates, because very few indie publishers can afford salaried positions. Thus, there's not a lot of upside in cultivating new talent. By the time they get big, they cost the same as existing names that already can whip up notice.
> 
> The raw numbers have to be recollected here. A slab of generic RPG product can expect to sell between 50-100 copies over its short-term lifespan. If it's got a notable publisher or hot buzz, it might sell 500+, or 1000+ if it's a real hit. So let's run some numbers from the publisher side of things.
> 
> Assume it's a 64-page supplement, since those sell well and are manageable for small publishers. Call it a $9.99 PDF + $19.99 print, since those prices are what the market will generally bear. Be conservative and assume that profits average out to about $8 a sale after OBS' cut. Be overly generous and assume that you can put this 64-page supplement together for zero dollars in art cost, layout, and editing, because you're a renaissance publisher who undervalues editing and uses Scribus and free art. If you do your own writing of circa 50K words and the product sells 75 copies over the near term, you've made $600 pre-tax. You're paying yourself the handsome rate of 1.2 cents a word there.
> 
> Now let's bring in a Name writer, one whose mere presence on the cover can turn the book into a modest hit of 500 copies sold. How much can you pay that Name writer before you're better off just doing it yourself? 500 copies @ $8 = $4,000 gross sales - $600 for the alternate case = $3,400 over 50,000 words = 6.8 cents a word. So less than 7 cents per word. And that's with excessively optimistic assessment of art, layout, and editing costs.
> 
> Honestly, I don't know if there's a healthy place in the publishing ecosystem for non-Name freelancers. If I were in their shoes, I'd ditch the publishers entirely and just self-publish until I'd built up a following and had a demonstrable value to a publisher. This requires developing a whole suite of new skills in layout and business management, yes, but the capital outlays are very small. You can get a subscription to Adobe InDesign for $20 a month, grab free stock art from DTRPG, and use guides and templates to get a basic grasp of layout design. Then you get to keep _all _the money, and I can assure you that that is a very happy place to be.




Given the relative ease to self publish, I don't see why a free lancer wouldn't want to go that  route (self-publish).  Granted, if your forte is not layout or art there are templates and free or reasonably priced stock art out there that can be used.  If you are semi-serious in becoming a freelance writer you will need tools to do the job anyway (more than just Word or other text editor) so investment in software to some degree will be necessary.  For me, $50 a month for Adobe CC isn't too bad and I generally make enough to cover the subscription (so at this point really more of a motivated hobby than anything else).


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## Fairman Rogers

One fallout of the self-publishing trend is that a lot of people now work in this industry in relative isolation from many of the other people who also work in it. Sure, we see each other on forums and social media, but that's not the same as talking or even working with someone. Freelancing (and indeed hiring freelancers as a publisher) is a way to network and develop relationships. Even if you can't get a "name" working on your book, you can get more people talking about it because of the relationships that you have developed.


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## Medesha

knottyprof said:


> I would like to know what qualifies as an "established" writer.  After all I have been publishing for over a year now, have over 20 PF products out now and my yearly sales last year were over a grand so my numbers are not huge but I do get sales (that and most of my products range between .99 and 3.49).  For me, it is more about getting my ideas out there in a professionally looking product.  I haven't done print yet, all PDF but I try to use the latest technologies (mainly Adobe) and all of my current products include the ability to turn off background layers to make it easier for people to print out.  I do have a full time job that pays really well, but my passion there is quite lacking compared to what I put into creating game product material.  Right now I just try to make enough to pay for the subscriptions I have for the software (Adobe CC, Microsoft Office 365) and pick up other publisher's material on DriveThruRPG.




Speaking solely on my own experience, I've been freelancing for about 11 years. Mostly writing, though I've done a little editing and even some publishing in that time. I'd say it took me about 5 or 6 years before I really cemented my reputation and was able to negotiate higher rates from publishers. I've probably written or contributed to over 100 books/articles (probably? maybe?) and I'm hardly a household name.


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## Steve Conan Trustrum

knottyprof said:


> Given the relative ease to self publish, I don't see why a free lancer wouldn't want to go that  route (self-publish).  Granted, if your forte is not layout or art there are templates and free or reasonably priced stock art out there that can be used.  If you are semi-serious in becoming a freelance writer you will need tools to do the job anyway (more than just Word or other text editor) so investment in software to some degree will be necessary.  For me, $50 a month for Adobe CC isn't too bad and I generally make enough to cover the subscription (so at this point really more of a motivated hobby than anything else).



Because even knowing how to put a product together isn't the same as knowing how to market and sell it. It certainly isn't the same as being able to offer product to an established customer base.

Product on the shelf (even when that shelf is virtual) =/= sales and, subsequently, money in pocket.

The idea that publishing PROPERLY and PROFITABLY is just something anyone can do so long as they can handle the technical aspects of production is one of the misconceptions that leads to some of the boldly erroneous assumptions this topic has been rife with, starting with the original post.


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## Jeremy.Smith

knottyprof said:


> (thanks Jeremy Smith on the reality check even for a company like Dreamscarred Press which is much more successful than my current run)




No problem!

I could probably turn publishing into my sole income - it would just mean downsizing our house, getting rid of one of our two used cars, and moving to a diet consisting primarily of rice and beans. Since the technology industry chooses to pay me far and away more than RPG publishing does, I instead let publishing be something I do nights and weekends and let it fund things like going to GenCon, or family vacations. We also reinvest a large portion of our profits back into the company - sometimes those investments pay off, sometimes they end up being money sinks that give us some good lessons on what not to do, and sometimes they pay off but not for an exceptionally long period of time.

And to give even more of a sanity check - our miniatures Kickstarter has not been profitable. What it has done is given us a line of miniatures that we can produce for a long, long time at a profit, but monetarily, it has been break-even, or a significant loss if factoring in the time I personally spent bagging and shipping miniatures instead of writing material to publish. But that goes back into reinvesting - we could have capped the number of figures at a dozen and had several thousand dollars in profit. Instead, we pushed the line so that we could bulk process the molding and casting and not have to expand our line for a long time. Now comes the test to see if that will pay off over the long haul, or if it became a profit-neutral vanity project.


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## mflayermonk

How and where do I go about finding $ 0.01 writers? Do I just post an ad?


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## Morrus

As a note, a number of publishers have very kindly pro-actively contacted me and volunteered information in a courteous and professional manner. Thank you! I very much appreciate it.  

I can't list 'em all, but Fred Hicks from Evil Hat, Simon Rogers from Pelgrane Press, Wolfgang Baur from Kobold Press, Owen K Stephens from Paizo (and Rogue Genius Games) and several others have all been fantastic and had nary a temper tantrum between them!


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## Morrus

mflayermonk said:


> How and where do I go about finding $ 0.01 writers? Do I just post an ad?




Pretty much, yep.


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## Morrus

Jeremy.Smith said:


> No problem!
> 
> I could probably turn publishing into my sole income - it would just mean downsizing our house, getting rid of one of our two used cars, and moving to a diet consisting primarily of rice and beans. Since the technology industry chooses to pay me far and away more than RPG publishing does, I instead let publishing be something I do nights and weekends and let it fund things like going to GenCon, or family vacations. We also reinvest a large portion of our profits back into the company - sometimes those investments pay off, sometimes they end up being money sinks that give us some good lessons on what not to do, and sometimes they pay off but not for an exceptionally long period of time.




I don't know how accurate this is, but my perception of you is that you're significantly bigger than I am in the Pathfinder publishing market.  By an order of magnitude, I'd guess.   But that's just an outsider's perception.

I've found that traditional PDF publishing models have completely stopped working for me.  We're finishing out ZEITGEIST, but we're moving on to Patreon-based stuff instead (and the occasional Kickstarter, of course).  Using a model like that, I can decide in advance that I am going to pay X, and set targets to publish when funding allows me to do so.


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## CardinalXimenes

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> The idea that publishing PROPERLY and PROFITABLY is just something anyone can do so long as they can handle the technical aspects of production is one of the misconceptions that leads to some of the boldly erroneous assumptions this topic has been rife with, starting with the original post.



I'd find a qualified disagreement with this.

If you are able to write good RPG material, and you wish to maximize your financial return from that, I think you will do so by embracing self-publishing for at least the initial part of your career. I don't know how you'd grade 'properly', but if you want to publish profitably... well, yes, just about anybody with a pulse can do that. The profit will be measured in a half-dozen McDonalds Extra Value Meals and will work out at about 23 cents an hour, but anybody capable of using a word processor's "print to PDF" function can get a few nibbles off DTRPG. Use Scribus, download free art, grab free templates and guides, and almost anyone of de minimis technical competence and a few months of determined practice can put together a not-unendurable PDF product.

And to be candid, as sad as these profits are, they are likely superior to anything they're going to earn at 1 or 2 cents a word from a publisher. More importantly, they are the beginning of a years-long apprenticeship on how to publish and produce your own material, an apprenticeship provided by a cruelly uncaring market and a pitiless audience. It requires the development of numerous new skills and the cultivation of labor that an author might have absolutely no talent for- but it's cheap. It's _very cheap_. It requires only the investment of effort and discipline, and if you haven't got either of those, well, you're not likely to become much of a writer anyway.


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## Jeremy.Smith

Morrus said:


> I don't know how accurate this is, but my perception of you is that you're significantly bigger than I am in the Pathfinder publishing market.  By an order of magnitude, I'd guess.   But that's just an outsider's perception.
> 
> I've found that traditional PDF publishing models have completely stopped working for me.  We're finishing out ZEITGEIST, but we're moving on to Patreon-based stuff instead (and the occasional Kickstarter, of course).




Our revenue streams have diversified drastically over the past few years, with CreateSpace becoming a larger segment of our profits than it was in years past. PDF-only products traditionally do not sell enough to justify a lot of investment. The no-hassle print products, such as CreateSpace and DriveThruRPG's print-on-demand, help to supplement that, which means that for us, if a product doesn't have a print version (or plans for one), it's typically not going to sell a huge volume of copies.

It's hard to gauge relative size, but I can tell you that while our library of products has grown, the 80/20 rule is in *full* effect. 20% of our products make up 80% of our revenue, and while we try out new products or niches, those have typically turned into money sinks. For example, we have yet to produce a profitable adventure, despite increasing our pay rate for writing, illustration, and cartography to produce a "higher quality" product that we can then charge a premium price for.

To give an example:
The Opened Mind (our latest adventure, one of the stretch goals of the Ultimate Psionics Kickstarter which has gone over budget in every way imaginable)

Costs
Writing: $260
Artwork: $235 (custom artwork, plus a small amount of stock art for layout)
Cartography: $150 - two maps
Layout: Free (I did it)
Total: $645

Sales To date (this is net, not gross)
DriveThruRPG/RPGNow: $68
Paizo: $15
CreateSpace: $11
d20pfsrd: $8
dreamscarred.com: $5
Total: $107

Now, we had several hundred backers who paid in knowing that was a stretch goal that they were going to get, at least as a PDF, but part of our justification for increasing our production cost on our books was an expectation of future sales of said books. Those sales are abysmal - and while I could go into a variety of reasons why (already giving it to our backers, potentially poor marketing, crowded market segment, GMs are a smaller segment compared to players, whatever), the fact is that we invested several hundred dollars of money into a book that so far has been a net loss. And a significant net loss. And since the Kickstarter went over budget (our own self-made problem, I fully admit), it's hard to find the silver lining in the loss. Will sales grow over time? Maybe, but history would imply no, they won't for that particular book.

Meanwhile, Ultimate Psionics, even after the 500+ backers who got it from the Kickstarter, and the people who had Unleashed and Expanded who decided they didn't need the combined book, has broken Gold status at DriveThruRPG (free downloads don't count toward that rank), and been in the top downloads at Paizo more weeks than it hasn't been.

So, there's an argument that could be made that we're "doing it wrong" by creating these other products. It's something I've been actively contemplating and it's been a discussion Andreas and I have had on multiple occasions. Unfortunately, that would mean further reducing the work we have for freelancers, because in-house we are absolutely *great* at producing new psionic content. Sure, we get assistance from freelancers on things like monster design, or handling projects we don't have time to do, but creating psionic content for players is where we started in the industry - and it's also where the bulk of our profits come from. Our other books, high-quality as they might be, paid at "reasonable rates" as they might be, don't produce the sales volumes of books like Psionics Unleashed and Ultimate Psionics that are largely produced in-house. So those sales are used to fund the other projects to "fill out" our library... which then turn out to be a financial loss. And we haven't really seen evidence that those support products have translated into increased sales of the other books.

And that's been a crux of the matter as the publisher  - we want to let other people do it for us, since I am a bottleneck on our ability to publish (especially with a growing family with two young children), but doing so has not proven to be financially beneficial except in a few cases (Psionic Bestiary, Path of War, Akashic Mysteries. Virtually all other projects we have freelanced out have been losses or barely break-even.) And getting freelancers interested in writing for psionics, who actually understand the system enough to properly design for it and actually complete the project, has been a struggle. We have fewer than a handful of reliable developers who can take a project on psionics and turn it around without it requiring significant rework by Andreas or myself. We have lots of people interested in doing work, but actually *turning in work ready to publish*? 

That's been the struggle - paying people to do projects we're not as good at has not been worth the cost, and paying people to do things we can already do well isn't in our financial best interests.


----------



## knottyprof

CardinalXimenes said:


> I'd find a qualified disagreement with this.
> 
> If you are able to write good RPG material, and you wish to maximize your financial return from that, I think you will do so by embracing self-publishing for at least the initial part of your career. I don't know how you'd grade 'properly', but if you want to publish profitably... well, yes, just about anybody with a pulse can do that. The profit will be measured in a half-dozen McDonalds Extra Value Meals and will work out at about 23 cents an hour, but anybody capable of using a word processor's "print to PDF" function can get a few nibbles off DTRPG. Use Scribus, download free art, grab free templates and guides, and almost anyone of de minimis technical competence and a few months of determined practice can put together a not-unendurable PDF product.
> 
> And to be candid, as sad as these profits are, they are likely superior to anything they're going to earn at 1 or 2 cents a word from a publisher. More importantly, they are the beginning of a years-long apprenticeship on how to publish and produce your own material, an apprenticeship provided by a cruelly uncaring market and a pitiless audience. It requires the development of numerous new skills and the cultivation of labor that an author might have absolutely no talent for- but it's cheap. It's _very cheap_. It requires only the investment of effort and discipline, and if you haven't got either of those, well, you're not likely to become much of a writer anyway.




I agree whole-heartedly with this.  Even if you have to put some free stuff out there (which I have quite a bit), people will take because of that fact.  Just don't be disappointment when numbers for free stuff doesn't = real sales numbers.  Honestly I get about 1 in 10 $ sale versus free download (amazing how many people thing Pay What you Want means 0 and for those that do give the publisher something for their PWYW title God Bless You).  Again, we are talking about exposure and a staple of samples of your work for other publishers to look at.

Honestly, unless you are living with someone that can support your life style, odds are you will have to have another source of income for a while if and when a career can be made out of game design writing (unless you can get into Wizards, Paizo, or other power house publisher).  I'm sorry but .01 a word won't support anyone in today's market (at least not in the US).  For 2,000 words that would come to $20.  If you can do 50 words a minute and know exactly what you are writing (no actual design or development time), you are talking about 40 minutes of writing time.  However, you got to figure at least twice that for actually developing the idea (if not a lot more).  So from concept to finished (just written) product you probably won't be making more than $10 an hour if you are lucky.  These are just some numbers I am throwing out for example and I am sure some can probably produce a lot more and many will produce a lot less in an hour and the numbers given do not even assume an average, just something to consider.

I produce products that have one to three pages of actual content and charge about a dollar each and even with basic layout, development, and writing most of those take me about 8 hours.  So even if I sell 20 or so the hourly breakdown does not make it worth while as an actual career at this point.  Does it make me feel good when I actually sell items?  Hell yeah!!!  But freelance writers (unless they are well established) should have no delusions about having a full time career they can retire from.

Just my .01 cents worth (or $3.90 at .01 per word ).


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## Steve Conan Trustrum

CardinalXimenes said:


> I'd find a qualified disagreement with this.
> 
> If you are able to write good RPG material, and you wish to maximize your financial return from that, I think you will do so by embracing self-publishing for at least the initial part of your career. I don't know how you'd grade 'properly', but if you want to publish profitably... well, yes, just about anybody with a pulse can do that. The profit will be measured in a half-dozen McDonalds Extra Value Meals and will work out at about 23 cents an hour, but anybody capable of using a word processor's "print to PDF" function can get a few nibbles off DTRPG.



Incorrect.

Making a sale and getting money back is not "profit." "Profit" is the point where incoming money surpasses outbound. As I said, the idea that "just about anybody with a pulse can do that" is a false one. Sure, just about anyone who can put a product together can SELL a few copies of it, at least (but not always), but it doesn't mean they'll make a PROFIT doing so. And when I talk about "outbound" expenses, I'm talking about spending time actually doing the work instead of, for example, spending that time doing freelance writing for any number of FAR more lucrative industries.

The fact that many people, yourself included, don't differentiate between profit and being able to make a sale is part of the misconceptions I initially referred to. 



> Use Scribus, download free art, grab free templates and guides, and almost anyone of de minimis technical competence and a few months of determined practice can put together a not-unendurable PDF product.



And yet soooooooooooooooo many people who think as you do put out absolutely horrible product that never reaches a state of profitability.



> And to be candid, as sad as these profits are, they are likely superior to anything they're going to earn at 1 or 2 cents a word from a publisher.



Not necessarily.

Let's say you're a guy who makes lots of homebrew stuff for his games, and all your friends say "why don't you try selling it!" So, you pitch some ideas around, apply to some freelance job ads, but nothing ever really seems to take off for you at a rate of return you feel is fair. So, "screw it! How hard can it be?" you say to yourself, and you jump right in using desktop publishing. After all, you've got great ideas and a pulse! Surely you can do better on your own, right?

Well, as it turns out ...

... it takes more to putting together an appealing, useful product than knowing how to use Word, buy stock art, and figure out the technical functions of a layout program. Stuff like branding, marketing, and aesthetics matter. So does an actual ability to write for your market. As another kick in the head, publishing actually involves a bunch of legal mumbo-jumbo that fits into a realm of law that is also one of the most misunderstood. Great ideas and knowing how to satisfy a free online community that downloads your creations from your personal website is not quite the same as knowing how to put something together, beyond the technical aspects, that people will pay for. (Even being a successful and experienced freelance writer is a far cry from this.)

So, you jump in with both feet and put out product that has all sorts of issues that you didn't account for because you've no experience writing for a publisher, let alone BEING that publisher. After all, as a freelancer you just write what and how you are told -- if you're lucky, you've got a style guide to work with that may shed some light on the particulars. And since you only get one chance to make a first impression, and you've done so to a market you've not already established a foothold in, you've just stuck both feet into something else. Something that doesn't smell so nice. If you're lucky, the potential customer base will give you a second (and likely third, fourth, and fifth) shot while you work out the bugs in your writing, production, and marketing. But perhaps they won't. What's worse is the fact that, as a freelancer, you would have been paid and moved on to something else days, weeks, or even months ago, but because you published it yourself, you've invested all this extra time (and thus cost) into the product that just takes a deeper bite. The fact that this additional expense doesn't show up on an invoice or pay stub doesn't mean it's not there.

Quite simply, no. No, publishing for yourself does not necessarily mean one is likely to get a superior rate of return versus freelancing. Not even remotely.

By way of example: a freelancer who has a working relationship with an established publisher they trust with an equally established customer base who works SOLELY on fair royalty rates is likely to earn a hell of a lot more for the same product than either a freelancer working at a low pay rate or who decides to publish it themselves. Still, even the one who works for a low rate is, given the odds of success in this industry, more likely to be better off working for a lower pay rate as a freelancer than they are self-publishing from a position of inexperience.



> More importantly, they are the beginning of a years-long apprenticeship on how to publish and produce your own material, an apprenticeship provided by a cruelly uncaring market and a pitiless audience.



During which time you're quite possibly not earning any profit to account for the expenses your learning process is eating up.



> It requires the development of numerous new skills and the cultivation of labor that an author might have absolutely no talent for- but it's cheap. It's _very cheap_.



It is NOT cheap.

Time is money.

Learning how to successfully publish to the point of profitability is a massive time eater. That means it's a massive eater of profitability.

If you break down the hourly rate it takes me to write and publish a RPG product compared to the $100 I can make writing a single 1,000 word blog as a professional web content writer, you see how Misfit Studios eats away at my overall profitability as a writer. And that is considering Misfit Studios is a successful and profitable (and by this, I'll clarify, I mean by comparing expenses to income) small press RPG company that has been around for more than a decade and has a large, established market.

Just how many of those benefits do you think new publishers without experience or, frankly, the know-how, going in are going to enjoy? Do you think they can all afford to turn down more profitable options in other industries to wait on fulfilling their RPG industry dreams?

Honestly?



> It requires only the investment of effort and discipline, and if you haven't got either of those, well, you're not likely to become much of a writer anyway.



Again, another common misconception.

Some people, no matter how much time and discipline they show, will never become writers able to function at a professional level, no matter how good their ideas are or how much their gaming group enjoys their creations, let alone successful publishers. Whether they lack talent or the insight to foresee the right sort of product the market will bite onto (or any number of other things that can go wrong), it takes a LOT more to get by as a writer or publisher than just time and discipline.

Far more people try to make it as publishers than there are those who succeed, and the same goes for people who feel they have what it takes to become freelance RPG writers. (And by "far more," I feel comfortable qualifying that by adding "exponentially.") The amount of publishers who are successful enough to earn a living wage are even more rare -- they are the honest politicians of the RPG industry.


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## CardinalXimenes

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> Incorrect.
> 
> Making a sale and getting money back is not "profit." "Profit" is the point where incoming money surpasses outbound. As I said, the idea that "just about anybody with a pulse can do that" is a false one.



Well, no. Suffice that I am very well aware of the difference between sales and profits and the definition of an opportunity cost. And yes, I reiterate that, strictly speaking, you can and will make a profit producing self-published RPG material, provided that you A) do so with a mind for economy and the use of free resources and B) are resolved to write RPG material instead of taking a more remunerative fry shift at McDonalds.

The analysis starts with the assumption that you want to write RPG material, and I don't think it's relevant or pertinent to bring in alternative means of earning money. The point is that you want to write RPGs and are weighing the alternatives between seeking paying freelance work and going into self-publishing, so those are the two alternatives to weigh. It is also assumed that you are capable of writing good RPG material, as if you lack this qualification it doesn't matter which choice you make, you're not going to earn anything consequential on it, though you will make a few bucks on DTRPG before people realize you're hopeless.

Conversely, trying to freelance... well, how many freelancers here can get all the work they have time and energy to do? At _any _price? Assuming that an aspiring and competent RPG writer can simply decide to work all they like at two cents a word is to assume facts not in evidence.

Given these assumptions- that you are going to write RPG materials instead of Mechanical Turking, that you are capable of writing halfway-decently, that you are using free tools and resources- then yes, categorically, you will make a profit in self-publishing. It will be a tiny profit at first, but through years of determined effort and unflagging labor, it can become something much more consequential.


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## knottyprof

I think that is the whole point the article is trying to make, a freelance writer isn't something for the faint of heart.  And I agree that Sales does not equal profit compared to the time spent actually making something.  Either you have the passion and willingness to spend the time knowing that your final reward may be your passion for it more than actual $$$ earned.  And whether your products are good or not consumers seem to let you know (either by lack of sales or for those not happy with the product a bad review).  Point is that if you want to freelance, there are market models such as DriveThruRPG where you at least have the opportunity to give it a try.

Jeremy's posts about what he as seen with Dreamscarred Press was excellent at making that point.  Even with a professionally done product, profit is not a for sure thing for any publisher on any particular product.

And if you put out an absolutely horrible product, then perhaps freelancing isn't for you anyway (at least not as a career).


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## Steve Conan Trustrum

CardinalXimenes said:


> Well, no. Suffice that I am very well aware of the difference between sales and profits and the definition of an opportunity cost.



When you initially say "but anybody capable of using a word processor's "print to PDF" function can get a few nibbles off DTRPG" as an illustration that anyone can make a profit at self-publishing, I don't believe you do know the difference between profit and making a sale.


> And yes, I reiterate that, strictly speaking, you can and will make a profit producing self-published RPG material, provided that you A) do so with a mind for economy and the use of free resources and B) are resolved to write RPG material instead of taking a more remunerative fry shift at McDonalds.



"can and will"

"will"

Really?

You're again assuming a hell of a lot.

Like someone who WANTS to become a writer actually knowing how to write.

And knowing how to write for the RPG market.

And that knowing how to write for the RPG market also means having the ability to select and then write a product that the market will show interest in, no matter how many people assure you the market is there because they've said "oh, I'd TOTALLY buy that if it was available" but, as it turns out, the rest of the market who doesn't happen to know you personally disagrees.

Even when the person has all the skills and will necessary, as you are assuming to be so, success and profit are not guaranteed.

You take a lot for granted and speak in an awful lot of absolutes considering the massive failure rate amongst writers and self-publishers, including those who have the necessary skills.



> The analysis starts with the assumption that you want to write RPG material, and I don't think it's relevant or pertinent to bring in alternative means of earning money.



It most certainly is relevant when people are talking about earning a living wage. Because what people think they deserve as a fair rate for their work, be it writing or art, ultimately doesn't decide how much they get paid for it. The amount of money the publisher has coming in and has left to pay freelancers based on their profitability determines that. 

Someone can say "my work is worth X amount of money" all they want, but if the profit to be made form that work means the product no longer becomes worth publishing, then no, they aren't worth that rate, no matter how skilled they are.



> The point is that you want to write RPGs and are weighing the alternatives between seeking paying freelance work and going into self-publishing, so those are the two alternatives to weigh. It is also assumed that you are capable of writing good RPG material, as if you lack this qualification it doesn't matter which choice you make, you're not going to earn anything consequential on it, though you will make a few bucks on DTRPG before people realize you're hopeless.



But that's my point: your entire proposed point of "just go self-publish" just assumes this to be so. Most people who think they're good enough to write RPG material simply aren't. Finding that out is one of the benefits of freelancing instead of, as you suggest, just jumping into self-publishing because of the relatively low entrance bar it requires. Your assumption that even skilled RPG writers can make it as self-publishers is also flat out wrong. Yes, some can, but some simply won't ever be able to wrap their heads around the process or learn the skills needed.

Do you think everyone can figure out Sribus? InDesign? Even how to use Word to get an acceptable looking layout?

How about knowing how to brand products -- or even what "branding" means? Because, I have to tell you, far too many small publishers have no idea when it comes to this.

And do they all have an eye for graphic design? Font selection? Maintaining proper eye flow during layout when the time comes to figure out where to place those sidebars?

Do they understand the legalities of copyrights and trademarks? Considering one of the lowest entry bars in self-publishing for the RPG industry is OGL-based publishing, do you think all writers can understand what that entails? Do you think they'll all figure out how to do it properly and legally?

Because it's all so easy so long as you put in the time and discipline, as you say?



> Conversely, trying to freelance... well, how many freelancers here can get all the work they have time and energy to do? At _any _price? Assuming that an aspiring and competent RPG writer can simply decide to work all they like at two cents a word is to assume facts not in evidence.



Oh, not many, relative to the overall pool, to be sure. But the fact that you think "just go self-publish!" is some easy answer to that conundrum is just ... confounding.



> Given these assumptions- that you are going to write RPG materials instead of Mechanical Turking, that you are capable of writing halfway-decently, that you are using free tools and resources- then yes, categorically, you will make a profit in self-publishing. It will be a tiny profit at first, but through years of determined effort and unflagging labor, it can become something much more consequential.



No.

Categorically, no you won't.

It's not guaranteed. It's not even in the greatest realm of possibility.

Sure, you'll be able to "self-publish" in the sense that you can get a product out there, but you will NOT "categorically" make a profit from it just because you put the time in.

I mean ... wow ... the liberties you take with the realities of self-publishing, let alone doing so profitably, are so far removed from what the industry is actually like, I really don't know how to respond to your claims at this point beyond staring at my screen in disbelieve at the absurdity of it.


----------



## Michelle L-M

Of course, if you're using a Kickstarter funding model and you add the wage into your budget, and then you fund... then you have no excuse not to pay decently.


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## CardinalXimenes

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> I mean ... wow ... the liberties you take with the realities of self-publishing, let alone doing so profitably, are so far removed from what the industry is actually like, I really don't know how to respond to your claims at this point beyond staring at my screen in disbelieve at the absurdity of it.



I made over sixty thousand dollars last year from indie RPG publishing. That is net, pre-tax profit, after subtracting all expenses for art, production, fulfillment, and OBS' cut of the take. My gross sales were approximately $107,000. My first product was released in November of 2010.

I am reasonably well-acquainted with making money at this pastime. I'd like others to be, too.

I've made the terms and qualifiers of my advice clear. Those with no talent for writing RPG material, those who do not use free resources, and those who are unwilling to put in the time and effort to develop their business will do no better as a freelance publisher than they will as a freelance writer. Those who do possess these qualities and do choose to employ them will, however, make some amount of money. Given the paucity of decent-paying freelancer jobs for writers, I have reason to believe that they will make more self-publishing than they will through freelancing. I can't say that the arguments presented have convinced me of the contrary.


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## brvheart

I would not encourage anyone to try and write for today's market. Too many publishers paying pennies on the dollar over what rates used to be and cost of living has gone way up. A penny a word is something I would never write for and I have written for cheap in the past and often didn't get paid or got paid pennies on what I was supposed to. Sales in the 100's of copies may be ok for some micro publishers, but they won't afford being able to pay anyone what they deserve to be paid for their time even starting out. I commend Morrus for starting this thread and informing people who are would be writers. Me, I think I am done with attempting to write. Been there, done that. Never even covered expenses. As Bob has passed away the person I was doing it for is no longer around.


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## Steve Conan Trustrum

CardinalXimenes said:


> I made over sixty thousand dollars last year from indie RPG publishing. That is net, pre-tax profit, after subtracting all expenses for art, production, fulfillment, and OBS' cut of the take. My gross sales were approximately $107,000. My first product was released in November of 2010.
> 
> I am reasonably well-acquainted with making money at this pastime. I'd like others to be, too.



That's great and all, but ...

... it has nothing to do with the assumptions you're making about the general terms you've proposed. Well, let me correct that. I think it has to do with the assumptions you're making but not in the way you mean. I think it's quite obvious that because you've been able to do it, you have ended up taking a hell of a lot for granted on behalf of everyone else who may try walking the same path. Do you honestly think that everyone who made the same decisions as you has the same chance at success as you've enjoyed? That there are no additional factors you've not accounted for that have nothing to do with your presented qualifiers?

I mean, the process of self-publishing comes relatively easy to me, when you talk about the mechanical aspects. I can intuitively learn software easily, which is why I headed IT for a multinational company for nearly a decade despite having a degree in English and NO IT training. As such, picking up things like InDesign came easy to me. The fact that I did this for a market research company helped me understand about branding and marketing. I've even found I can do some things better in InDesign than people I've worked with who went through courses and got certification in the software.

That doesn't mean I think those same things come easily to everyone, or that other things involved with publishing were as intuitive to me. There are some aspects of publishing I continue to struggle with over a decade in, while some of my peers find them to be child's play.

Wanting others to be able to do what we have done, and thinking that it's just a matter of time management and discipline are two very different creatures. One of those creatures has very little realistic footing in the RPG industry.



> I've made the terms and qualifiers of my advice clear. Those with no talent for writing RPG material, those who do not use free resources, and those who are unwilling to put in the time and effort to develop their business will do no better as a freelance publisher than they will as a freelance writer. Those who do possess these qualities and do choose to employ them will, however, make some amount of money. Given the paucity of decent-paying freelancer jobs for writers, I have reason to believe that they will make more self-publishing than they will through freelancing.



And yet the reality of the situation, as seen by the amount of attempts that fail, does not back up your claims.

Your assumptions simply take as given a lot of factors that you don't talk about, such as marketing, the market itself, product selection, and having a head for business. Even the qualifiers you state as being assumed are so particular that it's clear that, while profitable and sustainable self-publishing is going to be a viable option for some writers, it certain won't be a standard option anytime soon. Certainly not in the terms you present.



> I can't say that the arguments presented have convinced me of the contrary.



Well, unfortunately not everyone believes in math ...

EDIT: By the way, one of the biggest assumptions you're making, even if everything you've said were true: freelance writers want to put up with all that extra hassle and loss of time required to self-publish. Because I have people approach me with projects, not because they think it will necessarily earn them more money if they publish through Misfit Studios, but because they don't want to invest the time needed to publish it themselves. You discount a lot of factors.


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## arjomanes

CardinalXimenes said:


> I made over sixty thousand dollars last year from indie RPG publishing. That is net, pre-tax profit, after subtracting all expenses for art, production, fulfillment, and OBS' cut of the take. My gross sales were approximately $107,000. My first product was released in November of 2010.




To be fair, Sine Nomine has fairly unique offerings. 

Though I buy hundreds of PDFs, Red Tide was one of my favorite books I've purchased in the last few years, and one of the few I opted to get in print (along with books from Frog God Games, Lamentations of the Flame Princess and Wizards of the Coast). 

I wonder if the OSR community is very different than the Pathfinder community. Zak S could also join this thread and talk about Red & Pleasant Land, but that wouldn't be the norm for most writers or publishers.


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## Jeremy.Smith

CardinalXimenes said:


> I made over sixty thousand dollars last year from indie RPG publishing. That is net, pre-tax profit, after subtracting all expenses for art, production, fulfillment, and OBS' cut of the take. My gross sales were approximately $107,000. My first product was released in November of 2010.
> 
> I am reasonably well-acquainted with making money at this pastime. I'd like others to be, too.
> 
> I've made the terms and qualifiers of my advice clear. Those with no talent for writing RPG material, those who do not use free resources, and those who are unwilling to put in the time and effort to develop their business will do no better as a freelance publisher than they will as a freelance writer. Those who do possess these qualities and do choose to employ them will, however, make some amount of money. Given the paucity of decent-paying freelancer jobs for writers, I have reason to believe that they will make more self-publishing than they will through freelancing. I can't say that the arguments presented have convinced me of the contrary.




There is one big point of differentiation between you and some of the other folks posting here: you are releasing your own RPG. Most here are releasing supplements for Pathfinder or D&D. Without knowing how your sales break down, that would imply that the money is in NEW roleplaying games, not supporting existing games.

But that's at the 30,000 foot view, so you're welcome to correct that assessment.


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## Steve Conan Trustrum

Jeremy.Smith said:


> There is one big point of differentiation between you and some of the other folks posting here: you are releasing your own RPG. Most here are releasing supplements for Pathfinder or D&D. Without knowing how your sales break down, that would imply that the money is in NEW roleplaying games, not supporting existing games.
> 
> But that's at the 30,000 foot view, so you're welcome to correct that assessment.



Exactly, Jeremy.

Not every market is the same. Not every publisher's position or capabilities within the same market are going to be the same, no matter how skilled they are as a writer. The market is a fickle thing, and entering it as a publisher thinking "I've put my time in and I'm a good writer" is going to get one by is, well ... dangerously naive advice to be passing along.


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## CardinalXimenes

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> I think it's quite obvious that because you've been able to do it, you have ended up taking a hell of a lot for granted on behalf of everyone else who may try walking the same path. Do you honestly think that everyone who made the same decisions as you has the same chance at success as you've enjoyed?



I think we're just disagreeing on the scope of success that can be expected. I don't expect that anyone, talented or otherwise, could just cargo-cult repeat my processes and profit as well as I have. I had the luck to choose the right market niche and supply a need that wasn't sufficiently scratched at the time. I was there with a POD core book the month that OBS started offering them. Stars Without Number had the luck to be pushed by many people at the right place and right time. After a certain point, hard work and moderate talent simply make luck possible rather than foreordained.

But honestly, you're telling me that slapping a $4.99 mini-splat up on DTRPG won't catch at least three or four purchases while it's still sitting in the "Latest Products" listing? $10 may be nugatory, but if you're determined to write RPG material and have done it with free tools and resources, that's $10 of profit, and it's $10 of profit you chose to get. You were not obliged to find a publisher willing to pay you, which is a very non-trivial undertaking for many aspiring freelance writers.

The harsh truth is that there is not an unlimited supply of publishers willing to pay even one cent a word for a freelance writer. An aspiring writer's choice is often not between freelance rates and trifling self-pub returns, but between nothing and self-pub. Learning how to use Scribus and how to lay out a basic, respectable RPG product is not a trivial undertaking, but I honestly don't believe that a reasonably-intelligent person willing to spend a few months of real, freelancer-worthy work with the product can't learn how to make a modest and adequate product with it. I've published several documents expressly to handhold newbie publishers through the process.



arjomanes said:


> I wonder if the OSR community is very different than the Pathfinder community. Zak S could also join this thread and talk about Red & Pleasant Land, but that wouldn't be the norm for most writers or publishers.



I think the OSR community is exceptionally friendly to self-publishers because it has such low minimum standards for production quality. Some publishers actively seek to emulate bad or naive typography just to mimic the classics of the genre. Though to be truthful, given the extremely low book design standards of the RPG industry in general, this maybe isn't so much of a distinction from other sub-markets.



Jeremy.Smith said:


> There is one big point of differentiation between you and some of the other folks posting here: you are releasing your own RPG. Most here are releasing supplements for Pathfinder or D&D. Without knowing how your sales break down, that would imply that the money is in NEW roleplaying games, not supporting existing games.
> 
> But that's at the 30,000 foot view, so you're welcome to correct that assessment.



Stand-alone RPGs undoubtedly give the best profit-to-page ratio for me, especially given the Kickstarter money they bring in. Even so, supplements normally pay off their modest art investments handsomely- short supplements of 32 pages or so average around 2K profit in the near term, while longer supplements of 64-100 pages net out about 4-6K. I'm going to try a Kickstart for a full-color 64 page supplement later this year and compare the take with my b/w full-game book KSes to see if Kickstarter might improve supplement profitability. The Pathfinder market ecosystem might be very different, and I get the impression that higher production values are expected, but it might be worth seeing what kind of wiggle room you have there on production costs.


----------



## PaulO.

I appreciate the initial post, and the discussion, as I sometimes dream of writing. But I think an issue here is that there are lot of people who, like me, wish to write. The amount of fantasy content you can find available on the internet, and given away, is enormous. The market is flooded with decent writers, and decent content.

Creighton Broadhurst even wrote, 







> Very few people become freelance game designers to make decent money or to earn a living full-time. For me, I do it because I love sharing my “creative genius” and I get a real kick out of knowing people all over the world are enjoying my products and (hopefully) they are making their games better and more fun.




I think that is true for a lot of us. Which means there are a lot of us trying to squeeze water from the same rock. It seems that the supply of content outweighs the demand to the point that customers aren't willing to shell out much money on a regular basis for new content. Since publishers have less money coming in, they have less money going out to writers.

I don't know the solution. Publishers and writers to focus more on differentiation and branding? Broader economic issues so that we all have more money to better support the arts?


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## Adam Jury

knottyprof said:


> Also, in regards to the expectation that PDFs should be cheaper than print books I have a strong opinion (and not what you would think it would be as a publisher). My hang up with pricing PDFs as much as actual print books is that the cost to produce such items is a lot less than a traditional book. Sure there are costs for writers, art, editing, etc. but I know that a majority is in the actual production of the book itself.




This depends on a LOT of variables ... the size of your print run, whether it's offset/print on demand, and, of course, how much you pay your creative team.


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## arjomanes

PaulO. said:


> I don't know the solution. Publishers and writers to focus more on differentiation and branding? Broader economic issues so that we all have more money to better support the arts?




Maybe a co-op people could join that provides subscription material? Something like a DDI for indie design (magazines get partway there, and of course the well-read blogs). Kobold Press is kind of close to that, but you don't really need a membership to read all the free material on their website. It seems writing for a kickstarter book pays better, while writing an article for the website pays considerably less.

I'd be curious to see what happens with demand in the next year with 5th edition. A  new supplement to the OGL or GSL may make a difference, or it may not.  Some publishers are creating 5th edition compatible content under the  existing OGL, but that seems an additional legal hurdle that many  publishers want to stay clear of. It does seem to me that there's a  market for 5e material, but to what extent I'm not sure.


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## Mark CMG

CardinalXimenes said:


> I made over sixty thousand dollars last year from indie RPG publishing. That is net, pre-tax profit, after subtracting all expenses for art, production, fulfillment, and OBS' cut of the take. My gross sales were approximately $107,000. My first product was released in November of 2010.




Thanks for the numbers.  Is this you here? -

http://www.sinenomine-pub.com/?page_id=384


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## CardinalXimenes

Yea, verily, that's me. Still need to finish buffing up the site, but it tends to come in a little beneath sleep in priority lately.


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## knottyprof

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> Not every market is the same. Not every publisher's position or capabilities within the same market are going to be the same, no matter how skilled they are as a writer. The market is a fickle thing, and entering it as a publisher thinking "I've put my time in and I'm a good writer" is going to get one by is, well ... dangerously naive advice to be passing along.




But it is overall a reasonable option for those that want to try their hand at writing and game design.  Whether or not it is good, bad, or just bland is indifferent.  As pointed out from the article itself, the wages of freelance writing for a small to moderate gaming publisher will be limited at the very least and many who want to "break into" the business may be willing to do many of the items listed as exploitative just for the chance.  Self publishing on Drive Thru RPG or other similar sites is relatively simple to set up and doesn't cost anything until you actually sell something.  So if I have the option to try and find work as a freelance writer making 1 to 2 cents per word (with the assumption that a publishing company will even be willing to give you a project) or just going on my own to develop a few ideas and try to sell them, I think the self publishing road is an effective way to at least test the waters.
I am a small publisher that does all of the work myself from writing, layout, some artwork, and even branding.  Sure I don't know all the ins and outs of the business but as a glorified hobby it gives me an opportunity to learn and who knows what the future may hold.  If my company never makes me enough money to give me a real salary, at least I am learning and actively committing to a hobby and sharing my ideas with others.

So I am not sure how the advice is naive or dangerous to anyone.  Sure, you may find out that you are a less than spectacular writer and your skills are not what you thought they were, but there really is no harm in trying and the cost minimal compared to other types of self starting businesses.  And if you were strictly trying to find work as a freelance writer, any publisher that actually gives you a project will definitely let you know whether or not the material you generate is acceptable or not.

I guess if you are going into self publishing with grandiose plans of profit and adoring fans, yes this advice can be dangerous.  But if you realize that it is only a vehicle to test your skills and talents and possibly share some ideas with others while making a little money, then what is the harm in trying your hand at self-publishing?


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## Perram

Thank you so much for this article. I'll be saving this for sure.


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## Steve Conan Trustrum

CardinalXimenes said:


> I think we're just disagreeing on the scope of success that can be expected. I don't expect that anyone, talented or otherwise, could just cargo-cult repeat my processes and profit as well as I have. I had the luck to choose the right market niche and supply a need that wasn't sufficiently scratched at the time. I was there with a POD core book the month that OBS started offering them. Stars Without Number had the luck to be pushed by many people at the right place and right time. After a certain point, hard work and moderate talent simply make luck possible rather than foreordained.
> 
> But honestly, you're telling me that slapping a $4.99 mini-splat up on DTRPG won't catch at least three or four purchases while it's still sitting in the "Latest Products" listing?



Actually, it's quite possible it won't. I've seen it happen. You can look through OBS and easily find companies that have numerous products that haven't sold a single copy.

But no, that's not what I said. What I DID say was, in essence, that selling three or four products at a price of $4.99 at OBS (meaning you're earning either $3.50 or $3.25/sale) isn't making a profit if the product cost you even a measly $20 to put together. And by "cost you," I mean it took you at least an hour combined, as a self-publisher, to write it, choose a free art piece, do layout, upload it, and then just let it sit there waiting for people to buy it, not doing any marketing at all.

Your own example doesn't bear out a scenario that fits the premise of this thread. Losing money certainly isn't a living wage.



> $10 may be nugatory, but if you're determined to write RPG material and have done it with free tools and resources, that's $10 of profit, and it's $10 of profit you chose to get. You were not obliged to find a publisher willing to pay you, which is a very non-trivial undertaking for many aspiring freelance writers.



See, this is why I say you don't understand the difference between a "sale" and "profit."

NO.

This is NOT profit. It's "gross profit" if you want to stick purely to business vernacular, but it's not "net profit," which is where the sustainability that is contextually relevant to this thread comes in. Your own example dismisses the person's time investment as a cost which is, frankly, contrary to one of the core points of this thread's purpose: writing takes time, and time is money, so publishers need to account for that in the rates they pay.

And, considering all the extra time needed to self-publish a product that only grosses $10, as per your example, the person probably would have been better off just doing the writing aspect for the low rate. Not only would they probably flat out make more than $10 doing so, but all that time they didn't spend on the other aspects of self-publishing could have been spent working on other projects,or looking for them at the very least.

This is why business has what's called a "break even point." It's an actual thing that matters to a successful business that cannot merely be hand waved away.



> The harsh truth is that there is not an unlimited supply of publishers willing to pay even one cent a word for a freelance writer. An aspiring writer's choice is often not between freelance rates and trifling self-pub returns, but between nothing and self-pub. Learning how to use Scribus and how to lay out a basic, respectable RPG product is not a trivial undertaking.



You're confusing a lack of viable options for the guarantee of profit -- it just takes "time and discipline," as you put it. Just because an option is there -- is the most appealing option even -- doesn't mean that goal is reasonably attainable at a professional, profitable level.



> but I honestly don't believe that a reasonably-intelligent person willing to spend a few months of real, freelancer-worthy work with the product can't learn how to make a modest and adequate product with it.



You don't think that some things just come more difficultly to others than they do to others? I mean, I know plenty of artists, and I have taught myself a bit about digital colouring so that I don't always have to pay others to do it, but do you think it's a lack of "reasonable intelligence" that prevents me from learning the skills they possess? There's nothing someone you know finds simple that you can't wrap your head around, no matter how hard you try -- and do you think that makes you less than "reasonably intelligent"?



> I've published several documents expressly to handhold newbie publishers through the process.



I've written style guides on SEO writing. I'm working on a product that will help small press publishers learn a thing or two about marketing. I know for a fact that some of the content in both is going to be over the heads of some people. Does this mean that everyone who reads that material but isn't able to grasp it is not "reasonably intelligent"? Similarly, I own a number of books on digital colouring, so all the info is right there before my eyes, so why-oh-why can't I do it as well as the comic book colourists who wrote them?

It's almost as though something more than intelligence alone comes into play when learning the bare mechanics of new skills, let alone figuring out the artistic aspects of effectively implementing them.



> I think the OSR community is exceptionally friendly to self-publishers because it has such low minimum standards for production quality. Some publishers actively seek to emulate bad or naive typography just to mimic the classics of the genre. Though to be truthful, given the extremely low book design standards of the RPG industry in general, this maybe isn't so much of a distinction from other sub-markets.



Well, consider:

a) not every freelance writer wants to work in the OSR community. Likewise, not every freelance writer wants to work in a market that is easily accessible via the OGL, creative commons licensing, etc. Some writers want to freelance because the games they want to write for are not open to third party publication, and those games may not pay the best.

b) as with any aspect of the market, the OSR community will only take on so much product before it bloats past the point of sustainability (d20 bubble, anyone?) Considering the OSR community remains a relatively small niche within an overall nice market, perhaps it's not the greatest example market to hold up in order to illustrate a point of "hey, anyone can self-publish RPGs for profit!"

c) even in a market that is inviting of third party publishers, and even if that market's standards are low, it's still not a guarantee of profit. Want me to start citing incredibly well-written, beautiful RPG books that absolutely flopped in their respective markets for unrelated reasons? Entire companies have come close to dying (if not actually been wiped out) by such scenarios. At best, an inviting market increases the chance of success, but it certainly doesn't guarantee it, no matter how much time and effort one puts in.

As for using Kickstarter to help people transition from writer to publishers, something you may want to consider is that going with Kickstarter has not only killed off products put out by freelancer-come-publishers, but also killed off their fledgling companies. Again, Kickstarter can help people out, but it has a number of risks that go with it that not everyone is able or willing to take on.


----------



## Theo R Cwithin

Great article, and some fascinating discussion. 
Thanks for posting this one!


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## Steve Conan Trustrum

knottyprof said:


> But it is overall a reasonable option for those that want to try their hand at writing and game design.  Whether or not it is good, bad, or just bland is indifferent.



Sure, it's an option. But keep in mind that I'm specifically responding to someone who is putting it out as an option that is guaranteed to be more profitable than freelancing even at terrible rates. My point has always been "um, no."

Anyone can take their Word document as is and try selling it because, really, the entrance bar for self-publication really is that low. They can try their hand at it that easily. It doesn't mean they'll make money doing it. Indeed, it's quite possible they'll come out at a loss once their time is considered. A loss is < $0.01 in total profit, let alone $0.01 as a per word rate of payment. It's just basic math.



> If my company never makes me enough money to give me a real salary, at least I am learning and actively committing to a hobby and sharing my ideas with others.



But the same could be said of you if you were working for a low pay rate.

Or giving it away for free.



> So I am not sure how the advice is naive or dangerous to anyone. Sure, you may find out that you are a less than spectacular writer and your skills are not what you thought they were, but there really is no harm in trying and the cost minimal compared to other types of self starting businesses.



Quite literally telling people that time and discipline is all you need to turn a profit as a self-publisher if you're a talented writer is indeed naive and dangerous. Someone foolish enough to take it to heart, coupled with some of the "just use Kickstarter!" advice floating around here could see themselves winding up in some serious debt. It's already happened -- it's even happened to people who had a successful Kickstarter!

If ANYONE is giving out ANY advice that can be summed up as "X will make profit in the RPG industry a given" under ANY terms and conditions, you know their advice is to be avoided. Because, really ... advice that tries saying "RPG industry + X = guaranteed profit"???? Come on now ...

Who in their right mind believes ANYTHING can guarantee profit in this industry?



> And if you were strictly trying to find work as a freelance writer, any publisher that actually gives you a project will definitely let you know whether or not the material you generate is acceptable or not.



Why? Because publishers are always right about which product ideas and output will be profitable?



> I guess if you are going into self publishing with grandiose plans of profit and adoring fans, yes this advice can be dangerous.



Or if you go in thinking "time in" alone will see you through to profit.


> But if you realize that it is only a vehicle to test your skills and talents and possibly share some ideas with others while making a little money, then what is the harm in trying your hand at self-publishing?



Oddly enough, just about every publisher I would care to talk to on the subject would disagree and say this is what freelancing is for.

Jumping up one's position in a market several tiers without already having a grasp on the requisite skills is not a wise move when it's your money on the table. That's why freelancing is helpful beyond the money it offers -- it creates networks and relationships that help you learn this stuff without taking on the risk of producing product that might fail.


----------



## knottyprof

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> Sure, it's an option. But keep in mind that I'm specifically responding to someone who is putting it out as an option that is guaranteed to be more profitable than freelancing even at terrible rates. My point has always been "um, no."




Not sure who is guaranteeing anything, I don't remember specifically reading a post with a guarantee.  Comments that even with a crappy product/ supplement you may make a few dollars sure.

I think the whole point of the article in the first place is that those looking into freelancing need to be knowledgable as to what they are getting into.  The same applies to self publishing which is in a sense the ultimate freelancing project.



> Quite literally telling people that time and discipline is all you need to turn a profit as a self-publisher if you're a talented writer is indeed naive and dangerous. Someone foolish enough to take it to heart, coupled with some of the "just use Kickstarter!" advice floating around here could see themselves winding up in some serious debt. It's already happened -- it's even happened to people who had a successful Kickstarter!
> 
> If ANYONE is giving out ANY advice that can be summed up as "X will make profit in the RPG industry a given" under ANY terms and conditions, you know their advice is to be avoided. Because, really ... advice that tries saying "RPG industry + X = guaranteed profit"???? Come on now ...




Again, not sure where anyone said freelancing or self-publishing guarantees success.  As for Kickstarter projects, don't get me started.  From what I have experienced (as a contributor) so far Kickstarters for an individual publisher/creator is generally going to end in failure or at least extreemly long delay times.  Some publishers that have a lot more overall experience seem to have a better handle on it including Kobold Press and Dreamscarred Press, but they have years of experience generating both soft and hard products anyway.  At this point there is no way I would be willing to take on a Kickstarter because there is a lot I don't know and could not adequately quantify to deteremine the amount needed to produce a successful kickstarter project.  And I would not suggest a Kickstarter for anyone wanting to "Jump" into the business.

Bottomline is you need to know your strengths and weaknesses before you jump into any kind of industry (RPG or otherwise).




> Why? Because publishers are always right about which product ideas and output will be profitable?




No, but they are the one paying for the project so right or wrong a freelancer has to be willing to accept the minimum standards and opinions of the publisher that commissioned the project.



> Oddly enough, just about every publisher I would care to talk to on the subject would disagree and say this is what freelancing is for.
> 
> Jumping up one's position in a market several tiers without already having a grasp on the requisite skills is not a wise move when it's your money on the table. That's why freelancing is helpful beyond the money it offers -- it creates networks and relationships that help you learn this stuff without taking on the risk of producing product that might fail.




Kind of confused as to whether or not publishers know what they are doing anyway, you make a point to indicate that publishers are not always right or being able to gauge what products will be profitable then you seem to indicate that freelancing for publishers is the best move as it takes the risk of producting a product that might fail.

As a self publisher I have made some contacts and done some networking without the freelancer background so not sure why that is necessarily a requirement to connect with others in the market.


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## Blackbrrd

Paying per word must really make the writers pad their stuff. No wonder RPG's are so verbose. Why write concise rules and get paid less!

Personally, I find they pay discussed here appalling. I think 12.50$ an hour is really bad, while 1.25$ is just not OK in any way.

Personally, I would be into buying adventures, but finding good 3rd party adventures that fit my game style is just really hard. Low sales -> no reviews -> I have no idea if it's worth my time or my money...


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## DaveMage

PaulO. said:


> I appreciate the initial post, and the discussion, as I sometimes dream of writing. But I think an issue here is that there are lot of people who, like me, wish to write. The amount of fantasy content you can find available on the internet, and given away, is enormous. The market is flooded with decent writers, and decent content.
> 
> Creighton Broadhurst even wrote,
> 
> I think that is true for a lot of us. Which means there are a lot of us trying to squeeze water from the same rock. It seems that the supply of content outweighs the demand to the point that customers aren't willing to shell out much money on a regular basis for new content. Since publishers have less money coming in, they have less money going out to writers.
> 
> I don't know the solution. Publishers and writers to focus more on differentiation and branding? Broader economic issues so that we all have more money to better support the arts?




These are great points.  So much so, that for me, as a consumer, what has to be released from a 3PP has to be special for me to even look at it now.  Small PDF?  No thanks.  Rules add-ons?  No thanks.  Slumbering Tsar?  Yes, please.


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## Adam Jury

Blackbrrd said:


> Paying per word must really make the writers pad their stuff. No wonder RPG's are so verbose. Why write concise rules and get paid less!




My experience over the years is that this isn't true. Most writers don't struggle to write their section of a book and pad out 8,000 words into 10,000. More writers turn over 12,000 words, instead, and let editorial figure out how to fit it into the book. ;-)

I think there are a few reasons why RPGs are often verbose, but that's way off-topic.


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## Kamaloo

Very interesting links. Thank you for those, CardinalXimenes.


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## CardinalXimenes

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> This is NOT profit. It's "gross profit" if you want to stick purely to business vernacular, but it's not "net profit," which is where the sustainability that is contextually relevant to this thread comes in. Your own example dismisses the person's time investment as a cost which is, frankly, contrary to one of the core points of this thread's purpose: writing takes time, and time is money, so publishers need to account for that in the rates they pay.



Opportunity cost is a factor when choosing between multiple alternative uses for your time and resources. If you have your heart set on writing RPG materials, then your time is a sunk cost- you will be spending your time writing RPG materials come Hell or high water. The only question is which way you can do so such that you make the most money for your effort.

Your posts are full of so many statements that I disagree with or find difficult to support that I can't really enumerate all of them. Still, I'll try to address what seem to be the main thrusts of your argument. You insist that self-pub is a terrible idea for most writers because the returns on it are less certain than even penny-a-word freelancing and that such freelancing opportunities can be expected to be available to them. It is also a terrible idea because most writers lack the requisite business and layout talents to ever do so "professionally", and it is a terrible idea because many writers want to write for IP that is not commercially available to them. To which I say,

A) Freelance work even at a penny a word is not often available on demand, let alone a majority of aspiring writers. The choice is not between a penny a word and self-pub for these people, it's between nothing and self-pub.

B) Vanishingly few freelancers ever seriously expect to make a living at it, let alone to do so "professionally". What almost all of them want is to maximize the return on the amount of time and effort they are inclined to put toward the work. Again, self-pub has a very low bar to exceed to win a comparison with penny-a-word-if-you-can-get-it.

C) It's true. If you desperately want to write licensed IP you have no choice but to freelance for the IP owners. Self-pub can't help you there. I know very few RPG writers who are only willing to spend time writing for one IP, however, and most others need something to do with their quiet hours.

Self-pub at an entry level is dirt cheap. It requires nothing but an investment of time and effort. If you have already sunk the cost of your time in committing to write RPG materials, then it is effectively free. Freelance writers who are not satisfied with penny-a-word and the paucity of paying jobs are well-advised to consider their options in self-pub. It's my intention with Sine Nomine to make as many tools and resources as possible to help them get there. I want to see as many small publishers as possible out there, each one writing their own weird, wild stuff and expressing their own esoteric ideas. I want shy talents and frustrated writers to be able to take their material directly to the public. Sure, Sturgeon's Law is not mocked, and 90% of it will be crap, but I'd rather have 10% gold from a mountain than a molehill. It's not like we're going to run out of shelf space at DTRPG any time soon.


----------



## Anguish

I'd like to thank the publishers who are participating in this discussion for being open and forthright.  Generally the topics of income and profits are taboo, and it's heartening to see actual numbers posted.

Personally, I'm a consumer.  I'm not published.  But I'm a skeptical consumer.  I never complain about things like pricing, or distribution models (as in the case of say... pre-painted miniatures coming in blind packaging) because I _think_ about what's going on.

Is Paizo profitable?  Yes.  Are most 3rd-party publishers profitable?  Unclear, but if so, not massively.  Nobody's getting ultra-rich here.  I pay attention, so I know that - for instance - Jeremy from Dreamscarred isn't using his private jet to fly over to Andreas' mansion every weekend for cocktails.  No, they're both just normal guys with day jobs to pay the bills.  This isn't because they're incompetent; I've read their stuff.  It's because the market in which they participate isn't one with particularly deep pockets.  There is only so much 3rd-party RPG "pie" to be had.

There are only a small number of positions in the RPG industry (at least - as as been alluded to - when supporting an existing game like Pathfinder or D&D) that _can_ pay well enough to put a roof over your head.  Doubling the number of "awesome" products isn't going to double the number of those positions.  There's only so much money to be made in this hobby as a publisher, a writer, or an artist.

Raising product prices will reduce units moved.  Finding the sweet spot is hard.  With product prices as they are, and sales volume what I guess they must be, there just isn't a lot of room for _anyone_ to be paid "as well as they should be".

Frankly, it's best for writers, cartographers, artists, and the likes to view this as a hobby until and unless they can land one of the plum jobs.  Like all the other starving artists, you use what meager profits you glean from your early years to supplement your income from whatever _else_ you need to do to pay the bills.

It's kind of like consumer electronics.  I'm in IT too, but where I work there are some sales involved though we're mostly service.  People freak out because "computers are expensive".  They figure we're getting rich at their expense.  See, _they_ work hard for their money.  We're just ripping them off.  Fact is, the mark-up/margin on consumer electronics is (usually) pathetic.  We're not talking about Monster Cables here, we're just talking about Ye Randome Laptoppe.  We move the unit, and we're lucky to see $50 in profit, less our time to quote, order, unbox, test, prepare, and repackage the thing for you.  Yeah.

End result is I think I'm realistic in recognizing that it ALL starts at the consumer's end.  If we don't spend, publishers can't pay.

Problem is, a typical novel is about $10, in mass-printed paperback.  For anywhere up to 600 pages of prose some writer struggled for half a year to produce.  So when a consumer looks at a 16 page PDF or a 32-page leaflet adventure that was probably written in two weeks, laid out in a two days, illustrated with five images... it gets hard to imagine paying a big number for it.

There isn't a real _answer_ here, because there's no real question.  But regardless, once more, thank you to all the participants for... participating.


----------



## Medesha

Adam Jury said:


> My experience over the years is that this isn't true. Most writers don't struggle to write their section of a book and pad out 8,000 words into 10,000. More writers turn over 12,000 words, instead, and let editorial figure out how to fit it into the book. ;-)
> 
> I think there are a few reasons why RPGs are often verbose, but that's way off-topic.




That is my experience as well (though I started in magazine writing and would never turn in something 20% over word count). Editors are really good at spotting padding when they see it and often have heavily developed outlines before they even talk to freelancers. Not always, but often.


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## Steve Conan Trustrum

CardinalXimenes said:


> Opportunity cost is a factor when choosing between multiple alternative uses for your time and resources. If you have your heart set on writing RPG materials, then your time is a sunk cost- you will be spending your time writing RPG materials come Hell or high water. The only question is which way you can do so such that you make the most money for your effort.



Well ... there you have it.

Of COURSE you'll always make a profit if you don't consider the time necessary to do something as an expense. However, considering one of the key points of this thread is "know how much your time is worth as a writer," I think you'll find you're wandering more than a tad afield in order to found a point that's a tad ridiculous. I mean, if I can say I'm making a profit by doing away with whatever expense happens to prevent that from happening on paper, how can a business POSSIBLY not make money?

That there is just FANTASTIC business sense.



> Your posts are full of so many statements that I disagree with or find difficult to support that I can't really enumerate all of them. Still, I'll try to address what seem to be the main thrusts of your argument. You insist that self-pub is a terrible idea for most writers because the returns on it are less certain than even penny-a-word freelancing and that such freelancing opportunities can be expected to be available to them. It is also a terrible idea because most writers lack the requisite business and layout talents to ever do so "professionally", and it is a terrible idea because many writers want to write for IP that is not commercially available to them.



No, I do NOT say it's a terrible idea. I'm saying it's an idea not to be taken lightly, and not to go into thinking "I'll learn what I need along the way."

I think self-publishing is a great idea for people who do their research and prepare.

I certainly don't think profit is a given, as do you, so long as you just keep putting the time in. The facts of what happens to a lot of companies in this industry certainly don't support your theory.



> To which I say,
> 
> A) Freelance work even at a penny a word is not often available on demand, let alone a majority of aspiring writers. The choice is not between a penny a word and self-pub for these people, it's between nothing and self-pub.



And yet being able to put out whatever product you want, whenever you want, isn't a guarantee of making money from it. Here's the problem with ALL of your reasoning: you keep insisting that "if you self-publish, the profit is inevitable. It isn't. It PROVABLY isn't. You can't swing a dice bag around on OBS without finding a publisher that has numerous products on their publisher page, but only one or two that are showing as having made any sales, and none of them having reached copper sales yet.



> B) Vanishingly few freelancers ever seriously expect to make a living at it, let alone to do so "professionally". What almost all of them want is to maximize the return on the amount of time and effort they are inclined to put toward the work. Again, self-pub has a very low bar to exceed to win a comparison with penny-a-word-if-you-can-get-it.



Again, provably wrong.

There are some types of work I can crank out faster than others. WAY faster. It's just mindless typing to me. I can crank out WAY more of that at $0.01/word than I can something more detailed and thoughtful that I'm getting paid $0.03/word. Purely from an economic standpoint, it would make more sense to me to take the $0.01/word job in such a situation, which I've done.

Also, consider your response here hinges upon the lowered expectations of freelancers, and then consider the context of the thread you made such a response in. You may not see the irony here because, frankly, it needs you to actually acknowledge that self-publishing does not guarantee profit, no matter how much time you dedicate to it.



> C) It's true. If you desperately want to write licensed IP you have no choice but to freelance for the IP owners. Self-pub can't help you there. I know very few RPG writers who are only willing to spend time writing for one IP, however, and most others need something to do with their quiet hours.



That's why it's just one option I presented. There are, however, people who like to stick to their niche. Even when there's an open license, there's no guarantee of sustainable work.



> Self-pub at an entry level is dirt cheap.



Possibly. Depends on what you have planned and if it's viable. I hope you understand how the "I'll keep it dirt cheap" approach is not sure-fire winner without it being explained.


> It requires nothing but an investment of time and effort.



Possibly (and again, I note, you discount any relationship between time having a monetary value attached to it, which is nonsense.) Oddly, most of the successful small press publishers didn't get started with free art or by thinking the time they spent devoting to their initial products wasn't an expense.



> If you have already sunk the cost of your time in committing to write RPG materials, then it is effectively free.



Oh, it is? Interesting ...



> Freelance writers who are not satisfied with penny-a-word and the paucity of paying jobs are well-advised to consider their options in self-pub.



Agreed.

They'd also be well-advised to do their research, consider the time involved to make money doing so, and not just jump in because someone foolishly guaranteed they'd make money doing so.



> It's my intention with Sine Nomine to make as many tools and resources as possible to help them get there.



Ah, okay. A sales pitch attached to your particular line of reasoning. Everything comes into focus now. Thanks for the unbiased advice, Tony Robbins.


> It's not like we're going to run out of shelf space at DTRPG any time soon.



Are the people who comprise an intended market, and the money they have available to spend, virtual as well?

There are two parts to the whole "supply and demand" aspect of economics and, as I keep pointing out, and understanding the role the "demand" aspect plays is kinda important.


----------



## Steve Conan Trustrum

knottyprof said:


> Not sure who is guaranteeing anything, I don't remember specifically reading a post with a guarantee.  Comments that even with a crappy product/ supplement you may make a few dollars sure.



Go back and re-read some of the things CardinalXimenes has said. He hasn't used the word "guarantee" -- just synonyms and statements to that effect. His guarantee is based on the fact that, hey, self-publishing costs nothing when you start out! You don't even consider your time involved as an expense, so even a single sale equals profit! He's also ignoring the possibility (and fact that it does indeed happen) that it's possible to put out a product and not sell a single copy.

So, yes, someone is guaranteeing profit, but they're rooting it in rather loaded, self-fulfilling terms.



> I think the whole point of the article in the first place is that those looking into freelancing need to be knowledgable as to what they are getting into.



That message is in there, to be sure, but that's not all the article (or its writer) is saying. It's certainly not the latter, as verified by anyone who has followed up with Morrus' comments on it elsewhere. On Twitter, for example while tweeting about his article:

"Scary number of $0.01 per word rates out there. Don't work for $0.01 per word, guys!"

You won't, for example, find anything along the lines of "a good time to obtain experience and build relationships by accepting a low pay rate is when you're looking for the higher paying jobs. After all, if it takes you three times as long to find work that only pays you twice as much, you're losing money holding out for the higher rate, not making it. An important part of making money at freelance writing, no matter your pay rate, is knowing how to manage your time effectively in terms of cost-benefit."

There are times where I've made a lot more money working $0.01/word jobs than I would have working on a $0.04/word job because of what I was doing. A pay rate does not exist in a state of absolutes, just as what a writer is worth does not break down to any benchmark pay rate -- certainly not if you're an actual professional freelancer. There's always a context and other factors in play (if you're smart.)



> The same applies to self publishing which is in a sense the ultimate freelancing project.



Disagree. With freelancing you (theoretically -- this is the RPG industry after all) get paid no matter the product's success because you're working for someone else and you've done the work and have a contract (hah!) You're also just doing the writing job you're hired for. When it comes to self-publishing, I don't know anyone who gets by just doing the writing, and if you are, then you certainly aren't just accepting a payment -- you're also paying other people. You don't still get a payday if your self-published product ends up taking a loss whereas a freelancer should (theoretically) already have their money and be laughing.



> Again, not sure where anyone said freelancing or self-publishing guarantees success.



If you really want, I can go back and pull some of his quotes.



> As for Kickstarter projects, don't get me started.  From what I have experienced (as a contributor) so far Kickstarters for an individual publisher/creator is generally going to end in failure or at least extreemly long delay times.  Some publishers that have a lot more overall experience seem to have a better handle on it including Kobold Press and Dreamscarred Press, but they have years of experience generating both soft and hard products anyway.  At this point there is no way I would be willing to take on a Kickstarter because there is a lot I don't know and could not adequately quantify to deteremine the amount needed to produce a successful kickstarter project.  And I would not suggest a Kickstarter for anyone wanting to "Jump" into the business.



Exactly. Kickstarter is something that can go oh-so-very wrong for self-publishers. And when it does go wrong, it's usually because of a lack of research, awareness of what's involved, and being unprepared. Everyone else is doing it, so you figure you can pull it off too, no problem.

Which is sort of my point about self-publishing in general. The fact that some are portraying it as a no-risk venture is dishonest. And, to be clear, I'm not saying it's not something freelancers should consider. Some would make a great go of it. But it requires careful thought, and awareness of what you can do, what you'll have to hire people for, what you'll be able to learn, and if all of that adds up to something you want to take on.



> Bottomline is you need to know your strengths and weaknesses before you jump into any kind of industry (RPG or otherwise).



Exactly. This is my point.



> Kind of confused as to whether or not publishers know what they are doing anyway, you make a point to indicate that publishers are not always right or being able to gauge what products will be profitable then you seem to indicate that freelancing for publishers is the best move as it takes the risk of producting a product that might fail.



I'm not speaking in absolutes, so I don't intend me pointing out one possibility to mean I disregard things can swing the other way as well. Basically, I'm saying that both have their risks, but I was addressing points someone else had raised because they were talking as though the risks only exist with freelancing.



> As a self publisher I have made some contacts and done some networking without the freelancer background so not sure why that is necessarily a requirement to connect with others in the market.




Doing so has gotten me quick answers regarding costing, publishing processes, etc. and even permission to use an entire book's worth of art someone else owns at no cost because I wrote it for them but am going to re-issue it through my company. Also, without networking I never would have had the chance to work on the DC Comics RPG (getting a chance to influence the comics to boot!) or obtained a license to do my Armageddon products for the Unisystem.

It's not necessary, but it cuts down on risk, and it also cuts down on costs. You'd be a fool not to network with peers in this industry.


----------



## CardinalXimenes

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> Ah, okay. A sales pitch attached to your particular line of reasoning. Everything comes into focus now. Thanks for the unbiased advice, Tony Robbins.



All of my publisher materials are free and will remain free. As part of my Kickstarter stretch goals, I have released approximately $10,000 worth of art for free use by other publishers and creators, including all of the art I used in Spears of the Dawn, The House of Bone and Amber, Scarlet Heroes, and my upcoming Silent Legions game. My latest freebie publication includes an 8-page walkthrough of my Kickstarter production sequence for novice publishers to help them avoid pitfalls and fulfillment issues. I have created a free template module that recapitulates 1980s-style TSR dress; it includes both the InDesign source files for other publishers to use and a commentary layer to explain how to fit the page elements together and why I made the choices I did on each page. In the publisher folder I linked earlier in the thread, I included a short guide on basic RPG publishing methods and an in-depth analysis of TSR-era book design, with the InDesign source files for other publishers to rip and use, along with a set of Photoshop brushes with common old-school map symbols. I am currently working on another free template module echoing the B/X D&D module styles of X1-X5 and B3-B4, plus a short guide on creating old-school maps in Photoshop.

Your article on SEO optimization for publisher websites was doubtless helpful to many people. I'm sure you'll be contributing more to other creators in the hobby in the future.


----------



## Janx

mach1.9pants said:


> I am not surprised by LPJ's attitude. It is a company I wouldn't touch with a 10' pole after his so called 'April Fools Joke', that he took weeks setting up to disappoint those who pre-ordered Razor Coast. This is the attitude of someone I have no truck with "And there is the problem, you think this is an equal relationship. It isn't." ~ disgusting.




The biggest problem I see with LJP from this article, is not the pay, but the openly voiced attitude of superiority and disdain.

I think it's totally fine that if you can only afford $.01, then that's what you offer.

But you should also dance with the girl that brung you.  If somebody  writes for that rate AND the product turns into a goldmine, you owe that writer a debt.  They have proven themselves worthy of the money you didn't have back then.


----------



## Adam Jury

Anguish said:


> Problem is, a typical novel is about $10, in mass-printed paperback.  For anywhere up to 600 pages of prose some writer struggled for half a year to produce.  So when a consumer looks at a 16 page PDF or a 32-page leaflet adventure that was probably written in two weeks, laid out in a two days, illustrated with five images... it gets hard to imagine paying a big number for it




Instead of thinking about what creative works cost to create, I encourage you to consider how much time you'll spend with it and the enjoyment you'll get from it.


----------



## Shemeska

Adam Jury said:


> My experience over the years is that this isn't true. Most writers don't struggle to write their section of a book and pad out 8,000 words into 10,000. More writers turn over 12,000 words, instead, and let editorial figure out how to fit it into the book. ;-)
> 
> I think there are a few reasons why RPGs are often verbose, but that's way off-topic.




I should hope that writing so grossly over your word limit is a mistake that a freelancer only makes once, get's corrected by their editor, and never does it again. I know this from very early experience. 

Early experience that I still get (rightly) teased about years later. XD


----------



## Steve Conan Trustrum

CardinalXimenes said:


> All of my publisher materials are free and will remain free. As part of my Kickstarter stretch goals, I have released approximately $10,000 worth of art for free use by other publishers and creators, including all of the art I used in Spears of the Dawn, The House of Bone and Amber, Scarlet Heroes, and my upcoming Silent Legions game. My latest freebie publication includes an 8-page walkthrough of my Kickstarter production sequence for novice publishers to help them avoid pitfalls and fulfillment issues. I have created a free template module that recapitulates 1980s-style TSR dress; it includes both the InDesign source files for other publishers to use and a commentary layer to explain how to fit the page elements together and why I made the choices I did on each page. In the publisher folder I linked earlier in the thread, I included a short guide on basic RPG publishing methods and an in-depth analysis of TSR-era book design, with the InDesign source files for other publishers to rip and use, along with a set of Photoshop brushes with common old-school map symbols. I am currently working on another free template module echoing the B/X D&D module styles of X1-X5 and B3-B4, plus a short guide on creating old-school maps in Photoshop.




Uhuh. That's all seemingly all noble and everything, but as your quote to follow indicates, you've read at least one article on my blog, so ...



> Your article on SEO optimization for publisher websites was doubtless helpful to many people. I'm sure you'll be contributing more to other creators in the hobby in the future.



... did you also read the one where I outlined how people use free products as part of for-profit marketing? Such as to sell a particular agenda that may, when actually looked at, only work if you happen to ignore a few inconvenient facts like, oh, let's say ... just because you're not paying yourself a salary as an employee, it doesn't mean your time invested in a project doesn't count as an expense.

To be frank, if many of the things you have stated in this thread are indicative of your understanding of RPG publishing and business, in the general sense beyond your own company, you also illustrate that just because someone is giving away a ton of free advice and aids, even if they are themselves successful, it doesn't mean that advice is good for and applicable to everyone. I certainly wouldn't bother if that person was also saying "here's my advice on how profit in the RPG industry is just a sure thing matter of time!"


----------



## James Jacobs

Shemeska said:


> I should hope that writing so grossly over your word limit is a mistake that a freelancer only makes once, get's corrected by their editor, and never does it again. I know this from very early experience.
> 
> Early experience that I still get (rightly) teased about years later. XD




Hee hee hee.

(returns to lurk mode)


----------



## Anguish

Adam Jury said:


> Instead of thinking about what creative works cost to create, I encourage you to consider how much time you'll spend with it and the enjoyment you'll get from it.




Not a horrible metric, but one that I suspect won't get you where you're trying to arrive, logically.

The imaginary novel I mention is pretty much guaranteed to net me 2-3 hours of enjoyment.  On my first read.  I'm kind of wonky in that I will re-read books.  Anywhere as little as a year and I'm good to go for a re-read.  I'm fairly selective in what authors I pick up so I almost never get "meh".

RPG materials on the other hand vary.  Something like Ultimate Psionics I'll use heavily.  Accordingly, I throw more money there.  I've backed the Kickstarter to a more-than-normal level, purchased two additional hardcovers retail, and purchased at least one PDF for someone as a gift.  I expect to get a lot of bang for those many, many bucks.  Similarly with Slumbering Tsar, I spent a lot on my signed and numbered copy and I got two and a half years out of it.

But those aren't the norm.  The norm is... oh... the Malefactor (TPK games).  Reviewed well, intriguing idea.  Bought.  And it's expansion.  Have I read it?  Partly.  Will it ever get play at my table?  Probably not.  Not because of a particular quality issue, but because I buy support materials because they _might_ come in handy.

If I paid for most RPG stuff what I figured I was going to get out of it, I wouldn't be paying because most of it I won't get anything out of them.

I try to measure an RPG product's pricing worth in terms of a} how hard it was to produce, and b} will I use it?  Logue or Pett - for instance - could Kickstart a roll of toilet paper and I'd back it.  Easy to produce... it's a roll of toilet paper.  But their material is so good that I'd _find_ a way to use it.  Rappan Athuk... again I have a signed copy that I know will never get played, but I know it was monstrous to produce.  Same with Razor Coast.  I don't even _like_ pirate stuff.


----------



## arjomanes

CardinalXimenes said:


> All of my publisher materials are free and will remain free. As part of my Kickstarter stretch goals, I have released approximately $10,000 worth of art for free use by other publishers and creators, including all of the art I used in Spears of the Dawn, The House of Bone and Amber, Scarlet Heroes, and my upcoming Silent Legions game. My latest freebie publication includes an 8-page walkthrough of my Kickstarter production sequence for novice publishers to help them avoid pitfalls and fulfillment issues. I have created a free template module that recapitulates 1980s-style TSR dress; it includes both the InDesign source files for other publishers to use and a commentary layer to explain how to fit the page elements together and why I made the choices I did on each page. In the publisher folder I linked earlier in the thread, I included a short guide on basic RPG publishing methods and an in-depth analysis of TSR-era book design, with the InDesign source files for other publishers to rip and use, along with a set of Photoshop brushes with common old-school map symbols. I am currently working on another free template module echoing the B/X D&D module styles of X1-X5 and B3-B4, plus a short guide on creating old-school maps in Photoshop.




I really appreciate all the advice and tools publishers and authors provide for aspiring RPG content creators. As a graphic designer, illustrator and writer with very few RPG credits, I've been interested in exploring self publication. I think it's awesome that you're publishing this stuff and providing source files for free!


----------



## CardinalXimenes

arjomanes said:


> I really appreciate all the advice and tools publishers and authors provide for aspiring RPG content creators. As a graphic designer, illustrator and writer with very few RPG credits, I've been interested in exploring self publication. I think it's awesome that you're publishing this stuff and providing source files for free!



If you've got experience in all three of those spheres, you have an enormous leg up already. Get yourself comfortable with InDesign, brush up on gamebook typography issues, and you'll be beautifully situated to giving self-publishing a spin.


----------



## Kannik

I've enjoyed this conversation and it's made me wonder about my own e-publishing experience... what kind of "salary" did I make out of it?  So I did a back of the envelope calc and thought I'd present it here just to add more data/another experience to the mix:

Caveats:  

I wrote these without the intention of making a living from it
I already was familiar with desktop publishing, graphic layout, writing, and more (I am an architect by day)
I already had access to various softwares
I did very little promotion
Over the three supplements I have written/sold online, I have received about 400 bucks (net payout, after e-tailer costs taken out).  

I put in probably 20ish hours on each one, so let's call it 75 hours total to give it a fudge factor (again, as I wasn't intending to make a living, I didn't track hours at all, and worked on it here and there).  

That places it at about $5.33 per hour, and perhaps less if my time recollection is really off.  

In total, it's about 10,500 words of "real" writing, which equates to $0.038 per word.

For me it was a fun side project and so I'm chuffed with how well they have done (though I'd like them to be even more widely known, of course!  ).  To those who have turned it into a living, my hats off to you!

peace,

Kannik


----------



## Vigilance

I'll say this: I worked for Louis. He paid me well, promptly, let me  (mostly) set my own direction and was pleasant to work for. If I was still freelancing I'd work for him again.


----------



## Mouseferatu

There's a big element here that's being missed. (Or maybe _I_ missed it, in my read-through, in which case I apologize.) I'm speaking as a US citizen and freelancer here; it's likely different in other countries.

You think these numbers are bad? They're even worse. This is _gross_ take-home.

Freelancing doesn't get you benefits. You're paying out of pocket for medical insurance.

Freelancers don't have employers paying portions of social security or other taxes. Freelancers and contractors pay a _far_ larger percentage of their income in US taxes than people with "normal" employment.

So if someone's freelance writing rate comes out to $12 an hour? They're still making less than other people earning an actual $12/hour from an employer.

I feel for the publishers who can only afford to pay one or two cents a word. I know most of you guys are trying your best. But I have to agree with Erik Mona; whether you mean it to be or not, it's exploitive. AFAIAC, if you can't afford to pay your writers a reasonable rate, you can't afford to run a publishing business. Full stop.


----------



## lynnfredricks

Mouseferatu said:


> I feel for the publishers who can only afford to pay one or two cents a word. I know most of you guys are trying your best. But I have to agree with Erik Mona; whether you mean it to be or not, it's exploitive. AFAIAC, if you can't afford to pay your writers a reasonable rate, you can't afford to run a publishing business. Full stop.




Its only exploitative if there's no other viable choice. There are plenty of other choices. There are the very, very few well paying writing jobs in the RPG market, and there are many more writing jobs outside of the RPG market that pay much, much better.


----------



## Mouseferatu

lynnfredricks said:


> Its only exploitative if there's no other viable choice.




Completely and utterly disagree. You're paying less than the work is worth; that's exploitive, AFAIAC. But we don't need to derail the thread with an exchange of "Yes, it is!" "No, it isn't!" Pretty sure I'm not going to change your view, and I've been doing this long enough, at varying rates of pay, to know for pretty certain that you're not going to change mine.


----------



## Tark

Okie dokie I took the time to read through this so let me air out a few things first.

No one should ever enter this industry expecting to make it a full time job. Period. Not just in Pathfinder but in all other games as well. After I write this post I'm going to share it with a long time friend and acquaintance who was amazingly successful in their chosen field but never left his day job.  

Yes the market is saturated.  Both ways. Meaning that you not only have a glut of publishers vying to get what little space they can in a very small pond but a downpour of writers with no credits attached happy to take no pay for however much you'll take. 

So what we have here is a hobby industry.  That is to say very few of us on either the publishing side or the content creating side are even making a living let alone getting wealthy.  So we treat it as a hobby, we operate on nights and weekends quietly building our resumes so we can maybe one day get picked out of the ocean of content by a company who happens to be riding atop that ocean in a boat made of money.

From that perspective it's not all that different than trying to get a profitable partnership on YouTube or Twitch.  The difference being while our industry is held up by the dedicated few thousand those particular groups are held up by the billions.

On top of this we really don't have a good means to keep consumers really informed.  Their's only one person I know of dedicated to reviewing 3pp stuff.  But, where are the Reddit links?  What about YouTube videos?  What about more reviews on RPGNow and Paizo?  I mean just say something, give some feedback, good, bad or ugly.  That stuff becomes important to giving you more of what you want.  Publishers *want* to sell you books so tell us what you will buy.

So, while we're talking about being exploited.  I have to ask, where's your copies of all 6 books in Way of the Wicked?  Where are your copies of Psionic's Unleashed?  Cerulean Seas?  How many books have you bought on Endzeitgeist's (literally the only dedicated critic and reviewer I've seen for Pathfinder products) recommendation?  Did you know John Wick wrote an rpg about playing a house cat?  When was the last time you got drunk and played Fiasco with some friends?  

It is really easy to criticize someone as being exploitative when you have had no investment yourself into seeing that those who put the work in get what they deserve.  And if you do that's great!  Are you willing to do more?  Maybe get more people buying? Because that's just about the simplest way to negotiate better pay rates.

So yes, Louis is going to be confrontational and frustrated when presented as the bad guy.  But, being undiplomatic does not make him wrong.  It's a reality in any industry that eagerness can only take you so far.  Employment is not nor ever has been considered an equal relationship outside of those basic human decencies.  You get on the crab boat you get a half share.  You survive a year or two on the crab boat the captain might bump you to full share or just as likely bump you off his damn boat.  You come to MacDonalds with no experience you likely start at minimum wage.  That's just how it is. Until you can prove otherwise you're a pair of hands with a glimmer for potential.

So, you work at it.  You build relationships, network, don't just write things, keep an eye on them, see how well they do sales wise and note that for later.  That kind of stuff goes on resumes, fits in forum signatures, slides nicely on to the sidebar of your blog.  Self promotion has been important to writers since before Mark Twain's infamous eccentricities. Heck, Owen doesn't even need to promote himself anymore but I still see him posting everyday on facebook.  Stay professional even in the face of harsh criticisms and understand sometimes the best thing to say is nothing.  Don't quit your day job.

So now that that's out of the way let me do a bit of unsolicited defense.

I have written a number of things for LPjr Design.  I would be lying to you if I said it was a perfect relationship or if I was not frustrated every once in a while for reasons I choose not to get into.  But, what I was presented with was an opportunity to work in an environment where I was virtually unrestricted. It let me poke out, learn new things, and try out new ways of doing things.  I was given the entire Race's section in Obsidian Apocalypse and went unchallenged as I hammered out new territory in places unexplained up to and including wiping out entire species of subraces to make room for new races and allowing more options from old ones to flourish.  So yes, Louis pays a low rate, but it's in part a mitigation of risk against the fact that some man from Atlanta might arbitrarily decide to kill off all the half elves and turn the human race into xenophobic isolationists which may make things bad for sales.

In August of last year I lost my job. So, I mentioned to Louis if he had any projects for me I'd be happy to do them.  I also mentioned some work I had given him as part of a self willed effort to support another product I was a major part of.  He had sat on it mostly because it just wasn't part of his plans yet.  But, about a month after I reminded him of it he kicked it through and the results speak for themselves.

Could I have gotten better pay?  Maybe.  But I doubt I'd find other publishers who'd take a risk like that consistently.

And bear in mind that the definition of "new writer" is not really clear here.  Is this referring to new writer as in no writing credits at all?  Or simply no professional credits such as someone who has purely done fan and homebrew work?  Or does it mean no credits at all?

That definition is kind of important.  Paizo pays 0.07 cents a word but I sincerely doubt they'd consider taking in a fresh, untested, writer with open office and a dream.  Perhaps before we pass judgment we should ask about the expectations of those giving the money.

In any case I'm rambling.  There is a lot more going on than numbers suggest.


----------



## Steve Conan Trustrum

[NU][/NU]







Mouseferatu said:


> You're paying less than the work is worth; that's exploitive, AFAIAC.



Except here's where your argument fails. Utterly.

The writer decides what their work is worth TO THEM. What a publisher is able to earn on a product actually decides what the work is worth in the market. Ultimately, it's going to be that market that decides the worth of a writer's work.

A freelancer can tell a publisher all they want "hey, my work is worth X amount and no less. If you don't pay that, you're exploiting writers!" but if the market is not willing to pay a price at sufficient sales that allow the publisher to actually pay someone that rate, while allowing the publisher to earn enough money to make the project worth doing, then quite literally, no, your work is not worth that rate. By every definition except "what it is worth to ME, as the writer," the work is not worth the rate.

That's not exploitive. That's market economics -- it's supply and demand. And, of course, it's also only exploitive if there's coercion or the like involved. A publisher who offers a job that is entirely voluntary is not exploiting anyone because no one is being forced or compelled to apply for it. Saying "well, I'm an RPG writer, and there's a lot of competition, so publishers offering this low rate because they know this are exploting me" is not exploitation -- again, it's supply and demand. There are certainly more lucrative writing jobs out there in other markets for professional freelancers who are actually skilled enough to get them. And, well ... if you don't have those skills and writing for RPGs is all you can get, perhaps you want to consider that you don't have the chops to be worth what you think you are.

Oh, I know ... I'm just speaking as an exploitive publisher here, right? I'm the big bad enemy portrayed in this article. As Morrus put it in his twitter feed, I'm one of the publishers who showed up to have a "tantrum".

But I'm also a freelancer and professional writer who works in the latter capacity outside the RPG industry. I've also spent the last 4.5 years extensively hiring freelance writers outside the RPG industry for both long-term and short-term work. I've worked in and outside of RPGs as a freelance writer for $0.01/word and less within the past year for various reasons ranging from the work being of the sort that I can crank it out so quickly that if you calculated my rate per hour, it would actually be pretty high, to being desperate for cash at the time -- ANY cash, to the point where I couldn't afford to be picky. I certainly was NOT being exploited by taking that work because I made the choice to go to them and apply for the job. On the other hand, I've also netted jobs that paid me $100 for a 1,000 word blog I cranked out in an hour and a half. (Of course, with the latter, I needed to utilize my valuable SEO knowledge to land that particular job, but that's part of having the chops to get the higher paying jobs some other writers aren't qualified for. What you bring to the table counts for more than just your ability to use grammar properly and put in the time needed to get the work done.)

Frankly, the ideas regarding "what my work is worth" and "exploiting" writers expressed in this thread are the results of people who don't actually know what freelance writing is like in the world beyond the cottage industry that is RPGs. A true professional writer isn't fooled by such beliefs that there is actually some sort of magic number that you should calculate and say "this low and no less." If you're actually a professional writer looking to make a living freelancing, each job is taken on a cost-benefit analysis that includes numerous factors that don't get brought up here because everyone is too busy waving around the idea of a minimum rate per word like it's some sort of talisman. Factors like:

a) how long will the work take one to do? A small pay rate that takes one little time to do can very easily actually pay off better than a higher pay rate that requires slogging through the content, and thus more of the writer's time.

b) what else is on one's plate at the time? While hunting for higher paying work, are you doing anything else? Instead of waiting to hear back, filling the time with lower paying work because there's nothing else on your plate at the time is still earning you more money than hunting for the higher paying work alone brings in. Especially if the hunting ends up in no results.

c) is there some other benefit to taking on the lower pay rate? And no, I'm not talking about the "work for exposure" aspect that seems about as far as RPG writers are able to consider because they don't have experience in other industries. Writing professionally outside of a cottage industry means building relationships (well, it actually means that in the RPG industry too, but people don't want to seem to admit that, so we'll pretend it's irrelevant here) that can lead to more and better work down the road. That $100 for $1,000 word job I got? That was the result of building a relationship with a lower paying gig first.

d) is taking on the lower paying job actually going to teach me something I can translate into a sellable skill for other work later? When I was doing content management for a multinational company, I had a big problem in that far too many writers looking to write blog content knew jack  about SEO best practices. That means many of them never made it past my paid trial. If some took on some low paying, quick turn around jobs that let them hone their SEO techniques, they would not only not get on my bad side by wasting my time applying for jobs their trial work illustrated they weren't capable of doing, despite it being in the job description, but they'd also end up qualifying to get the job. The same can work out in the RPG industry if the writer wants to use that connection with the publisher to ask questions or the like. Much of the knowledge I brought into Misfit Studios as a publisher was learned by spreading myself out as a freelancer writer first. If you're focused on your pay rate and just getting the job done, you're missing out on that.

e) am I actually likely to get paid? While working as a freelance writer in the RPG industry, I had higher pay rate jobs I never actually got paid for because the publishers didn't follow through on their contract. All the favourable terms in the world don't mean squat when a contract is broken unless you have the resources to pay the matter. On the other hand, the lower paying gigs have almost always followed through. So, from that perspective, getting $0 actual money in pocket at a higher pay rate doesn't really do me much good. But, hey ... any writer in the RPG industry knows how rare it is for a publisher to stiff their freelancers, right?

And, much like how people should be approaching the idea of a pay rate, none of the above are absolutes. They have value sometimes, but sometimes they don't. Each and every job should be approached from the perspective of a cost-benefit for that particular moment in time. If that's not what you're doing -- if you're operating purely under the belief that there's nothing to it but deciding on your minimum pay rate and nothing else -- well, you don't actually know what it means to be a professional writer. You just happen to be a writer who knows enough to sometimes get paid for one's writing.

And my final qualifier on all of the above: I am currently working full-time as both a small press publisher in the RPG industry and as a freelance writer in other, more lucrative fields. Misfit Studios, which operates primarily on a digital product model, hasn't used freelance writers in about 7 or 8 years (EDIT: well, until recently -- I currently have a job where I'm paying a flat fee of $5 per creature to convert a OGL 3.5 creature to M&M3e stats, so no pay per word there), but when we did it was at about $0.01/word, negotiable. (Because, as a publisher, I also recognize that considering a pay rate to be an absolute isn't realistic to how a project requiring freelancers functions within the RPG market.) Since then, instead of taking on freelancers, all writers other than myself have been on a royalty basis or as a collaborative project. So, I'm not just talking out of my ass without perspective from both sides, and because I haven't actually hired on any freelance writers for so long, I'm not here "having a tantrum" under the convenient excuse that I'm defending my company's "exploitive" payment policies.


----------



## Scrivener of Doom

Mouseferatu said:


> Completely and utterly disagree. You're paying less than the work is worth; that's exploitive, AFAIAC. (snip)




What is the work worth?

It's worth what someone will pay for it. 

RPG products have no inherent value. Their only value is what someone will pay for them and clearly the market is so small and so crowded that people are not prepared to pay a lot.

That may sound harsh but that's the reality of this hobby.


----------



## Morrus

Scrivener of Doom said:


> What is the work worth?
> 
> It's worth what someone will pay for it.




The _product_ is worth what someone will pay for it.  That's not the same as the value of the labour. The product is more than just the writing.


----------



## Morrus

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> As Morrus put it in his twitter feed, I'm one of the publishers who showed up to have a "tantrum".




No. You're not. The tantrums were actual bona-fide tantrums with naughty words and everything.  I did not put in my twitter feed that you were one of the publishers who showed up to have a tantrum.  In fact, I've never mentioned you at all. 

Though you are being pretty belligerent, so please tone it down.


----------



## Scrivener of Doom

Morrus said:


> The _product_ is worth what someone will pay for it.  That's not the same as the value of the labour. The product is more than just the writing.




Your labour is a product and your labour is worth what someone will pay for it. That's why salaries and wages differ across society.

And, yes, a product is more than just the writing. It combines the product of writing with the product of editing with the product of layout with the product of art etc.... Effectively it's just an assembly line of different components.


----------



## Steve Conan Trustrum

Morrus said:


> The _product_ is worth what someone will pay for it.  That's not the same as the value of the labour. The product is more than just the writing.



The actual value of the labour, as opposed to the personal value to the writer, is defined by how much the resulting product can bring in. You cannot separate the product's earning potential from the expenses of creating it like one has nothing to do with the other.

Again, "what my labour is worth to ME" is not the same as how much the labour is actually worth in the market. And the cold, disappointing truth is that rates are defined by the latter, not the former. You'll find there would be far fewer jobs if every writer in the RPG industry got paid what they thought they were worth because the amount of products being published at a loss would soar.


----------



## MichaelSomething

The hobbyist doesn't really care about making money and does it because they enjoy doing it.
The wood league shops wants to make money but really can't.  This is for many reasons, with bad business sense being the reason for many.  RPGs being a small niche market doesn't help either.
Mid tier people are established and can actually make money on a regular basis.  Most of the time, it's just pocket change or moonlighting.  The elite among them can make it a full time living.
The highest rank is WOTC and Paizo.  They're actual companies with business and stuff like that.

The market realities for each are quite different.  I'm at the hobbyist level so I really shouldn't expect to get paid.  I don't think I want to try to climb the ladder either since it sounds really hard, and there are easier ways to make money...


----------



## ravenkult

While the situation for writers is dire, I'm kinda shocked that a multitude of people have commented with something along the lines of ''You'd have to write 2000 words a day to make a living wage!''

Well...duh? That's like two hours of work for a first draft. If you're a professional writer you SHOULD be writing 2k a day even if you're not working on a project.


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## Starfox

An artist friend once told me that we all have 10,000 bad drawing in us - it is only once you have gotten those out of your system that you can begin to consistently draw well. The same is true about writing. Writers need experience. The early experience is almost guaranteed to be unpaid work (in school, for hobby papers, in your private blog), but as you advance you earn more. Being paid at all is a giant first step. Being able to live off your writing is for most of us to aim for the sky, but you can never get there unless you start somewhere.


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## Steve Conan Trustrum

Morrus said:


> In fact, I've never mentioned you at all.



I was speaking in general terms, as in "here comes a publisher who thinks this article ignores quite a bit of important data and is saying as much."


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## Morrus

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> I was speaking in general terms, as in "here comes a publisher who thinks this article ignores quite a bit of important data and is saying as much."




I didn't say that, either.. Please stop making up things I didn't say.

I was replying on Twitter to an above average amount of abuse in various forms, some of which was by publishers.


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## lynnfredricks

Mouseferatu said:


> Completely and utterly disagree. You're paying less than the work is worth; that's exploitive, AFAIAC. But we don't need to derail the thread with an exchange of "Yes, it is!" "No, it isn't!" Pretty sure I'm not going to change your view, and I've been doing this long enough, at varying rates of pay, to know for pretty certain that you're not going to change mine.




I knew that when I quoted you ;-)

If products are really selling at the rates I have seen quoted, then the work (meaning the great majority of work from small vendors, and not the ones that can pay anything like a real wage) just isn't worth doing for most people. It isn't what the work is worth as the end work has so little value in the market.

At least if you are self publishing your own work, you have ownership of your IP, and the satisfaction - and if you are good enough then may be you can make a living.  The skills it takes to do all of those things are greater than just knowing how to bang out something in a text editor; if you have those skills and actually do it, I salute your entrepreneurial spirit. If you do not, then find something that pays the bills, because complaining isn't going to get you anywhere.


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## Cristian Andreu

This is a fantastic source of otherwise very hard to come by information. I just published my first RPG supplement a few months ago and have plans for several more, so this is a great point of comparison.

Thank you very much, Morrus, as well as all the people who provided the intel. Much appreciated.


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## Steve Conan Trustrum

Morrus said:


> I didn't say that, either.. Please stop making up things I didn't say.



Well, having read what was being said on FB before you closed it, and in your Twitter feed, let's just say I disagree with what you have and have not been saying on the matter, as well as what others have been saying that constitutes a "tantrum." After all, when one looks at what you've said elsewhere, your article tends to take on a different light than just looking at it here without that additional context.


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## Janx

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> Well, having read what was being said on FB before you closed it, and in your Twitter feed, let's just say I disagree with what you have and have not been saying on the matter, as well as what others have been saying that constitutes a "tantrum." After all, when one looks at what you've said elsewhere, your article tends to take on a different light than just looking at it here without that additional context.




what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.  Please don't bring in drama from other sites (Twitter and FB are other sites), into a discussion on this site about what was said on this site.

All I've read is the original post, which seems reasonable and educational to a writer or publisher so they know where the market is.

There is of course some disagreement on whether the lowest rates of pay are OK.  Ultimately, economics kicks in, and you'll note the more successful companies pay more.


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## Morrus

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> Well, having read what was being said on FB before you closed it, and in your Twitter feed, let's just say I disagree with what you have and have not been saying on the matter, as well as what others have been saying that constitutes a "tantrum." After all, when one looks at what you've said elsewhere, your article tends to take on a different light than just looking at it here without that additional context.




Third and final time before I ask you to leave. I've asked twice politely.. This is unacceptable. Please stop inventing things. I have informed twice now you that your claims as to my viewpoint are incorrect.


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## Steve Conan Trustrum

Janx said:


> what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.  Please don't bring in drama from other sites (Twitter and FB are other sites), into a discussion on this site about what was said on this site.



I'm not talking about drama. I'm taking about Morris presenting this article here as "just giving you some things to think about" perspective, but commenting on it elsewhere where's linked back to it with things like "Scary number of $0.01 per word rates out there. Don't work for $0.01 per word, guys!"

Add to that the fact that his facts ended up getting a number of corrections out of the gate and, well ... it's not what I'd call a carefully researched, fully realized article that comes from a position that actually looks at the whole picture. Especially when one considers some of the writers who are coming out to disagree with it, especially with regards to writers looking to get started.


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## Steve Conan Trustrum

Morrus said:


> Third and final time before I ask you to leave. I've asked twice politely.. This is unacceptable. Please stop inventing things. I have informed twice now you that your claims as to my viewpoint are incorrect.



Understood. I've quoted you directly in the previous post to indicate my meaning and illustrate it's disingenuous to say I'm inventing things. There's also the tweet to illustrate my meaning: "Just saw an artist advertise full-colour illos for $15 on ENW. Told him he was undervaluing himself (and, by extension, his fellow artists)."


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## lynnfredricks

Scrivener of Doom said:


> Your labour is a product and your labour is worth what someone will pay for it. That's why salaries and wages differ across society.
> 
> And, yes, a product is more than just the writing. It combines the product of writing with the product of editing with the product of layout with the product of art etc.... Effectively it's just an assembly line of different components.




I think you are clearly identifying a philosophical difference in society that goes beyond this tiny market - between these perspectives of value of product and value of labor.

The value of a product is determined by what people are willing to pay (yes, its more complicated than that when you look at values of IP); availability of data and experience help to set our expectations of what the market will produce. From that, you establish a budget.

If the labor is available, and the workers are willing to work for it even if its very little money, you have a metric that works, just not to the satisfaction of everyone involved. That satisfaction can often be increased by moving your labor to a market where the money is more attractive. I don't see satisfaction going anywhere if the only solution is not to have a project at all.

If you have a notion that everyone must work based on a rate of earning a living wage because they intrinsically deserve it, then you are espousing a philosophy. That's something that is not specific to this little niche market.


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## lmpjr007

Morrus said:


> Third and final time before I ask you to leave. I've asked twice politely.. This is unacceptable. Please stop inventing things. I have informed twice now you that your claims as to my viewpoint are incorrect.




WOW! Russ Morrissey edits my quote down to fit his narrative and then he tells Steven to " Please stop inventing things." Here is what he said: 
 "So if you are interested and not sure you think you can be good at this, I will just say, don't miss out on your dreams because you are afraid to go after them...It is your job to loose."

Here is the full quote of what I said: http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2rxfh?ThirdParty-Publishers-Freelancer-Open-Call#32

Everything I, Louis Porter Jr., said I stand behind. You might not like how I said it but it IS the truth and I didn't edit it or move the thread to private.


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## Janx

lmpjr007 said:


> WOW! Russ Morrissey edits my quote down to fit his narrative and then he tells Steven to " Please stop inventing things." Here is what he said:
> "So if you are interested and not sure you think you can be good at this, I will just say, don't miss out on your dreams because you are afraid to go after them...It is your job to loose."
> 
> Here is the full quote of what I said: http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2rxfh?ThirdParty-Publishers-Freelancer-Open-Call#32
> 
> Everything I, Louis Porter Jr., said I stand behind. You might not like how I said it but it IS the truth and I didn't edit it or move the thread to private.




From this site, I don't think that's the alleged quote from you that raised hairs.  But I'm also not keen on anybody here grabbing quotes from somewhere else and posting them up as "so and so said this!"

I think the unfortunate thing is that you folks in the business all need to be a bit more circumspect about what you say about each other, how you say it on any of these sites.  It's a small world.  No need to cheese each other off because you didn't like what the other said on some other site.


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## lynnfredricks

Differences of opinion aside, I also want to thank Morrus and the vendors / publishers who provided data and feedback. Even if we disagree on some things, knowing is far better than not knowing - even for folks who are just end users and have no idea what costs are to produce even a modest project.


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## Mouseferatu

I do not believe that work--writing or otherwise--lacks intrinsic value. The market may determine worth in a _practical_ sense, but not (IMO) necessarily an ethical one.

People say this is a niche market, so most publishers can't afford to pay a living wage. I might respond by saying that a lot of publishers need to drop out, leaving only the ones who _can_ support a living wage.

Note I said "might." I don't pretend it's that simple. But it's not that simple in the other direction, either.

(And if this is me espousing a philosophy, I'm okay with that. There's a reason the concept of minimum wage exists.)


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## DaveMage

It's pretty much already been said, but if you are a writer of RPGs and you don't like what a publisher is paying/offering - don't write for them.  

If there's no market (or room) for your product with the publishers that are paying more, then publish it yourself.  

Don't like either of these options?  Go into another line of work besides RPG writing.


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## PCIHenry

Hello, 



Mouseferatu said:


> People say this is a niche market, so most publishers can't afford to pay a living wage. I might respond by saying that a lot of publishers need to drop out, leaving only the ones who _can_ support a living wage.




With all due respect, I just don't understand what that would achieve. 

Whether the publishers who can't afford to pay X rate  vanish or not, those who you identify as the ones who can pay X rate are neither hindered or incentivized to pay a lower rate. So what does it matter if they remain or not? For example, I think it's doubtful that Paizo or WotC (the two highest paying publishers on the list) would care whether any other publisher is paying 0.1/word or would change their price structure because of it. 

I'm an attorney by trade and I see this as they taught us Contracts class - a "meeting of the minds" between the parties. Publisher A can offer X payment to which Writer B can either accept, counteroffer or reject. No one is holding a gun to anyone's head to accept a particular fee. AFAIAC  - that is not exploitative - that's just how business (and contacts) work. 

For the record: Paradigm Concepts (www.paradigmconcepts.com) pays a range of 0.01 to 0.05/word based on experience, length and subject matter. 

In the 14 years I've been publishing, I've had writers agree, negotiate and/or reject writing for us. Everyone is paid per the contact (30 days after acceptance, though I usually pay earlier than that) and I haven't heard anyone tell me they were being mistreated or exploited, (plus they usually come back for future projects). 

Bottom line - as long as the terms of the agreement are fully disclosed and both parties agree and perform their duties, I don't see how having more venues to write for is a bad thing.


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## Steve Conan Trustrum

Mouseferatu said:


> I do not believe that work--writing or otherwise--lacks intrinsic value. The market may determine worth in a _practical_ sense, but not (IMO) necessarily an ethical one.
> 
> People say this is a niche market, so most publishers can't afford to pay a living wage. I might respond by saying that a lot of publishers need to drop out, leaving only the ones who _can_ support a living wage.



Well, you've just reduced the industry to, likely, 10 or so companies (and I'm probably being generous.) You've also entirely done away with the previously put forth solution of writers self-publishing. What's more, some of the companies closing up shop will likely be most of your favourites.

That not only means fewer options for the customer, but fewer employment opportunities for freelancers. The latter isn't exactly going to drive up pay rates, either -- simple economics shows us that when there is a great supply of available workers but a reduced opportunity for work, the price the writers can demand of the publishers will drop dramatically.



> Note I said "might." I don't pretend it's that simple. But it's not that simple in the other direction, either.



No, it IS that simple. It's a simple matter of mathematics and economics.

The fact that the math is unfortunate and not favourable does not make the situation any more complex. How much money people can afford to pay other people is not reliant upon the whims of philosophy or opinions. There's an actual point that's crossed where one goes from "okay, my expenses are low enough that I'm making money" and becomes "well, my expenses are high enough that I'm not making money or am actually losing it." No freelancer's opinion about their worth will change that absolute.



> (And if this is me espousing a philosophy, I'm okay with that. There's a reason the concept of minimum wage exists.)



You may want to consider that there are very practical reasons why minimum wage doesn't apply to work-for-hire employment scenarios like freelance writing.


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## hunter1828

I've been a publisher (co-founded 4 Winds Fantasy Gaming, which I sold to Purple Duck Games two years ago) and a freelance writer/editor (worked or working for Purple Duck, Xpeditious Press, Green Ronin, Third Eye Games, EN Publishing, John Brazer Enterprises, and artist Larry Elmore). As a freelancer, I've worked for product (editing work for Mr. Elmore netted me some sweet limited edition, low numbered prints) and I've worked for pay (everywhere from .01/word to .05/word) and never felt exploited by any of them (the prints I got from the work for Larry Elmore are worth more than what I would have been paid as an editor, and had I been paid in cash I most likely would have turned around and bought some prints...). As a publisher, I paid out anywhere from .03 to .05 in general, sometimes lower for unknowns and sometimes higher for known names. I don't feel I ever exploited anyone. 

The assumptions that anyone can self-publish because it's easy have been argued to death and I'm not going to beat that dead horse any further than to say that I am much, much happier as a freelancer than I ever was as a publisher. As a freelancer, I write and edit. That's it. I don't have any other concerns. And I'm fine with that. I'm also not trying to make this my sole source of income, just some extra money that usually gets spent on other game products.


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## Mouseferatu

I've tried rewriting my response several times, and I simply can't make it without violating EN World's "no politics" rule, so I'm probably going to have to refrain.


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## Starfox

ArcaneSpringboard said:


> One thing that's interesting, is that you're more likely to have your work SEEN as a writer if you give it away for free, than as part of a very cheap, but non-free, PDF.
> 
> http://danariely.com/tag/free/




I'm not so sure. My feeling is that people see free stuff as being worth what they paid for it. Giving things away free is a sure way to obscurity. I don't have much experience in this, but I wrote a backround and talents article for 4E that was well received on ENworld, but when I had it published in a free fanzine, I got no reaction whatsoever. Maybe it was just that I didn't track it.


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## ArcaneSpringboard

If the fanzine isn't searchable from Google, that's part of the problem. Not saying that's what happened, but I'm not talking about having it published in a free fanzine. I'm talking about what you did on ENWorld.

In my case, I started blogging. Got noticed by some people, interacted on Twitter, got invited to write for a blog. Kept writing there, had friendly relationships with multiple people in the industry, and eventually lucked out (and absolutely luck is involved) and got onto the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying team. 

My point is though that I had quite a bit of my writing out there, for free.

Writing for a publication that sells so few copies that they can only afford a pittance for a writer means that your writing isn't going to be seen by very many people. Writing for free on the 'net gives you exposure to anyone who might Google for what you're looking for.


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## lynnfredricks

Mouseferatu said:


> I do not believe that work--writing or otherwise--lacks intrinsic value. The market may determine worth in a _practical_ sense, but not (IMO) necessarily an ethical one.
> 
> People say this is a niche market, so most publishers can't afford to pay a living wage. I might respond by saying that a lot of publishers need to drop out, leaving only the ones who _can_ support a living wage.
> 
> Note I said "might." I don't pretend it's that simple. But it's not that simple in the other direction, either.
> 
> (And if this is me espousing a philosophy, I'm okay with that. There's a reason the concept of minimum wage exists.)




That was a nice little bait on a hook there by mentioning minimum wage  and living wage together. But I positively agree... that is your philosophy ;-) 

Not all niche markets pay poorly, but for the most part this one does, and seemingly for very good reasons.

If you have a very vertical market that's mature (and therefore flooded with competition and big fish above), your hope is either to: 1) dominate it or a piece of territory with something truly innovative; 2) be able to charge a lot of money per unit; 3)have more irons in the fire in that market for upsell; 4) all of the above.

Writing for a living, especially when you are not a full time employee someplace is not the easiest way to earn. I've done it, and done other things at the same time. I guess I still do since most of what I earn is through coming up with plans and getting other people to implement (much of, but not all of) them. If I were to try to live on my writing skills without being a journalist (what sad sacks they are now...), Id be a technical writer. Even that's not what it was 10-20 years ago, but it can pay well.


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## lynnfredricks

Starfox said:


> I'm not so sure. My feeling is that people see free stuff as being worth what they paid for it. Giving things away free is a sure way to obscurity. I don't have much experience in this, but I wrote a backround and talents article for 4E that was well received on ENworld, but when I had it published in a free fanzine, I got no reaction whatsoever. Maybe it was just that I didn't track it.




You are right, at least for free things that have no effect on someone's bottom line.

What I have always found interesting is how some people think if they got something for free, they can automatically redistribute it however they want.


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## Steve Conan Trustrum

Starfox said:


> I'm not so sure. My feeling is that people see free stuff as being worth what they paid for it. Giving things away free is a sure way to obscurity. I don't have much experience in this, but I wrote a backround and talents article for 4E that was well received on ENworld, but when I had it published in a free fanzine, I got no reaction whatsoever. Maybe it was just that I didn't track it.



Offering things for free can actually make one a lot of money, but you've got to know what you're doing, and you've got to have a strategy. The idea of people not valuing free things because it doesn't cost anything is true to an extent, but not nearly the degree you'll see tossed about. A good marketing strategy can counter it. I've written an article on publishing freebies that can make money, if you're interested: http://trustrum.com/on-the-subject-of-free-books/


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## CardinalXimenes

Starfox said:


> I'm not so sure. My feeling is that people see free stuff as being worth what they paid for it. Giving things away free is a sure way to obscurity. I don't have much experience in this, but I wrote a backround and talents article for 4E that was well received on ENworld, but when I had it published in a free fanzine, I got no reaction whatsoever. Maybe it was just that I didn't track it.



Free is part of the strategy, but it's not the whole story. If I were in your shoes, here's what I'd do:

First, I'd go to where the eyeballs are, and that means OneBookshelf- DTRPG/RPGNow's parent. No free fanzine gets within an order of magnitude of the number of visits they get on an hourly basis. Even outlets like Amazon and Lulu can't compete for the small publisher because only a tiny percentage of their users have any interest in RPG material, while everybody who goes to DTRPG is at least a theoretical customer.

Next, I'd slap the article into a standalone freebie format. It doesn't have to be long- there are plenty of 3-4 page freebies on DTRPG- and it doesn't have to be lavishly illustrated, but it has to look nice and respectable. If you've got graphic design chops, this is a chance to settle on some trade dress you'll be using for future products.

Now upload the product. For at least a while, it's going to be on DTRPG's front page among the "Latest Free Products", and you _will_ get a lump of downloads just because it's right there in front of people. If you've done really hot work, maybe talk will spread about it, or maybe it'll drop off the face of the earth in a few days. The former is preferable, but really, the latter is endurable too. Why? Because free downloads add willing customers to your OBS mailing list. If they haven't opted out of your emails and you don't abuse them by sending mail more than once a month or so, every free product is another chunk of people willing to accept your emails.

Repeat this process for a few months. Leave some breathing room between releases- you don't want to spam the front page, and you'll need time to make your products up as well as you can. When you've cultivated enough eyeballs, then you can put up your first for-pay product and hit your mailing list with the announcement that your for-pay is available in PDF and print. If you've done good work with your freebies, you've overcome the initial stage of uncertainty in a buyer and convinced them that you're able to write something fun to read. It's not a blind buying proposition to them any more.

Now keep going. Release freebies every so often to keep snaring the marginal customers who are interested enough to take something for free but not certain enough about you to pay for it. You'll convert some of them over time. In the meanwhile, focus on for-pay releases that showcase your talents and emphasize the things you're good at. Remember that at this stage, your worst enemy is anonymity. Free stuff is doing its job if it's convincing more people to look at you, but that job doesn't mean anything if there's not paying product waiting there for enthusiastic readers to then buy.

As a side note, if all you ever plan on releasing is one or two products, then Pay What You Want can be an option. I generally advise against it as customers seem to have a fundamentally different relationship with PWYW than they do with free- it feels more like an imposition to them, so a lot of people who'd grab a free product will walk past a PWYW one. That, and the conversion rate on people who pay tends to be miserable, from what I hear. Despite this, if this is all you're going to make, then it's a tactic you can take if you know you aren't going to have any future plans for marketing the line or monetizing the product.


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## Starfox

Nice advice. With that 4E product, I had pretty much already decided to quit 4E, so I didn't care what happened with it. Now that I write for Pathfinder, it is different. I might look into some of these strategies. Thanks.


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## Nellisir

Starfox said:


> I'm not so sure. My feeling is that people see free stuff as being worth what they paid for it. Giving things away free is a sure way to obscurity. I don't have much experience in this, but I wrote a backround and talents article for 4E that was well received on ENworld, but when I had it published in a free fanzine, I got no reaction whatsoever. Maybe it was just that I didn't track it.




I'll echo what's been said. An article is different from an actual product. I've done fan-writing for GH since the mid-90's culminating in editing the _Oerth Journal_ for 4 issues (I was assistant editor for one issue under Erik Mona). That got me enough confidence to submit three articles to _Dragon_ (netting one rejection, one request for revision that was so extensive we mutually retconed it into a rejection, and one acceptance) at the same time 3e was announced. I've done little stuff since then, but not much public.

A few years ago I got involved in the OSR and, unhappy with a lot of what I saw, decided to write an illusionist supplement for _Swords & Wizardry_. I was working off a free copy of the rules, and vowed to make the supplement free in turn. The result is _The Basic Illusionist_, which I am absolutely proud of and rue daily the vow to make it free, but so it is and so it stays.

A year after that I wrote two issues of a fanzine, _Secrets: Omens & Artifacts_ and _Secrets: Strange Races_. Those are for-pay ($1.99 each). I listed all three of them on RPGNow/DTRPG just prior to Thanksgiving, so approximately two months ago. In that time (approx two months) I've "sold" 562 copies of _The Basic Illusionist_; 18 copies of _Strange Races_, and 10 copies of _Omens & Artifacts_. It's not much, but _TBI_ definitely draws attention to the other two, even though it's almost two years old at this point and has been available for free in various places around the internet that whole time. 

I don't freelance because I know I'm not reliable at this point. Self-publishing is a hassle, and many self-publishers are, frankly, abysmal. Particularly with design & layout. I self-publish because I'm not adhered to a deadline (though it would probably actually work for me) and I have control over the product. 

This turned in to a bit of a ramble. Hope it's helpful in some way.

*Edit:* I just updated _The Basic Illusionist_ to Pay What You Want, because...why not?


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## trancejeremy

CardinalXimenes said:


> As a side note, if all you ever plan on releasing is one or two products, then Pay What You Want can be an option. I generally advise against it as customers seem to have a fundamentally different relationship with PWYW than they do with free- it feels more like an imposition to them, so a lot of people who'd grab a free product will walk past a PWYW one. That, and the conversion rate on people who pay tends to be miserable, from what I hear. Despite this, if this is all you're going to make, then it's a tactic you can take if you know you aren't going to have any future plans for marketing the line or monetizing the product.




FWIW, I've released two Pay What You Want OSR adventure modules

The first one was 4 pages (just a test, basically) with a suggested price of 50 cents, the second 16 pages or so, with a suggested price of $1.

The first one (released in December 2014) has 182 downloads, 24 "purchases" with a total of $12.72 in gross sales
The second one (released in January) has 152 downloads, 19 "purchases" with a total of $22.37 in gross sales 

I'm surprised how consistent it is. About 1 out of 8 people who download pay for it, and pretty much the suggested price (a little bit more on average)


----------



## Scrivener of Doom

Mouseferatu said:


> I do not believe that work--writing or otherwise--lacks intrinsic value. The market may determine worth in a _practical_ sense, but not (IMO) necessarily an ethical one.
> 
> People say this is a niche market, so most publishers can't afford to pay a living wage. I might respond by saying that a lot of publishers need to drop out, leaving only the ones who _can_ support a living wage.
> 
> Note I said "might." I don't pretend it's that simple. But it's not that simple in the other direction, either.
> 
> (And if this is me espousing a philosophy, I'm okay with that. There's a reason the concept of minimum wage exists.)




Coming from Oz where the minimum wage is a living wage - and where real wages have been steadily increasing for 30-odd years including in the middle class - I do agree that, generally speaking, labour has intrinsic value. I also believe there is dignity in all labour, as the saying goes.

That said, writing for the RPG hobby is not like that. It's not an industry: it's a hobby. And anyone writing for it shouldn't be thinking of it as an industry where they are going to have a long career. That's reality. It's like graduating from university with a degree in Art History: that piece of paper simply isn't worth much, except in a few niche areas where there is a lot of competition from people who also wasted three or four years of their lives.

Of course, this being the internet and with me clearly not being a professional writer, saying these things may come across as being insensitive or, especially for American readers, a statement of a political opinion. Um, no. It's just reality. 

Think back 100 years. How many jobs that existed then do not exist now? Think back 10 years. How many jobs that existed then do not exist now? 

I think the real challenge for those who see themselves as RPG writers is working out how they can transfer their same skills to an area or industry where they will be properly rewarded. That's life. I have done it in my fields of expertise and, as a result, I have lived most of my adult life outside my country of birth. 

And it has nothing to do with politics. Either what you can do has a market value or it does not.


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## arjomanes

Scrivener of Doom said:


> That said, writing for the RPG hobby is not like that. It's not an industry: it's a hobby. And anyone writing for it shouldn't be thinking of it as an industry where they are going to have a long career. That's reality. It's like graduating from university with a degree in Art History: that piece of paper simply isn't worth much, except in a few niche areas where there is a lot of competition from people who also wasted three or four years of their lives.
> 
> Think back 100 years. How many jobs that existed then do not exist now? Think back 10 years. How many jobs that existed then do not exist now?
> 
> I think the real challenge for those who see themselves as RPG writers is working out how they can transfer their same skills to an area or industry where they will be properly rewarded. That's life. I have done it in my fields of expertise and, as a result, I have lived most of my adult life outside my country of birth.




Most of those lost jobs are unskilled jobs or jobs reliant on skills in outdated technology. 

Writing is content creation, and there will always be a market for it if the author writes something people want to read. There is also money to be made in RPG writing. A very few people do very well, some do ok, and a lot don't do well at all. 

I think it's like many other arts. There are some artists who do very well, but there are those who can't gain the recognition. However, continually selling your art for a few dollars will guarantee you'll never make a living. Same with writing for a penny a word. Maybe that can work for a short time for people who have no recognition, but once you're published, it makes no sense to continue working for those very low rates. It's not a viable scenario.


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## Scrivener of Doom

arjomanes said:


> Most of those lost jobs are unskilled jobs or jobs reliant on skills in outdated technology. (snip)




And also those where tastes have changed and the market for those jobs has shrunk. 



> (snip) Writing is content creation, and there will always be a market for it if the author writes something people want to read. There is also money to be made in RPG writing. A very few people do very well, some do ok, and a lot don't do well at all.
> 
> I think it's like many other arts. There are some artists who do very well, but there are those who can't gain the recognition. However, continually selling your art for a few dollars will guarantee you'll never make a living. Same with writing for a penny a word. Maybe that can work for a short time for people who have no recognition, but once you're published, it makes no sense to continue working for those very low rates. It's not a viable scenario.




Agreed, and that's why I mentioned turning those same skills toward better-paying jobs.


----------



## fireinthedust

I'm a new publisher myself, with my first solo DCC RPG-compatible product up now on DrivethruRPG:  http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/143780/Wrath-of-the-Frost-Queen

That title is all me.  As in aaaaaaallll me: Writing, illustration, layouts, InDesign, everything.  Some feedback from others, but otherwise I'm my only employee.  

Publishing itself is cheap:  I had a scanner, I can draw, I can write, I have InDesign and Photoshop, which means I can make and sell PDFs with a cost only in time, if I do them myself. 

It's a lot of work, and if I ever want to get to the point where I make back any money, I need other people to generate content for a back list.  I also want to help other people like myself get creative content out there.  I'm looking for sustainability first, so if there are lots of products being sold, even if I get just a little bit from each, that helps me.  Creators who make content need to get paid: they earn it.   The money up front is the kicker, though, for things like a print run.  Distribution in print also takes off a share.  That's why the PDF market is important for no-money companies just starting up.  If I want to hire an artist, or team up with a writer to get their materials into book form and off their laptops, basically we're neither of us getting paid until the book sells.

My predicament is this:  I want to hire help, and share the profits with others (like a ship captain and his crew).  I am happy to pony up whatever comes in, but I don't have it until the book gets purchased, and that can't happen until the product is done.

That means a) do a Kickstarter/Indigogo to pay artists and writers (like me) up front (give them food while they work); or b) network with talented people and pay them as the money comes in.

I refuse to screw people over, period.  But if I can't offer a % when it gets sold, is Kickstarter the only way to get a project up and running?

I'm happy to meet potential writers and artists in person, and work in person on the product until it's ready.  But, considering I have the equipment to do everything RIGHT NOW, how else but a Kickstarter or a % afterwards, can someone who isn't already rich get going?


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## TarionzCousin

trancejeremy said:


> About 1 out of 8 people who download pay for it, and pretty much the suggested price (a little bit more on average)



That's all? That surprises me. 

I just want to say I appreciate all the freelance writers, self-publishers, and essentially volunteers that dedicate their time and hard work to our shared hobby. In my opinion, it keeps the games alive. So thank you.


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## CardinalXimenes

fireinthedust said:


> I'm happy to meet potential writers and artists in person, and work in person on the product until it's ready.  But, considering I have the equipment to do everything RIGHT NOW, how else but a Kickstarter or a % afterwards, can someone who isn't already rich get going?



Do some zero-overhead products, collect the profit on them, and roll it over into your next project. I do not recommend Kickstarters to anybody unless they have a complete grip on their project workflow and a couple prior projects published already. I do not recommend royalty-sharing to anybody, either, because that doesn't necessarily guarantee that the freelancers are going to get paid an amount which is minimally adequate to them. I think a publisher really does need to have cash in hand before they hire freelancers, and they get that cash in hand with low-overhead startup projects.

Don't worry about not having a big back catalog yet. In conventional publishing, your book has maybe a month on the shelf before it gets tossed. With modern POD, your back catalog is immortal, and will always get about the same amount of retail exposure regardless of how long it's been out. So long as you don't stop producing, every new product you make slowly stacks up- and since you're making all of it, you can be sure that it all fits together gracefully. If you want to make significant money at this, you're going to have to commit to at least two or three years of steady, unflagging output before you have a catalog worth mentioning, but once you have it, the effects add up with each new release.

The sad truth is that you won't have any profits worth sharing for at least a year of ferocious effort. Unless and until you can show potential freelancers how each of your new products of type X averages $5K sales over the first 12 months, they've got no reason to take a flyer on collaborating for royalty shares. After you work cheap, roll the money into the business, and develop a brand that customers recognize and want, then it's something to consider- but even then, I am very much more in favor of plain old-fashioned fee for service.

As for Wrath of the Frost Queen, it looks like a very creditable first effort, but where's your POD version? You need a paper option up there- there's a non-trivial number of buyers who don't want PDF, and you can get better margins on paper products. If I were you, I'd drop the PDF to $8.99 to get it comfortably below the $10 mental break point many buyers have and then do a $14.99 POD with bundled free PDF. A lot of buyers get twitchy about spending more than $9.99 on non-full-game PDFs, and $9 is something of a sweet spot for pricing in terms of volume and per-item profit.


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## Steve Conan Trustrum

TarionzCousin said:


> That's all? That surprises me.
> 
> I just want to say I appreciate all the freelance writers, self-publishers, and essentially volunteers that dedicate their time and hard work to our shared hobby. In my opinion, it keeps the games alive. So thank you.



Pay what you want still tends to get more people paying nothing than something, is my experience. But you'll also get the people who download it for free and then come back and pay for it to show they liked it.


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## Starfox

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> Pay what you want still tends to get more people paying nothing than something, is my experience. But you'll also get the people who download it for free and then come back and pay for it to show they liked it.




Speaking only for myself here. Having a pay-what-you want title makes me reluctant to download unless I truly want it. Sometimes, I may download and not pay, seeing it as a sampler. I may have returned to pay on occasion, but not often; its easy to forget, and tbh most such downloads end up forgotten deep in some folder. But yeah, it is a hope. And if the work is stellar and used alot, it would prompt me to go back and pay. 

A problem with many free and pay-what-you-want items is that they are lacklustre. If you see these products as marketing materials, you should make them as good as you can, even if they are short. After all, a good free product may convince byers your paid product is worth the cost.


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## Nellisir

fireinthedust said:


> I'm happy to meet potential writers and artists in person, and work in person on the product until it's ready.  But, considering I have the equipment to do everything RIGHT NOW, how else but a Kickstarter or a % afterwards, can someone who isn't already rich get going?




The way it's always been done. Write a few products and save the profit. Build up a fund, use that to pay someone. Hopefully profits on that product are worth the expense. Grow your business, don't try to vault straight up.


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## Nellisir

Starfox said:


> A problem with many free and pay-what-you-want items is that they are lacklustre. If you see these products as marketing materials, you should make them as good as you can, even if they are short. After all, a good free product may convince byers your paid product is worth the cost.




That is something that bothers me, and (three years ago, when I started The Basic Illusionist) a trend I wanted to buck. Personally, I'll put TBI up against almost* any other OSR product for layout and production, and that's using copyright-free images and Word. I hate crappy free products. There's really no excuse.

I should really do a POD version.

*I say almost because there are a few people out there doing fabulous work, and I'll happily concede to them.


----------



## Ricochet

Interesting article, and a good discussion for the most part. I've written fiction novels that have been published through a traditional publisher, and I must say that the rates I'm seeing here are quite low compared to even my entry-level efforts as a novelist on a words-divided-by-pay calculation. However, I did a translation of a novel too at one point, which comes closer to these rates once you add editing time etc. into the calculation.

I always thought the "payment per word" model was mostly a myth though, which is the most surprising part of all this for me. We always wondered why American-authored textbooks in schools/universities were so long and wordy, and this might just explain that (write something in some obscure field of expertise in which the editor doesn't know what is trivial and what is necessary ;-)).


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## Zak S

CardinalXimenes said:


> I wonder if the OSR community is very different than the Pathfinder community. Zak S could also join this thread and talk about Red & Pleasant Land, but that wouldn't be the norm for most writers or publishers.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I think the OSR community is exceptionally friendly to self-publishers because it has such low minimum standards for production quality.
Click to expand...


That may well be, but Red & Pleasant Land is definitely not one of those products.

James spent more money putting out that book than my artbook publishers spent putting out my art books--and it paid off.

I made off RPL in a month to pay rent in downtown LA for like two years. The trick?

Make sure the design is something you'd put face to face with anything in the industry.
Make sure the writing is something you'd put face to face with anything in the industry.
Make sure the art is something you'd put face to face with anything in the industry.
Make sure the graphic design is something you'd put face to face with anything in the industry.
Make sure you can defend every single decision (and with something better than "Well that's what we could afford" or "Well that's what people usually do").
And, having people who are widely despised attacking you, your girlfriend and your book helps, too.


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## lynnfredricks

ParagonofVirtue said:


> Interesting article, and a good discussion for the most part. I've written fiction novels that have been published through a traditional publisher, and I must say that the rates I'm seeing here are quite low compared to even my entry-level efforts as a novelist on a words-divided-by-pay calculation. However, I did a translation of a novel too at one point, which comes closer to these rates once you add editing time etc. into the calculation.




What you can make as a translator also depends on the language, field and experience of the translator. Also, depending on what the type of editing is, you can charge more for that. Every translator should have their work eyeballed for accuracy; its rare that a direct translation is suitable for anything outside of technical documentation.

At one time, I was involved in console games, and had a team that translated Japanese -> English (back in the SNES, Genessis, PC Engine, Jaguar days). An accurate translation was just a part of it, because the end text had to either capture the original flavor and style of the game OR, if that original flavor was just too alien for the target market, it had to be "creatively edited" too.


----------



## CardinalXimenes

Zak S said:


> That may well be, but Red & Pleasant Land is definitely not one of those products.



Undoubtedly so. I bought paper for R&PL, and I only buy a handful of paper RPG products in a year- the physical artifact was worth having.



> Make sure the design is something you'd put face to face with anything in the industry.
> Make sure the writing is something you'd put face to face with anything in the industry.
> Make sure the art is something you'd put face to face with anything in the industry.
> Make sure the graphic design is something you'd put face to face with anything in the industry.
> Make sure you can defend every single decision (and with something better than "Well that's what we could afford" or "Well that's what people usually do").
> And, having people who are widely despised attacking you, your girlfriend and your book helps, too.



This basically boils down to "make something noticeably better in all possible ways than the standard market output", and it's undeniably good advice. Eventually, every publisher wants to get there and stay there in a consistent way. But you and James Raggi have had years of intense effort to develop and focus your abilities, and this particular partnership involved the business and publishing nous of Raggi and your own writing and artistic skills. The average self-pub RPG creator has nowhere near that kind of skill reserve to call on.

They have none of those skills _yet_. Some of them can get those things, and some of them have those things just waiting in abeyance for the opportunity to show them, and some of them have things they've polished in other parts of their lives that they can repurpose with minimal fuss. But for the average apprentice RPG publisher, just getting out a respectable-looking print product with modestly useful content and a few good ideas between the covers is a real challenge.

Shooting for sublimity is what every self-respecting publisher wants to do, but my concern is for novices who try to buy excellence. They think they need to spend a lot of money patching over their own limited skills- buying a lot of art, a lot of writing, a lot of layout support, a lot of everything, really, because they've got a grand vision and they know that if they just make their product sufficiently awesome that it's bound to sell well. They're like kids playing in their father's workshop, hammering stuff together and waving around tools they don't exactly recognize. And like such kids, they've got a tendency to get hurt when their shambolic contraption doesn't quite come out the way they'd hoped. And then they get bitter, and write off self-pub as a horrible idea because they invested too much before they had sufficient skill to control their creation.

Good craftsmen start simple. You learn how to cut a board or how to hammer a nail or how to sand a corner. You learn how to lay out a simple two-column page of text, how to set to a grid, how to compose a unified spread. Maybe you dream of 300-page full-color artbook-games full of luminous prose, but you start with an orc with a pie. Maybe you don't even bother to publish your orc with a pie, but you need to make him, because you need to know how to compose and key a bog-standard dungeon in a way that's accessible and efficient in use. And most of all, you take each step in such a way that you can support your own creative process, that you're not relying on blithe hope to make things work.

Then, someday, after years of ferocious effort and study, you'll be ready to make that 300-page artbook. You'll know which artists to tap, which designers you need to help you, which parts of it you can do and which parts you can't. You'll know exactly how it should be put together and you'll know that even in the worst case you're going to come out in the black because you've built up a following that can be relied on for a minimal number of sales. You'll have _mastered your tools_, and that will make your money something rather more than an expensive way to not learn something. Then you can make something like R&PL, or Vornheim, or DCC, or any one of the other remarkable physical artifacts that've earned just praise.


----------



## Nellisir

Zak S said:


> That may well be, but Red & Pleasant Land is definitely not one of those products.
> James spent more money putting out that book than my artbook publishers spent putting out my art books--and it paid off.




Yeah, great. Because I need more reasons to want this. :/ 
Someday I too shall have this thing called money.


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## Zak S

CardinalXimenes said:


> Undoubtedly so. I bought paper for R&PL, and I only buy a handful of paper RPG products in a year- the physical artifact was worth having.



Thanks!



> This basically boils down to "make something noticeably better in all possible ways than the standard market output", and it's undeniably good advice.




I mean something slightly different--and advice I think is more generally useful:

Make something that is, at least, the best you can do.
Make something that you yourself would actually use.
Do not assume the way thing are usually done is the way you need to do it.

I think this is advice everyone can follow--I see a lot of freelancers complaining that they did some writing on some thing---some thing they essentially don't really believe in and don't take responsibility for and that they only feel good about a part of---isn't selling. The RPG equivalent of a writer doing ad copy to make money, or an artist making cigarette money doing graphic design on the side.

In most of the world, this is sometimes necessary--you need money to keep afloat. In RPGs, it's silly: there's no money to be made. If you're working on projects you don't totally believe in, well: they're gonna suck. Expect that. Make your cigarette money writing outside RPGs--there's more of it. Only write RPG stuff if the entire package is something you can be proud of.



> The average self-pub RPG creator has nowhere near that kind of skill reserve to call on.




Everybody has something to say. The trick is to say it and feel responsible for making sure you said it as well as you could rather than saying part of it and kind of making a hash of the other part and then praying it goes over anyway.



> But for the average apprentice RPG publisher, just getting out a respectable-looking print product with modestly useful content and a few good ideas between the covers is a real challenge.




For those people, I'd suggest starting at a scale where what is there is something you can feel good about.

Raggi started with a zine. I started with a blog. Don't tackle something bigger than what you're confident you can do right.


> Shooting for sublimity is what every self-respecting publisher wants to do, but my concern is for novices who try to buy excellence. They think they need to spend a lot of money patching over their own limited skills- buying a lot of art, a lot of writing, a lot of layout support, a lot of everything, really, because they've got a grand vision and they know that if they just make their product sufficiently awesome that it's bound to sell well. They're like kids playing in their father's workshop, hammering stuff together and waving around tools they don't exactly recognize. And like such kids, they've got a tendency to get hurt when their shambolic contraption doesn't quite come out the way they'd hoped. And then they get bitter, and write off self-pub as a horrible idea because they invested too much before they had sufficient skill to control their creation.
> 
> Good craftsmen start simple. You learn how to cut a board or how to hammer a nail or how to sand a corner.




Yes.



> You learn how to lay out a simple two-column page of text, how to set to a grid, how to compose a unified spread...Then, someday, after years of ferocious effort and study, you'll be ready to make that 300-page artbook.




Well, this I have a little bit of a problem with--I think people thinking the standard bag of graphic design tools is actually what you need is part of the problem. It creates a barrier to entry that's both high and in the wrong place.

Most graphic design in RPGs sucks--especially the most professional graphic design. It doesn't do what GMs and players need it to do.

If you only know two chords--write a song which uses two chords. But make it BETTER than anything Emerson Lake and Palmer could ever write. A limit on experience is not a limit on good ideas. 

I think good RPG stuff starts with outrage at how terribly, uselessly done even the most well-funded corporate product is. You can start small--but challenge the world with that small thing. 

Each time you think "Oh well I'll just learn to do it the way they usually do it" you've just tied an anvil to yourself. The way they usually do it doesn't work.


----------



## arjomanes

Zak S said:


> Well, this I have a little bit of a problem with--I think people thinking the standard bag of graphic design tools is actually what you need is part of the problem. It creates a barrier to entry that's both high and in the wrong place.
> 
> Most graphic design in RPGs sucks--especially the most professional graphic design. It doesn't do what GMs and players need it to do.
> 
> If you only know two chords--write a song which uses two chords. But make it BETTER than anything Emerson Lake and Palmer could ever write. A limit on experience is not a limit on good ideas.
> 
> I think good RPG stuff starts with outrage at how terribly, uselessly done even the most well-funded corporate product is. You can start small--but challenge the world with that small thing.
> 
> Each time you think "Oh well I'll just learn to do it the way they usually do it" you've just tied an anvil to yourself. The way they usually do it doesn't work.




Zak, this is extremely useful advice. I'm a graphic designer, and I never really thought much about the graphic design of RPGs. 

It's funny how much time I spend thinking about design in my regular job, yet I never applied any of that thinking to RPG design. There are really interesting ways to quickly get information across when running a game and those LotFP books are great inspiration.


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## Zak S

arjomanes said:


> Zak, this is extremely useful advice. I'm a graphic designer, and I never really thought much about the graphic design of RPGs.



That's why I wrote this:
http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2011/03/arrows-and-boxes-and-columns-and-bullet.html

RPGs are a whole undiscovered continent for real graphic and information design. The top-dollar product still just defaults to hiring a designer who has never played or GMed and going "Make it look expensive"


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## Jürgen Hubert

As someone who has embarked on self-publication this past Sunday, this thread is directly relevant to my interests.

First of all... I am not doing this for the money. I realize that only a small minority of RPG authors can make a living from their writings, and I suspect that _all_ of them make less money than I do with my day job. Thus, I am not going to pretend that a profit is my primary motive - my financial goals are not to make a loss, and if something is left over that do reduce my not inconsiderable RPG-related bills then that's a nice bonus.

I've long dreamed of publishing my own material, but for many years I had this vague notion of a huge magnum opus - releasing the fantasy world I've been working on ("Urbis") as a massive tome. Unsurprisingly, I never finalized it.

Then I had the opportunity of publishing a smaller setting I had written ("Doomed Slayers") with a small publisher, back in 2012. A number of reviewers said some nice things about it and it managed to become a "Best Silver Seller" at DriveThruRPG, so there is that. However, the publisher decided to close down last year, which meant that this seemed to be a good opportunity for going into self-publication.

Which I did. The second edition of "Doomed Slayers" was released past Sunday, and I hope to be able to release a first supplement early next month (the manuscript is in the final stages).

Since I _am_ a very small publisher and don't have much of a budget to work with, I have to do most things myself - therefore:

- Layouting is done with LaTeX, since I am familiar with that from my academic years.
- I still had the rights to some artwork from another artist from the previous edition. While the artist fully deserved his money, this also took an enormous amount of money out of my budget. Since I have started with dabbling in digital artwork again, I plan to do further illustrations on my own, saving me more money.
- Instead of massive tomes, I will largely focus on smaller PDF supplements - these are _far_ less of a hassle to create, and easier to cram into my busy schedule.

"The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good". I am still at the beginning of my RPG writing career - I will have to assume that all my relevant skills will improve over time. The main thing is that, right now, I am doing _something_ which will give me experience and feedback - instead of thinking about it.

So, what's the payoff like?

Well, this gets a bit complicated - basically, I managed to get the "first edition" of Doomed Slayers transferred to my new imprint, and then updated the files with my new edition.

The first edition had 136 "non-free" (that is, without comp copies) sales at a sales price of $3.99 - which was enough to make it a "Best Silver Seller" (that is, among the top 14.26% of products at DriveThruRPG). Subtracting the 35% that DriveThruRPG gets for the "non-exclusive" contract, that left $362.71 to be distributed between the publisher and myself. That probably counts as a "success story" in RPG publishing - remember, at least 85% of all products sell _less_ than this!

For the new edition, I decided to try out the "Pay What You Want" option and turned the $3.99 into the "suggested price". Obviously, after only five days there is not yet much hard sales data to evaluate. Nonetheless:

- It has been "sold" 24 times
- Of these, 18 "sales" were set at a price of $0.00.
- The six others paid $0.25, 2x $3.99, $4.00, $5.00, and $7.85

It is too early to say whether customers who first got it for free will repurchase it later at a higher price to show their appreciation (the DriveThruRPG sales reports do show customer numbers, so it's possible to track this). I also hope that they will consider giving money for future products. Furthermore, I hope that increasing my presence through the "Pay What You Want" option will increase my "brand name recognition" so to speak.

I will probably publish some statistical analysis of the sales every month or so for the first few months - as a trained scientist, I find this interesting, and I hope some other aspiring publishers will find this useful as well.


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## Nellisir

Update. On February 4th, I switched The Basic Illusionist on RPGNow from free to Pay What You Want.

In the 8 days previous, I "sold" 19 copies.
In the 8 days since, I've "sold" 5 copies. Two were on the 4th, and it's not clear whether they occurred before or after I change the price. If before, that changes the figures to 21 vs 3.

No one had paid anything for it.

I might leave it alone for a few more days, but PWYW definitely seems to hurt free downloads.


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## Jürgen Hubert

Since I am planning on two lines of products, I think I will make the "core product" for each "Pay What You Want" - and for one line _all_ will be "Pay What You Want", while for the other the rest will have fixed prices.

That should give me some data for comparison's sake.


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## CardinalXimenes

Jürgen Hubert said:


> Since I am planning on two lines of products, I think I will make the "core product" for each "Pay What You Want" - and for one line _all_ will be "Pay What You Want", while for the other the rest will have fixed prices.
> 
> That should give me some data for comparison's sake.



That... does not sound like a highly-optimized sales plan, to be honest. I'm assuming that these two lines cover fundamentally different topics- and if that's the case, then the only parity between them is that they're both written by you. People who love sci-fi kelpmen may not be the ones who love intricate explorations of life as a macrame cultist, even if your name is on the cover of both products. Even if they're loosely connected, such as both targeting the same system, product lines have their own identity- or should, at least.

If you make one line entirely PWYW, everybody who likes that topic but doesn't care about the other has just dropped out of your customer base. Sure, they might throw you some spare change, but I've never heard of anybody actually making meaningful money off of a PWYW product. You'll get very little from them, aside from those print fans who insist on ordering the POD for a given product. Worse, you won't get enough to support further development of the line- there won't be the "publish one, collect money, roll it into the next" cycle that actually enables a healthy line.

There's also the issue of uptake. If you want to go with a free core product, you want it to be _free_. You want it to waft into the hands of multitudes, lifted to them by the slightest breeze, descending upon their fevered brow as lightly as a mesh of dew-pearled spiderwebs, except less creepy. You want absolutely nothing to stand between the public and that first hit, and PWYW is a substantial barrier for a lot of people. They just don't want the implicit social obligation. They have "free" and "not free" categories in their head, and PWYW is not in the former. Once you get them hooked on your limpid prose and splendid topics, then you start charging them full freight on the supplements.

If you really do have two lines in mind, I'd recommend taking the most salable, doing a free core product, and then following it up a month later with the release of the next in the line at full-freight price. If you need to chum the waters a little, then toss in something small as a freebie, but I'd stay far away from PWYW if you have plans of serious line-building. Free is for marketing, pay is for earning, and PWYW is nowhere in what calculus.

As for the second line, well, I'd wait to see if it actually is feasible to maintain two lines. I've got two going myself with the SWN-derived games and the LL-derived material, and it is enormously hard sledding. If you can really keep two lines flying, then I'd start the second one off with a full-price core. It's your initial line's core that's the bait, and you don't need two core games worth of bait in the water. If they aren't sold on you by the first, they're not especially likely to jump into your line because of the second.


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## Jürgen Hubert

CardinalXimenes said:


> That... does not sound like a highly-optimized sales plan, to be honest.




It's not. Money, for me, is a secondary concern - though it _is_ a nice bonus, it will still earn me _far_ less than what I earn via my day job. I do this because I enjoy writing settings.

But I am interested in some hard statistical data. Who, among those who got a certain product for free, will later pay for a non-PWYW from the same line? DriveThruRPG sales reports allow me to track this. So far, all I can see is speculation about the possible advantages and disadvantages of PWYW pricing, but selling my products in this way might provide some useful information on its actual effects (and I do plan to publish this information).


----------



## Nellisir

CardinalXimenes said:


> If you want to go with a free core product, you want it to be _free_. You want it to waft into the hands of multitudes, lifted to them by the slightest breeze, descending upon their fevered brow as lightly as a mesh of dew-pearled spiderwebs, except less creepy. You want absolutely nothing to stand between the public and that first hit, and PWYW is a substantial barrier for a lot of people. They just don't want the implicit social obligation. They have "free" and "not free" categories in their head, and PWYW is not in the former. Once you get them hooked on your limpid prose and splendid topics, then you start charging them full freight on the supplements.




I'll support this. By my admittedly scanty data, PWYW has caused "sales" of The Basic Illusionist to nose-dive with no benefit. I'm up to 6 sales and 0 dollars. I'd rather have 20 sales and 0 dollars.


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## CardinalXimenes

Jürgen Hubert said:


> It's not. Money, for me, is a secondary concern - though it _is_ a nice bonus, it will still earn me _far_ less than what I earn via my day job. I do this because I enjoy writing settings.
> 
> But I am interested in some hard statistical data. Who, among those who got a certain product for free, will later pay for a non-PWYW from the same line? DriveThruRPG sales reports allow me to track this. So far, all I can see is speculation about the possible advantages and disadvantages of PWYW pricing, but selling my products in this way might provide some useful information on its actual effects (and I do plan to publish this information).



Well, I can give you some specific numbers up front. According to DTRPG, Stars Without Numbers' free version has been downloaded about 24,400 times. If I run a report on people who have bought both the free version of SWN and the expanded Core version, which just adds another 40 pages of content, I find 744 overlaps. It's hard to translate that number into a percentage of Core editions sold, because I've also distributed it two years running with the Bundle of Holding SWN offer, but if you're speaking only of DTRPG sales, that's about 3/4ths of the total Core sales there. When I compare SWN Free downloaders with those who've picked up Skyward Steel, a supplement that came out just a month after SWN, I see a whopping 964 of its owners had downloaded SWN Free as well, against a total 1108 copies sold through DTRPG.

Now, it's impossible to tell how many of those buyers got Skyward Steel first and then downloaded SWN Free, but I have to imagine that's a pretty rare event. What is clear is that the majority of supplement buyers have also grabbed the freebie entry-point into the game, and that these sales are converting at about a 25:1 ratio for me over a long timeframe. I don't really know how much validity that conversion rate would have for other publishers, and I don't know how PWYW would have affected it, but given the evidence that PWYW cuts general uptake I haven't a lot of confidence in that model.


----------



## Megaton Games

Megaton Games:
$0.03 for established freelancers - 0.05 for well known freelancers with good record.


----------



## RichGreen

Hi there,

For those of you interested in getting started in self-publishing, I published my book, Parsantium: City at the Crossroads a year ago, after doing a number of freelance projects for Kobold Press and Raging Swan Press. 

I've written about my adventures in this thread.

Cheers


Rich


----------



## Nellisir

I switched The Basic Illusionist from Pay What You Want back to free. "Sales" were miserable. No one paid anything, and downloads overall were way way down (but ticked up very slightly for Secrets 1 & 2)


----------



## pickin_grinnin

To put this in perspective, the Science Fiction Writer's Association defines a professional rate as no less than 6 cents a word.  The Horror Writer's Association defines it as 5 cents.


----------



## pickin_grinnin

PaulO. said:


> The amount of fantasy content you can find available on the internet, and given away, is enormous. The market is flooded with decent writers, and decent content.




All the more reasons to target the underserved genres in the rpg world.


----------



## pickin_grinnin

Most fiction novel writers still have day jobs.  In science fiction, fantasy, and horror there are a number of well-known authors with numerous books who still have day jobs, too.

Writing almost always begins as a hobby, and only eventually becomes a form of income.  Even then, it only provides a significant income to a tiny, tiny percentage of writers.

Nobody should go into writing or designing rpgs as a way of making a living.  It happens for some people, but it's not a realistic goal in most situations.


----------



## M.T. Black

I'm not part of the industry, but I've followed this thread with great interest. Self-publishing makes a lot of sense for those wanting a greater return for their art, but the host of small publishers makes the market tricky for the consumer. Perhaps the way forward is for groups of writer/publishers to come together in a co-operative under a shared brand (perhaps the products would be co-branded, like films are). Members of the co-operative would vote to admit new members, and also vote on which materials were releasable. Members would retain control of their content and get a better return on their efforts, but could leverage the profile of a larger publisher.


----------



## Starfox

My views on recognition. 

It is VERY hard to build recognition. Ultimately that is what brands are - pre-packed recognition value from earlier successes. The buyer imagines there is a continuity in the production/editing teams and judges a product based on its predecessors. If I am mainly publishing under a brand, it is my interest that orher products of the same brand are good. This is why I have put in free hours editing/revising products others wrote that my publisher publishes. And when looking ofr a publisher, I went looking at theirproducts, trying to find one with a focus and editorial idea similar to mine.

My experience with community projects makes me a pessimist about M T Black's idea. A publishing house cannot be a democracy. Someone must be the publisher, and this person's ideas must permeate the brand. This is how you build brands. Of course, others can have input, artists and editors especially, but in the end it is the publicist who makes the decisions and who's ideals becomes the brand.


----------



## Nellisir

M.T. Black said:


> Members of the co-operative would vote ... on which materials were releasable. Members would retain control of their content ....




That's your conflict, right there.  :/

I think it's doable in a small & limited sense, but self-determination in all things is one of the perks of self-publishing.


----------



## M.T. Black

Well, is there a better way for the writer and publisher to share the risk? That's what this really comes down to, who bears the risk.


----------



## Adam Jury

As a publisher: the writer (and other freelancers) shouldn't be sharing the risk.


----------



## M.T. Black

Is there a reason that straight royalty arrangements arent more common?


----------



## James Jacobs

M.T. Black said:


> Is there a reason that straight royalty arrangements arent more common?




Yup; tracking royalty payments gets real complicated, and it compounds as time goes on and more products are created. For small companies, this becomes an increasingly huge drain on resources, and that doesn't even touch the complex tax and legal and other stuff royalties introduce into a company's financials. Furthermore, the amount of money most RPG products produce is a tiny fraction of what a novel might create. Furthermore, many RPG companies have to/need to/choose to purchase all rights to a freelancer's work (this is what we do at Paizo), since it's work for hire—it makes more sense in this case to buy it once and have done with it. For lots of freelancers, getting a big (but one time) check for your work is better than lots of tiny ones spread out over the rest of your life.


----------



## jeffh

Zak S said:


> And, having people who are widely despised attacking you, your girlfriend and your book...



And your publisher. Don't forget about him.


----------



## Starfox

The OGL accentuates what James Jacobs is saying above; once an OGL publication has been released anyone can re-print it. If the original publisher was working on a royalty model, a third party publisher could publish the same product under OGL and not have to pay the royalty. 

Yes, I know I am simplifying; there is trade dress, product identity and all that. Still, the problem is there. Paying royalty for an OGL product seems unsustainable to me.


----------



## M.T. Black

Adam Jury said:


> As a publisher: the writer (and other freelancers) shouldn't be sharing the risk.




Some fresh thinking may be needed to resolve the problem (if it is a problem)


----------



## Thiago Rosa Shinken

It would be good to have the OP updated. Four-in-Hand Games, for example, pays better than the top publishers - and they mentioned it at page 1.


----------



## lynnfredricks

Starfox said:


> Yes, I know I am simplifying; there is trade dress, product identity and all that. Still, the problem is there. Paying royalty for an OGL product seems unsustainable to me.




I think you are oversimplifying.

There are a number of extremely successful (for what they are) OGL based products that come to mind, such as Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Adventurer, Conqueror, King, and Dungeon Crawl Classics. These are "core" products of a system, but they are still OGL.

The problem is frequency of purchase by product type. The number of people who buy adventures or special splat books will always be a fraction of the buyers of the actual game. The more specialized the product, you also run into the other problem of increasing piracy.

The more necessary the product is to the largest segment of participants, the more likely you are going to be able to estimate and generate revenue. Then pricing and presentation rest on top of that.

The Pathfinder core rules book sells. You could get by with a PDF, sure. But the core rules are high quality, and if purchased off of highly discounted sites like Amazon, much less than the cost of a console game. There is a high perception of value in that book.


----------



## Steve Conan Trustrum

M.T. Black said:


> Is there a reason that straight royalty arrangements arent more common?



Royalty arrangements can be a good idea for publishers up front (woohoo! No up-front expenses for writers and/or artists!), but can cost money in the long run (wow, this book is selling so well I would have paid the writers and/or artists off by now, but I have to keep splitting profits.)

For example, I released Better Mousetrap for Mutants & Masterminds 2e in 2007. At the time, Misfit Studios wouldn't have been able to afford the type of artist I wanted to provide original artwork for the whole book. As such, an artist I'd worked with who was interested in the project came on board for 50% of the profit in exchange for doing all of the interior artwork in colour (I had already created a cover for it.) As time went on, the project kept expanding so that my share of the writing kept getting bigger, which means the time I'd need to spend on layout would also take more time -- I even did the flat colouring for the interiors to speed things up. By the time BMT came out, the time I'd put into the project was well over half the overall work (I'd guess *at least* 90% of what needed to be done to get the project out, in man hours.)

In 2012, I decided to re-release the project for M&M 3e. I was still bound by the original contract for use of the book's interior art, and the same artist did a new cover as part of the existing "you do the art" agreement. I then went about rewriting everything for the new rules, which meant adding some new content to get everything to convert as true to the original as possible. It took me about 6 months (spread out) to do the rewrite, oversee playtesting, and then do layout for the PDF/print version and for a tablet-ready, interactive version. The artist, on the other hand, added some new weapons and insignia for the interior at no additional expense (it was considered accommodating the original agreement of providing interiors), a new character art piece (which I wrote the content for), and then the previously mentioned cover (and because the artist was working for royalties, their other, flat rate jobs took priority, delaying the project by 8+ months.) So, I was again doing far more than half the work for the new release, but was still getting 50% of the profits because of the new book being an extension of the original agreement.

I don't begrudge paying the artist this royalty rate or blame him for anything, as it's what we agreed to, but continuing to keep the book out beyond its first (and now second) iteration means more ongoing work for me (say if M&M 4e comes out) while the artist could quite possibly never have to do any more art for it in the future. Because of how the original agreement was written, there is never a need to renegotiate how royalties are split, regardless of the reason why doing so would seem to make sense and be fair. I am bound to keep paying a 50%/50% royalty rate when the division of labour was something I would estimate to be at about 99%/1% with me taking on the heavier share. Considering the 3e version, released at the end of 2014, outdid the 2e version's sales (after 7 years) in just 2 months, you can imagine how frustrating the royalty agreement can be in hindsight given the division of labour behind the 3e release. It would have been better for my return on the project to not use any of the artist's original work, but rather pay him to do all new art at his usual rate, thus keeping all future profits beyond this flat expense for Misfit Studios. 

Now, not all of these issues will come up in royalty agreements; most are issues that arose from me lacking foresight (I didn't expect the product to do as well as it did initially, or that its popularity would see the 3e rerelease surpass it so quickly), and it being my first time working with someone on a royalty basis I made some mistakes in how the agreement was prepared. However, you can see why it would leave me shy of doing so again, especially if I have to sell the other participants on signing on with a contract that, while fair to the amount of work I'd put in, on the bare face of it would seem to skew in favour of me. These sort of unforseen circumstances can easily pop up with any royalty-based project because closing all possible holes is problematic -- and the unexpected is something publishers want to avoid. It leads to expensive learning experiences (as my example illustrates.)


----------



## Steve Conan Trustrum

Starfox said:


> The OGL accentuates what James Jacobs is saying above; once an OGL publication has been released anyone can re-print it. If the original publisher was working on a royalty model, a third party publisher could publish the same product under OGL and not have to pay the royalty.
> 
> Yes, I know I am simplifying; there is trade dress, product identity and all that. Still, the problem is there. Paying royalty for an OGL product seems unsustainable to me.



You're assuming the entire book is made open under the OGL (edit: minus the points you mention.) The declaration of content, as well as the demands of the OGL's terms, can be used to create a division of open and closed content that prevents a third party from doing this. Sure, they can take out your rules and the like, but not everything else if you've closed it. There may be a context between the two that doesn't make much sense for a third-party publisher to attempt the former in its entirety because what's been stripped away is required for what remains to cohesively make sense.

There's also the fact that what other publishers are ALLOWED to do via the OGL, as per your concern, is not how the practice tends to operate.

There are very few companies that try the kind of "strip mining" tactic you mention, and they tend to get bad-mouthed by other publishers and the market alike for doing so. Indeed, I think you'd be hard pressed to name anyone who currently makes a frequent, profitable practice of doing this despite there being products on the market that have written content 100% released under the OGL. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone who even goes so far as to just extract the open portions the OGL allows and reprint it wholesale. Bits and pieces, sure, which is how the OGL is meant to be used, but not fully extracting all open content for third party retasking. Even when a third party uses open content from someone else's product, be it royalty based or not, there is an overall contextual difference between the source and the secondary product that the two have distinctly different identities in the market whereby sales of the latter are not likely to affect sales of the former.


----------



## Starfox

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> Indeed, I think you'd be hard pressed to name anyone who currently makes a frequent, profitable practice of doing this despite there being products on the market that have written content 100% released under the OGL.




Which is good. Publishers want to add value, have pride in their work. But still, legally, it is doable and might happen in case of a royalty conflict. Once your work is OGL, you no longer have exclusive rights to it.

d20pfsrd.com does "print" OGL wholesale, but then that is the service the provide. According to them, much of their content is actually put on the site by the publishers themselves as a form of promotion.


----------



## Morrus

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> There are very few companies that try the kind of "strip mining" tactic you mention, and they tend to get bad-mouthed by other publishers and the market alike for doing so. Indeed, I think you'd be hard pressed to name anyone who currently makes a frequent, profitable practice of doing this despite there being products on the market that have written content 100% released under the OGL. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone who even goes so far as to just extract the open portions the OGL allows and reprint it wholesale.




Mongoose used to do it, but don't any more.  I can think of websites today which make a profitable living doing exactly that, though, and are generally lauded for doing so.


----------



## Steve Conan Trustrum

Morrus said:


> I can think of websites today which make a profitable living doing exactly that, though, and are generally lauded for doing so.



Is it affecting the sources' sales, though, or aiding them (EDIT) considering most such products are sold through the site's store and are cited beside their online content? (And, as has been pointed out, most publishers volunteer their content to be posted at d20pfsrd.com, which is what I assume you're referring to.)


----------



## jreyst

Just noticed the reference to the d20pfsrd store and reference to the site. I'm happy to say that the consistently best seller in the store is the publisher who has more content on d20pfsrd.com than any other, Dreamscarred Press. They themselves routinely either ask me to add new content, or report errata that needs to be updated after the source material has been updated. Jeremy and Andreas (I think) agree that more content on the site = more entry points to their products in the store. And contrary to popular belief, a large enough number of users of d20pfsrd.com actually go on to buy their products to make it an overall net positive being on the site. Feel free to ask them or any of the other larger publishers with content on the site.


----------



## GameNightLife

This original post is so useful.  I really appreciate all the work you put into it, and I will be saving it for reference.  We're in the process of looking at writers right now, and we didn't know the exact rates for the companies you mentioned.  So this was super helpful.

In summation, "Huzzah! And thanks! And keep up the good work!"


----------



## Samloyal23

So I just created a Patreon account, like an hour ago, so I can share some of my stories and poems and post spells and warlock invocations for 3.5 that I have created, anything just to be seen by the public and make even a tiny amount of money. This is yet another attempt to turn blogging into a profitable side venture. How many ways do we try to turn art into money? Is something like Patreon really worth the effort? Are there better ways to self-publish?


----------



## Roux

2Cents a word. Period


----------



## trancejeremy

Apparently if you are going to write a module, you should base it on HP Lovecraft. In one month my module about the Mi-Go has made $50 off of 340 downloads (40 paid), which is about 4x better than any previous effort.

Still, that was also 11,000 words, longer than any previous effort, so maybe what, half cent per word? (Minus the $15 I spent on stock art as well)


----------



## J. L. Duncan

Great Post Morrus!

Something of note: Kenzer and Company pays 3 cents a word, in regards to content for Knights of the Dinner Table. They do a good job-and do what they say they will. I write reviews and the occasional game article for them.

Palladium Books, The Rifter, pays $10 a printed page. By my estimation this equates to about 1 to 2 cents per word.

My experience (if I may share it) with Kenzer has been very good. Paid within the time they say they will and I always receive a free issue, which my work appears. There have been a couple of minor problems-but in the end, Kenzer always did the right thing.

My experience with Palladium was not so good. Without getting into it (And I won’t) just a lot of miscommunication. 

I’m not a professional writer. However, I do try and write with a professional mindset and being paid is part of that. I loved the vid-absolutely loved it!


----------



## Steve Conan Trustrum

J. L. Duncan said:


> Palladium Books, The Rifter, pays $10 a printed page. By my estimation this equates to about 1 to 2 cents per word.



So, it hasn't changed since I was published in Rifter #1 in the '90s.


> My experience with Palladium was not so good. Without getting into it (And I won’t) just a lot of miscommunication.



I'm fairly certain I could guess what happened


----------



## J. L. Duncan

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> So, it hasn't changed since I was published in Rifter #1 in the '90s.
> I'm fairly certain I could guess what happened




I'm certain you know (edit: or I should say understand). And even better than I.

Well, to be fair... I knew what I was getting into. Some of that was because of the mega-thread over at the other site-which you and Bill did partake. 

What I didn't anticipate was how upset I became once things went badly.

I'm looking for better opportunities-


----------



## ARMR

Paying .01 is the standard it seems. At least from all the jobs I've done that's what I've gotten.

I do understand that for most publishers it's too difficult to pay any more than that.

With that said, paying half a cent is ludicrous! And all publishers that offer as such should be ashamed of themselves.

Heck I did a job earlier this year for a Publisher who will not be named, and I'm still waiting for my payment, sure it was just $6... But it's my $6...

I offer all my products for free, but only because I write, design, proof read, AND edit. While my wife draws everything I need.


----------



## Steve Conan Trustrum

ARMR said:


> And all publishers that offer as such should be ashamed of themselves.



Why should they be?

If someone's willing to do the work and the publisher is happy with it, why should the publisher be ashamed? Are you able to access the finances behind publisher budgets to draw some conclusion about what's going back into future product versus the publishers' pockets the rest of us are not aware of?


----------



## ARMR

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> Why should they be?
> 
> If someone's willing to do the work and the publisher is happy with it, why should the publisher be ashamed? Are you able to access the finances behind publisher budgets to draw some conclusion about what's going back into future product versus the publishers' pockets the rest of us are not aware of?





It's simple, these writers are giving hours and hours of their time on a product they'll barely see any $ out of, while the publisher with time will see their spent money back and then some. Sure it'll take time, but they will break even and make a profit.

And things like classes take a lot of hours to complete, and days of proper playtesting before sending to a publisher. So paying half a cent to someone that's giving over 10 hours of their life to work on a good product is worth more than half a cent. Like i said, I understand that many small time publishers cannot afford more than 1 cent a word. But writers are definitely worth $30 for a base class of 3,000 words than just $15.

My recommendation would be, if you can't pay at least 1 cent a word, don't ask for writers. Because at the end of the day, these are humans you are working with, and asking to work for you, and none of them are worth half a cent a word. And while it's almost inconceivable to live of making TTRPGs for a living and much less freelance as a TTRPG writer, those $30, maybe even $10 for a monster here or there add up, and help us out.

But like someone mention before I believe, you get what you pay for, if you pay half a cent, don't expect the writer to give it his all, they'd be better off making a blog where they offer all their own personal TTRPG designs.

And if they are willing to do the work for that miserable pay, then they don't know any better, or they are just like artists that sell their drawings for mere pennies when other artists sell them for more. You are showing the publisher that it's ok to pay close to nothing, when it's not.

But that's just my opinion.


----------



## Fairman Rogers

I feel there are two parts to improving the situation:

1) Consumers need to be willing to pay more for quality work. It is not cheap to publish a book even digital-only, but there's still a pervading sense that PDFs have to be super cheap. As long as publishers are trying to shave their margins as tightly as possible, the pay and therefore quality will continue to suffer. I feel like this is gradually improving, but I still see some holdouts of this attitude.

2) Publishers need to pay more per word but commission fewer words. We've been seeing some serious page-bloat over the last couple years, and I definitely think quality is suffering. Unfortunately, this is fed by the problems mentioned in #1 - consumers have built up a perception that page count should be a determiner of price. We have got to break the page-inflation feedback loop.

The thing is, both of these need to change for the improvements to make economic sense. If I drop from 200,000 words to 80,000 words but I go up from .01 to .05 per word, that book is twice as expensive as it was before. That's not sustainable without consumer support for higher prices overall.

RPGs are still essentially a hobby industry. We're all expecting hobby industry prices, which can only come from hobby industry work. We can't get up to professional wages without treating the whole industry differently.


----------



## Ricochet

Fairman Rogers said:


> I feel there are two parts to improving the situation:
> 
> 1) Consumers need to be willing to pay more for quality work. It is not cheap to publish a book even digital-only, but there's still a pervading sense that PDFs have to be super cheap. As long as publishers are trying to shave their margins as tightly as possible, the pay and therefore quality will continue to suffer. I feel like this is gradually improving, but I still see some holdouts of this attitude.
> 
> 2) Publishers need to pay more per word but commission fewer words. We've been seeing some serious page-bloat over the last couple years, and I definitely think quality is suffering. Unfortunately, this is fed by the problems mentioned in #1 - consumers have built up a perception that page count should be a determiner of price. We have got to break the page-inflation feedback loop.
> 
> The thing is, both of these need to change for the improvements to make economic sense. If I drop from 200,000 words to 80,000 words but I go up from .01 to .05 per word, that book is twice as expensive as it was before. That's not sustainable without consumer support for higher prices overall.
> 
> RPGs are still essentially a hobby industry. We're all expecting hobby industry prices, which can only come from hobby industry work. We can't get up to professional wages without treating the whole industry differently.




Both parts are true. However, this hobby in particular seems to have a notoriously thrifty consumer mindset once we delve out of the miniature gaming section. I hope things are slowly changing with all of the kickstarters etc. though, because the industry needs to increase the profits in order to remain eager to satisfy their consumers. I'm not saying triple the prices or anything, but scraping through isn't fun for anyone - publishers, writers, or ultimately the consumers.


----------



## Steve Conan Trustrum

ARMR said:


> It's simple, these writers are giving hours and hours of their time on a product they'll barely see any $ out of, while the publisher with time will see their spent money back and then some. Sure it'll take time, but they will break even and make a profit.



Again, you have access to information on everyone's budgets and profit margins ... how?

When you start saying things like publishers in the RPG industry will make back money spent "*and then some*" (emphasis mine), you illustrate a common misunderstanding of the industry's economics.



> And things like classes take a lot of hours to complete, and days of proper playtesting before sending to a publisher.



Not that it really matters, but most playtesting is done by publishers, not writers. 







> So paying half a cent to someone that's giving over 10 hours of their life to work on a good product is worth more than half a cent. Like i said, I understand that many small time publishers cannot afford more than 1 cent a word. But writers are definitely worth $30 for a base class of 3,000 words than just $15.



Simple solution, then: don't work for those publishers. This is what you simply aren't getting.

It is up to writers and artists to define their minimum threshold of payment, not publishers. If a job isn't paying enough, don't apply for it. If you see a job posted for a specific rate, however, and you apply to do it, then why should you be bitching about it and why should the publisher feel ashamed? Now, if you find it difficult to get jobs that pay higher rates, consider the following: a) maybe there are good, objective reasons why so many publishers can't afford to pay higher rates (and, as a hint, consider that lining their pockets with inflated profit margins isn't one of them -- no publishers are getting rich putting out RPGs.) b) perhaps you (in the general sense, not YOU specifically) simply aren't as skilled a writer as you think and aren't worth the higher paying jobs.



> My recommendation would be, if you can't pay at least 1 cent a word, don't ask for writers. Because at the end of the day, these are humans you are working with, and asking to work for you, and none of them are worth half a cent a word.



Who are you or I to insist on that? Again, if people say to themselves "I'm worth more than this!" then they won't apply for a job. You're (incorrectly) assuming there are no writers (or publishers, for that matter) out there who are primarily motivated by fun, and consider the payment to be secondary. Or that it's something they do in their spare time so a high payment rate is not a priority. Again, your point here shows a rather narrow understanding of the sorts of people who write content and why.



> And while it's almost inconceivable to live of making TTRPGs for a living and much less freelance as a TTRPG writer, those $30, maybe even $10 for a monster here or there add up, and help us out.



Sure, undeniably getting paid more is better. And if you think you deserve more money for your work then only apply for those jobs. It really is that simple.



> But like someone mention before I believe, you get what you pay for, if you pay half a cent, don't expect the writer to give it his all



Which is true of any industry that employs freelancers, to be certain. So, let me ask you this: if low pay rates seem to be so common in the RPG industry, yet it keeps trucking along without everything being total , why is that? Consider it's the cold, hard economics of the industry that drive those rates and not the demands of freelancers. You're talking about a dwindling market where the customers demand better at cheaper prices. Do you think that's an economic situation that presents opportunities for more money to be made by all involved, or less?



> they'd be better off making a blog where they offer all their own personal TTRPG designs.



Perhaps, if all they want is people looking at their stuff, but not really if they want to make money. And if all they want is people looking at their stuff, why then are they concerned with low pay rates to begin with?



> And if they are willing to do the work for that miserable pay, then they don't know any better, or they are just like artists that sell their drawings for mere pennies when other artists sell them for more. You are showing the publisher that it's ok to pay close to nothing, when it's not.



Again, you're assuming a lot about freelancer motives and desires. You also conveniently forget that anyone going into the RPG industry probably has a good idea that they won't be doing what they do with the expectation of a big pay day. Sure, everyone WANTS to make money hand over fist, but no one should expect it. If you want to be producing content in this industry at any level, hope, strive, and keep aiming for the best but expecting anything more than having fun doing what you're doing while earning a bit of cash along the way is not exactly accepting the reality of how much money flows into this industry from the customers at any point but the top.



> But that's just my opinion.



Yes, but an opinion you're trying to qualify in general terms on everyone else's behalf while attributing motives and standards to publishers that ignore a lot of facts that are inconvenient to your opinion.

Most publishers pay what their particular section of the market can handle. If you want to earn more, start by convincing customers that getting quality RPG product into their hands is worth paying more.


----------



## ARMR

Fairman Rogers said:


> I feel there are two parts to improving the situation:
> 
> 1) Consumers need to be willing to pay more for quality work. It is not cheap to publish a book even digital-only, but there's still a pervading sense that PDFs have to be super cheap. As long as publishers are trying to shave their margins as tightly as possible, the pay and therefore quality will continue to suffer. I feel like this is gradually improving, but I still see some holdouts of this attitude.
> 
> 2) Publishers need to pay more per word but commission fewer words. We've been seeing some serious page-bloat over the last couple years, and I definitely think quality is suffering. Unfortunately, this is fed by the problems mentioned in #1 - consumers have built up a perception that page count should be a determiner of price. We have got to break the page-inflation feedback loop.
> 
> The thing is, both of these need to change for the improvements to make economic sense. If I drop from 200,000 words to 80,000 words but I go up from .01 to .05 per word, that book is twice as expensive as it was before. That's not sustainable without consumer support for higher prices overall.
> 
> RPGs are still essentially a hobby industry. We're all expecting hobby industry prices, which can only come from hobby industry work. We can't get up to professional wages without treating the whole industry differently.




I think that a fair way to improve on this, besides eliminating the need for a minimum word count (that makes it so sometimes you end up with run on sentences, and little cohesion, for the sake of a word count), there could be established rates for different things.

Making a monster is in no means the same as designing a class, or writing up an adventure, or even writing up a city.

The same way artists have standard rates, we writers should too have standard rates.


----------



## Starfox

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> You're (incorrectly) assuming there are no writers (or publishers, for that matter) out there who are primarily motivated by fun, and consider the payment to be secondary. Or that it's something they do in their spare time so a high payment rate is not a priority. Again, your point here shows a rather narrow understanding of the sorts of people who write content and why.




I'm one of these, and I'm writing for one of these too. And they pay isn't very good, but it is a creative outlet. By making this writing the best I possibly can, I'm hoping to qualify for better commissions later on.

For me, it is also part of rehabilitation - I've been ill a very long time, and by writing (keeping deadlines, and so on), I am slowly making myself employable again.

But yeah, I am also generating competition for the professional game-writers, those who try to live on this.


----------



## Starfox

ARMR said:


> Making a monster is in no means the same as designing a class, or writing up an adventure, or even writing up a city.




Just for fun, which of these would be the hardest to do? My answer would be the adventure writeup. I guess others' answers would be different. I don't try to get adventures published because I'm frankly not very good at them. I don't even play my own adventures. But writing up an archetype is a delight for me.

So I publish rules and purchase adventures. Works for me.


----------



## lynnfredricks

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> Most publishers pay what their particular section of the market can handle. If you want to earn more, start by convincing customers that getting quality RPG product into their hands is worth paying more.




Explaining simple market economics doesn't seem to be be enough for some people, Steve ;-)

A lot of professional artists and writers work in different markets based on the benefits of those markets. The tabletop RPG market is an extremely tiny market. If you are well known and have a good reputation for team work, you may land a job at one of the few tabletop RPG companies that pay a good living wage or have a short list of clients that let you live the life you want. Those artists are you competitors and your colleagues. If you cannot compete with them, then do it part time and pursue other work that pays the bills until you are good enough to command better. That's what author Kurt Vonnegut did when he wrote for Better Homes & Gardens. He did it to pay his bills until he could get his novels out.

The 'no spec' crowd that goes out of its way to shame publishers demonstrates exactly why they shouldn't be hired.


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## ARMR

Starfox said:


> Just for fun, which of these would be the hardest to do? My answer would be the adventure writeup. I guess others' answers would be different. I don't try to get adventures published because I'm frankly not very good at them. I don't even play my own adventures. But writing up an archetype is a delight for me.




I'm with you there. Writing adventures is hard work for me. However, when it comes to base classes and monsters, I find them simple enough to make within a few hours.
I've written one adventure, and honestly, I barely garnered any joy from it.


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## Starfox

My guess is others would give completely different answers. But yeah, adventures rock, and if you look at prices they're usually more expensive too.


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## McNabb Games

I have seen posts where new publishing companies have been ripped to shreds for offering too little per word to freelancers and alot of us were nervous about posting job postings but OPs breakdown of industry standards has helped me to understand what is and is not acceptable. Thanks for the post. I'll point other indie designers and publishers to this post for pricing.


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## scourge

Where did you get those numbers? About five years ago, I made about 4 cents a word for Paizo.  Frog God has paid me .02 to .04, depending on the project.


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## Morrus

scourge said:


> Where did you get those numbers? About five years ago, I made about 4 cents a word for Paizo.  Frog God has paid me .02 to .04, depending on the project.




Generally, I simply asked. In some cases, the numbers were clearly published on websites. Frog God certainly pays more for non-starting writers (thus the asterisk) and Paizo's rates have gone up in recent years.


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## lynnfredricks

Morrus said:


> Generally, I simply asked. In some cases, the numbers were clearly published on websites. Frog God certainly pays more for non-starting writers (thus the asterisk) and Paizo's rates have gone up in recent years.




Did you do an update or your original post? I just re-read it and found it extremely useful, and well, its been a year


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## Morrus

lynnfredricks said:


> Did you do an update or your original post? I just re-read it and found it extremely useful, and well, its been a year




I might do an updated version at some point  When I next feel like being shouted at by people!


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## scourge

I'm sorry if I was shouting.  I have typing immodulation syndrome


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## lynnfredricks

Morrus said:


> I might do an updated version at some point  When I next feel like being shouted at by people!




There is a really, really vocal crowd of "No Spec" folk who love to jump in threads like this. You should be happy its only within the tiny RPG industry that this is being discussed. I see a lot worse in G+, deviantart, various pro 3d forums and the like.


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## Starfox

Not strictly on the topic of pay, but I found this blog post by Crystal Frasier very enlightening. Its on what Paizo wants from professional freelancers.

http://amazonchique.tumblr.com/post/138634046407/getting-work-from-rpg-publishers-vs-pitching


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## pickin_grinnin

Starfox said:


> Not strictly on the topic of pay, but I found this blog post by Crystal Frasier very enlightening. Its on what Paizo wants from professional freelancers.
> 
> http://amazonchique.tumblr.com/post/138634046407/getting-work-from-rpg-publishers-vs-pitching




One of the more important things from that article:

"The dirty secret of creative professions is that ideas are cheap, even super-creative ideas. Sorry if this sounds harsh, but you’re not special for having them. What makes you special is the ability to actually make them into something usable, enjoyable, and accessible. "


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## M.T. Black

I want to acknowledge, again, that Morrus performed an excellent service for all creators by publishing this survey.


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## J.L. Duncan

@_*morrus*_:

This is an awesome thread. I don't know when/if you decide to update it, but I am building a regular feature over at my blog. The list includes a list of RPG publishers and rates... Even EN Publishing 

Here is the Link


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## Lwaxy

Thanks for the link.


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## J.L. Duncan

Lwaxy said:


> Thanks for the link.




YW. I'm creating a page for my blog soon. I have a couple of more places to add.


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## arjomanes

Jim Raggi at Lamentations of the Flame Princess just posted on Google + that the writer(s) for his 21st-best-selling book made 21 cents/word (in Euros). Royalties. 

https://plus.google.com/112262093672917983853/posts/4B6j9CaezK7


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## Steve Conan Trustrum

Royalties are an entirely different beast, though. You're not setting a rate that is negotiated (well, beyond the royalty rate itself.) Your "rate" is determined by the product's success, which has nothing to do with the a "fair rate." Adventures almost never earn a lot compared to a system's core books, for instance, so a writer that provides 10,000 words for a game's core book and then writes a 10,000 word adventure, both based on the same royalty rate, won't earn the same amount of money.

And the circumstantial nature of the "fairness" of asking writers and artists to work on a royalty basis is an entirely different debate unto itself.


----------



## Zak S

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> Royalties are an entirely different beast, though. You're not setting a rate that is negotiated (well, beyond the royalty rate itself.) Your "rate" is determined by the product's success, which has nothing to do with the a "fair rate." Adventures almost never earn a lot compared to a system's core books, for instance, so a writer that provides 10,000 words for a game's core book and then writes a 10,000 word adventure, both based on the same royalty rate, won't earn the same amount of money.
> 
> And the circumstantial nature of the "fairness" of asking writers and artists to work on a royalty basis is an entirely different debate unto itself.




  this description is not an accurate   depiction of how things work at LotFp.

If James pays an advance it's upfront.  this advance is usually comparable to any other company its size .   then if the book outsells that advance and you have a royalty deal,   you move into royalties.  and as james has pointed out above his 20th selling book is still earning 4 to 5 times what you’d  get at Green Ronin (dc adventures, blue rose etc), Evil Hat (fate, dresden files, etc), Margaret Weis (Marvel Heroic, Smallville, etc).  — companies that are repeatedly complementing themselves on how socially conscious they are.

 it’s hard for the average gamer to realize just how drastically better LotFP’s deal is better than the on e offered freelancers at other companies is— but I believe it shows in the quality of the projects and the willingness of the freelancers there to devote time and energy to them


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## Steve Conan Trustrum

Zak S said:


> this description is not an accurate   depiction of how things work at LotFp.



Gotcha.

I'm talking a purely royalties-based payment, not a flat payment + royalties. EDIT: but to my initial point, the amount paid in the initial amount would still need to be sufficient to make up for the uncertainty of the return on royalties. Sounds like it works for LotFp, but won't for most small press.



> it’s hard for the average gamer to realize just how drastically better LotFP’s deal is better than the on e offered freelancers at other companies is— but I believe it shows in the quality of the projects and the willingness of the freelancers there to devote time and energy to them



Which is, I agree, essential to any amount of royalties entering such a professional relationship.


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## Zak S

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> but to my initial point, the amount paid in the initial amount would still need to be sufficient to make up for the uncertainty of the return on royalties. Sounds like it works for LotFp, but won't for most small press.




But you do have to wonder why the publishers of guaranteed-sellers like Dresden Files RPG, DC Adventures and Marvel Heroic can't manage that. It's not like LotFP is selling so many more copies than they are--these companies are bigger than LotFP by an order of magnitude.


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## Starfox

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> And the circumstantial nature of the "fairness" of asking writers and artists to work on a royalty basis is an entirely different debate unto itself.




My main publisher, Purple Duck games, refused to do a royalty contract, considering it too unfair to the writer.


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## Morrus

Starfox said:


> My main publisher, Purple Duck games, refused to do a royalty contract, considering it too unfair to the writer.




Royalties are unfair, yes. Good for them.


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## Zak S

Reiterating for anyone confused:

The LotFP deal we're discussing is ywhen ou get an advance (you can keep, it's not a loan) you _then royalties on top of that in addition_ after the product earns out its advance.


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## Steve Conan Trustrum

Zak S said:


> But you do have to wonder why the publishers of guaranteed-sellers like Dresden Files RPG, DC Adventures and Marvel Heroic can't manage that. It's not like LotFP is selling so many more copies than they are--these companies are bigger than LotFP by an order of magnitude.



LotFP also has much lower overhead because they aren't a company with a physical address, etc., and don't have as many product lines to support.

Licensed products =/= big profit. Their greatest value is usually one of exposure and more opportunities to follow. Cost associated with licensing, etc. can quickly eat up a profit margin. Also keep in mind that Dresden Files is not a guaranteed seller. It may be popular in circles many gamers run into, but it's not as mainstream as we believe. And great selling source material does not equate a great selling RPG. There are LOTS of examples of popular licenses that failed to translate into popular games that made buckets of money.


----------



## Zak S

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> LotFP also has much lower overhead because they aren't a company with a physical address, etc., and don't have as many product lines to support.
> 
> Licensed products =/= big profit. Their greatest value is usually one of exposure and more opportunities to follow. Cost associated with licensing, etc. can quickly eat up a profit margin. Also keep in mind that Dresden Files is not a guaranteed seller. It may be popular in circles many gamers run into, but it's not as mainstream as we believe. And great selling source material does not equate a great selling RPG. There are LOTS of examples of popular licenses that failed to translate into popular games that made buckets of money.




Evil Hat objectively has more money than LotFP and objectively pays its people less.


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## Steve Conan Trustrum

Zak S said:


> Evil Hat objectively has more money than LotFP and objectively pays its people less.



That may well be. It doesn't mean "guaranteed-sellers" are guaranteed to make bags of cash, though. LotFP also isn't putting as much money back into product (and other resources) as often or as much.

Because, ultimately, even if other companies are paying less to writers, what are they doing with the money? It's not like you can point to any of the other companies named and claim that they're skimping on rates so they can dine on surf n' turf every night and then  it out into their gold-plated toilets.


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## Zak S

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> LotFP also isn't putting as much money back into product (and other resources) as often or as much.




Apparently they 100% are because they pay better rates for the first thing and then _again for the second thing after that_.



> Because, ultimately, even if other companies are paying less to writers, what are they doing with the money?




I don't know what Evil Hat et al doing with all the extra money they aren't paying writers and artists. I am not sure I have heard anyone ask them and I am not sure they've ever been put in a position where they had to answer.


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## Steve Conan Trustrum

Zak S said:


> Apparently they 100% are because they pay better rates for the first thing and then _again for the second thing after that_.



How do you figure? Evil Hat has between x2 to x3 the amount of products as LotFP, most of which (it looks to me) have much higher outlay. Sounds to me more like LotFP is channeling the money into the creatives rather than into product development.

And don't get me wrong, that's fine. But if a company is paying people less because it's pumping as much money as it can back into itself, the creatives have to either demand they get more and slow that process down as a result, or they decide they can live with a lower rate but more opportunities due to more products being outputted.



> I don't know what Evil Hat et al doing with all the extra money they aren't paying writers and artists.



Well, if they're living the high life then you have a point. And characterizing it as "extra money" is, as I pointed out, an assumption on your part. It's not "extra money" if it's put back into the company. Since I've not heard anything about Evil Hat throwing gala parties on their yacht or the like, and most of its employees still have other careers, it seems a matter of different operational and business models due to different goals, capabilities, and outputs. If the money isn't lining Evil Hat's pockets at the expense of writers and artists, then it means it's doing something else.



> I am not sure I have heard anyone ask them and I am not sure they've ever been put in a position where they had to answer.



The only ones able to do that is the people working with them. You and I are just assuming.


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## Zak S

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> How do you figure? Evil Hat has between x2 to x3 the amount of products as LotFP, most of which (it looks to me) have much higher outlay.



Evil Hat aren't spending it on the art, they aren't giving it to the writers, they aren't spending it on the production, so....where?



> Sounds to me more like LotFP is channeling the money into the creatives rather than into product development.




"Product development" literally means paying the creatives.

There isn't a magic "development" machine that you feed quarters into and it produces ideas for you. You pay artists graphic designers and writers to devote time to talking about and thinking about and making the thing.





> And characterizing it as "extra money" is, as I pointed out, an assumption on your part.




Like I said: nobody's ever asked Evil Hat where the money they aren't paying creatives goes and they have never answered.
I know some of it goes to banner ads.




> Since I've not heard anything about Evil Hat throwing gala parties on their yacht or the like,




Why would they advertise all the money they're hoarding and not paying freelancers?


----------



## Steve Conan Trustrum

Zak S said:


> Evil Hat aren't spending it on the art, they aren't giving it to the writers, they aren't spending it on the production, so....where?



Production = product development and inventory output. They have a product catalog that is between 2x and 3x bigger than that of LotFP. Some is PDF but there's also a lot in (expensive quality, in my experience with their physical product) print. That requires money to sustain.



> "Product development" literally means paying the creatives.



That's a component, yes. But it's paying them for NEW product, not putting more money into stuff already on the shelves.

Royalties has its upside and its downside. One of the biggest downsides, from a publisher's perspective, is that if the product succeeds, you can reach a point where the amount you're paying in royalties surpasses the point you would have paid out in a flat fee. So, even a successful product using royalties can mean less money going back into the business.



> There isn't a magic "development" machine that you feed quarters into and it produces ideas for you. You pay artists graphic designers and writers to devote time to talking about and thinking about and making the thing.



Except that's typically not how the creative process works. The artists don't come to the publisher and say "I have this idea I want to talk to you about." The publisher goes to the artist and says "I have this idea, here's my rough art direction, how much to make it happen and how many approval options do I get with your quoted cost?"



> Like I said: nobody's ever asked Evil Hat where the money they aren't paying creatives goes and they have never answered.



Still not seeing why that makes it "extra" money.


> I know some of it goes to banner ads.



Which sounds pretty normal to me.


> Why would they advertise all the money they're hoarding and not paying freelancers?



Hoarding? Really?

Anyone who says that ANY rpg publisher is making enough money to be "hoarding" profits illustrates a rather flawed understanding of both RPG publishing and the RPG market.


----------



## Zak S

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> Production = product development and inventory output. They have a product catalog that is between 2x and 3x bigger than that of LotFP. Some is PDF but there's also a lot in (expensive quality, in my experience with their physical product) print. That requires money to sustain.




Unless you're claiming that Evil Hat has less money than LotFP at any given moment, what's the point here? 

And if they _do_ have less money, then you're simply saying that Evil Hat's freelancers are paying the price for Evil Hat's mismanagement of their business. They sell a zillion more copies and have been around longer yet somehow have less cash?





> Royalties has its upside and its downside. One of the biggest downsides, from a publisher's perspective, is that if the product succeeds, you can reach a point where the amount you're paying in royalties surpasses the point you would have paid out in a flat fee. So, even a successful product using royalties can mean less money going back into the business.




That's not a* risk *of how LotFP royalties work, *that is how the royalty deals work on purpose: LotFP pays a flat fee equal or greater than Evil Hat or Green Ronin and then pays royalties on top of that.*

And yet STILL they produce books with more money invested into the art writing binding printing etc than Evil Hat and Green Ronin.



> Except that's typically not how the creative process works. The artists don't come to the publisher and say "I have this idea I want to talk to you about." The publisher goes to the artist and says "I have this idea, here's my rough art direction, how much to make it happen and how many approval options do I get with your quoted cost?"




1. Both of those things happen all the time. Vornheim and Maze of the Blue Medusa and Veins of the Earth happened the first way, Red & Pleasant Land, Frostbitten and Mutilated and many other products happened the second way.

2. Your whole point was that "paying for development" meant something other than "paying the artists and writers to make a thing" and that isn't true at all. The whole process you just described is "paying artists and writers to make a thing"



> Still not seeing why that makes it "extra" money.




EVil Hat& Green Ronin make more money than Lotfp.

Evil Hat & Green Ronin spend less money on the writing and art and binding, printing, etc than LotFP.

(If not, where is any evidence of this? When have any of their books matched the indestructible gold-embossed clothbound extravaganzas LotFP put out?)

So there is money they are pocketing that LotFP isn't. Call it "extra" or whatever you like.

It's money they could use to make the products better for customers and fairer to their creators that they do not use for that purpose.

There's nothing wrong with any of this if:

1. consumers are ok with product that is less well-produced than the publisher can afford and

2. if the creators are ok with being paid less than they could be and 

3. if both are ok with the results of what underpaid freelancers are pumping out for (literally in terms of US cost-of-living) poverty-line wages at per-word rates guaranteed to make them want to express every idea in the least efficient way possible using the most words in order to either line the pockets of the publisher or be spent on some mysterious business expense that shows nowhere in the finished product 

...but I bet lots of people aren't ok with that.


----------



## Zak S

The US poverty line in 2017 Thresholds:

One person     $13,860
Two people    $18,670
Three people    $23,480

At Evil Hate/Green Ronin rates, producing 500-1000 usable words per work day, every week, all week no time off, a game designer would make 6500-13000$ a year. Well below the poverty line

Meanwhile the publishers are somehow happily cruising along as full-time game publishers with no need for a second job.

And the high end (still below the poverty line for a single person with no kids) _1000 good RPG words a day _and _working every work day is_ not easy and probably barely sutainable.

I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest freelancers could describe this as "unfair".

I don't think it's unreasonable to say many RPG customers would describe the work currently being made under these conditions as disappointing.

Evil Hat and Ronin's excuse is that it has to be this way. They couldn't possibly pay people more or make better product.

LotFP and other OSR/DIY RPG companies are proving that is not true.


----------



## Steve Conan Trustrum

Zak S said:


> Unless you're claiming that Evil Hat has less money than LotFP at any given moment, what's the point here?



The point is that business sustainment is a real thing that money must go into, more so when you don't have another job to support you. Green Ronin, as per your example, has a MUCH larger overhead than either Evil Hat or LotFP. And, although Green Ronin has full-time staff, I'd place safe money on them not living the Kardashian lifestyle as a result.

Not all businesses function the same. Just because you can point at LotFP and it's pay rate doesn't mean everyone who pays less is being unfair to their talents. Sure, some may be, but it's not a given. All of those businesses operate in different ways. Does James Edward Raggi IV have another job, for example, or is LotFP his only source of income?



> And if they _do_ have less money, then you're simply saying that Evil Hat's freelancers are paying the price for Evil Hat's mismanagement of their business. They sell a zillion more copies and have been around longer yet somehow have less cash?



That's why it's important to know the difference between gross and net profit. Having higher outlay =/= mismanagement.

Frankly, I don't know why it is, but I'm going to guess between your constant use of Evil Hat as an example and your loaded language and assumptions, you're concerned about proving some sort of personal point about them rather than actually discussing the financial realities of publishing.

[quoteThat's not a* risk *of how LotFP royalties work, *that is how they work on purpose: LotFP pays a flat fee and then pays royalties on top of that.*[/quote]From a publisher's perspective, it is an actual risk. Here's an example from my own company:

I have a popular supplement for Mutants and Masterminds. It's one of the most well-known and best-selling 3pp products for the system: Better Mousetrap. It was published under a royalties split model with its sole artist, Eric Lofgren, for the 2nd edition rules. It was a great deal because, at the time of that initial edition, I didn't have much money to work with as a budget, and certainly not enough to pay Eric a flat fee rate to illustrate and color all of this large book's art. It was a good deal for both of us based entirely on Eric's trust in me, as his income was 100% royalty based. When 3e came out, I went back and put time into rewriting this 150k+ word book, converting all the rules, redoing layout, remarketing, etc. That's a lot of work from the publisher's end. From Eric's perspective, he had to do a new cover and about 10 new art pieces. Everything else was carried over from the original, so not nearly as much work, but because the old art was being used, the old royalty agreement stands. So, from a publisher's perspective, using royalties for the art represents a clearly diminishing ROI from an effort perspective alone. But that's not all.

Better Mousetrap 3e surpassed the sales of its previous edition. It's now WAY past the point that it could have covered Eric's total art flat rate fees. But because he gets paid based on royalties, I keep taking money out of profits and giving them to Eric. This not only means less money in my pocket for all the additional work I put into the new edition, but it means less money going back into Misfit Studios for new products. Royalties, from a publisher's perspective, is an unending process of diminishing returns.

I've followed up Better Mousetrap, both in second and third editions, with my next most popular supplement, Metahuman Martial Arts. This book is even bigger and has more art, thus requires more time, but used stock art and art purchased on a flat fee basis. It's more niche and doesn't sell as well, in either 2e or 3e, but because my outlay is already long since paid, it makes far more money for Misfit Studios than does Better Mousetrap because my margin per sale is larger for the lack of still needing to pay someone else each sale.

The decision to go with royalties made sense at the time it was made but, future thinking-wise it was a mistake for Misfit Studios. I don't regret the decision, because i have a great relationship with Eric and it resulted in a good product, but purely from a business perspective, it's proven to be a bad risk that isn't paying off.



> So as soon as an LotFP book sells well it is automatically paying more total than they would with a flat fee.



This here? This thing you just said?

This is where there is risk to the publisher. Intentions and good will aside, anything that increases costs is a risk to the business.

By definition.

The less money going back into the business, the less likely it is to be able to sustain itself against the unexpected, such as the rising costs of production if the paper market suddenly takes a hit or if another Wizard's Attic happens.



> 1. Both of those things happen all the time. Vornheim and Maze of the Blue Medusa and Veins of the Earth happened the first way, Red & Pleasant Land, Frostbitten and Mutilated and many other products happened the second way.



No, not "all the time."

The first is an outlier with most publishers. Most publishers develop product concepts in house and then look externally for the actual work to get done. Most publishers absolutely do not accept and then publish pitches as much as they do internally developed products.



> 2. Your whole point was that "paying for development" meant something other than "paying the artists and writers to make a thing" and that isn't true at all. The whole process you just described is "paying artists and writers to make a thing"



Yes, although it may be a surprise to some, there are costs involved with product development other than paying the artists and writers.



> EVil Hat& Green Ronin make more money than Lotfp.



Sure, we can assume that in both gross and net.



> Evil Hat & Green Ronin spend less money on the writing and art and binding, printing, etc than LotFP.



Yes on the former rates, but the latter isn't the same. All three companies produce print products with quality binding and paper. "Paying less" can be as simple as getting more for their money because they make larger orders with their printer. That "less" is actually purchasing value for the company and its market.



> So there is money they are pocketing that LotFP isn't. Call it "extra" or whatever you like.



(again with the loaded language)

How do you know they are "pocketing" it?

Green Ronin has facilities and full-time staff to pay. The fact that their lower freelance rates reflects this isn't the same as "pocketing" money, "extra" or otherwise. It's a matter of the actual cost of doing business on a different scale than LotFP. (But the implication that it's not cool for the publishers to also try and make a living wage is kind of a real crappy perspective to take as a default position.)



> It's money they could use to make the products better and fairer to their creators that they do not use for that purpose.



Only if we agree with your assumption they are "pocketing" it.



> There's nothing wrong with any of this if:
> 
> 1. consumers are ok with product that is less well-produced than the publisher can afford and



Well, I don't track Evil Hat as much, but people seem pretty happy with Green Ronin's product quality.



> 2. if the creators are ok with being paid less than they could be and



Having worked with Green Ronin, and knowing people who do, I'll also say that while people may always hope to earn more, they'll also work for the existing opportunities and be happy about it.



> 3. if both are ok with the results of what underpaid freelancers are pumping out for (literally in terms of US cost-of-living) poverty-line wages at per-word rates guaranteed to make them want to express every idea in the least efficient way possible using the most words in order to either line the pockets of the publisher or be spent on some mysterious business expense that shows nowhere in the finished product



Talents are "underpaid" by most RPG publishers because of the market and customers, not because of the publishers. 

Low talent rates are the result of customers complaining and moaning that they aren't still paying the same price for product in 2018 as they were in 2000, coupled with an overall shrinking market, while talent rates increase. That's just the facts of the economics. For example, every single time Misfit Studios has tried raising a price to match economic shifts, there's been backlash over it and sales go down. So then it becomes a juggling game of whether the increased price is enough to bring in more money with fewer sales or if it's been raised to the point where it's just too high.

Every.

Time.

I've taken a small PDF product line with a cost of $1.55 per (with a profit of $1 per sale to me) up to $1.99 to accommodate art cost increases. Sales immediately dropped as a result and I was sent more than a few messages about how I was "ripping off" my loyal customers. Keep in mind that this price increase happened after the product line was 5 years old, so there were legitimate economic shifts to address. The result was that, in order to sustain the product line, I had to use original art less and stock art more just to maintain my own take away of $1 per sale, as the person doing the writing, layout, logistics, and marketing (you know, everything except the art; sometimes also including colouring the art myself.) This outcome doesn't exactly benefit freelancers either unless they happen to be the ones selling the stock art, because the result is missing job opportunities. And it's not like that $1 per sale I'm sustaining has the same value today as it did 5 years ago. 

Because these are the realities of publishing beyond the perspective of freelancers alone.

There is a smaller market, that market wants to pay prices that are 20 years old, and freelancers expect rates that keep pace with the changing economy.

One of these things is not like the others.

Again, LotFP may pay great rates but is James Edward Raggi IV still doing other work to help pay expenses? Does his company have an office and full-time staff? How much of the work is he doing himself to reduce costs rather than "just" being the publisher? And on the projects he does the writing for, does he pay himself as he would any other writer or is he taking his compensation as writer out of the income he also takes as the publisher (as is the case with most small press)?



> ...but I bet lots of people aren't ok with that.



Then they won't work for those companies and will all go work for LotFP ...

... except they can't because, due to their higher rates, LotFP has less money to put into new product development and thus presents fewer opportunities for projects.

Because that's how businesses operate.


----------



## Zak S

> Talents are "underpaid" by most RPG publishers because of the market and customers, not because of the publishers.




Except not at Lotfp.

Or at Satyr Press.

Or at other little OSR/DIY RPG presses that call me up and pay me way more than the 3-5 cents a word that Green Ronin and Evil Hat can offer.

Just like the publishers at Green Ronin and Evil Hat, James at LotFP has no other job.

They all live off their publishing.

And yet:

Green Ronin and Evil Hat make more money yet LotFP spends more on books and more on creators.

So *either*:

A) the big indies are "pocketing" that money (and not spending it on making the product better)

or 

b) their business practices are--from the point of view of creators and customers--*worse* than LotFP & Cos and they are just finding ways to waste it that don't improve product

If it's because have more overhead? They should get rid of it then. It clearly isn't doing anyone any good except maybe their landlord.


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## Steve Conan Trustrum

Zak S said:


> Except not at Lotfp.



Again ... is the owner also working another job? No? Good for him. Now, are you going to argue that is the standard in our industry?



> Or at Satyr Press.



And I'm truly glad they can afford to pay more.

But consider, given what I stated above and you ignored, that may be part of the reason why 99% of the RPG market has never heard of them.



> Or at other little OSR/DIY RPG presses that call me up and pay me way more than the 3-5 cents a word that Green Ronin and Evil Hat can offer.



Again, would those be more OSR/DIY RPG presses that are competing within a niche within a niche and most of the market has never heard of? Thus they don't have the same costs as companies that are competing in larger waters?



> Just like the publishers at Green Ronin and Evil Hat, James at LotFP has no other job.



Great. It's always good news when a small press guy can go full-time.

And it's good to hear he's also paying for facilities, other full-time staff, licensing, etc., no?



> They all live off their publishing.



And clearly in the high life because of all they are pocketing, correct?



> And yet:
> 
> Green Ronin and Evil Hat make more money yet LotFP spends more on books and more on creators.



I'll give you LotFP pays more on its creatives, but you're guessing at paying more on its books. Green Ronin probably pays less per unit, but that's because they are buying in larger numbers. They also use glossy paper and lots of hard bounds. Despite paying less per unit, it's a safe bet their overall costs for publication and inventory maintenance are substantially higher than LotFP.



> So *either*:
> 
> A) the big indies are "pocketing" that money (and not spending it on making the product better)
> 
> or
> 
> b) their business practices are--from the point of view of creators and customers--*worse* than LotFP & Cos and they are just finding ways to waste it that don't improve product



or c) there is actually such a thing as scale of economics in business.



> If it's because have more overhead? They should get rid of it then. It clearly isn't doing anyone any good except maybe their landlord.



So ... you're advocating that they fire people in order to pay freelancers more? That they output less product and not keep up with their demand? That also sounds like poor business. Because you don't seem to realize that "overhead" includes other people and the cost of sustainment. The bigger the company, necessarily the more money it requires to sustain its operations.

Ultimately, here's the thing that brings this all back to the original question in the topic:

"What's a Freelance RPG Writer Worth?"

The answer is, simply, more than the RPG industry at large can afford.

The industry, by and large, hasn't been able to keep its prices at a pace with the economy. Why? Because they are a luxury good in a small niche market that only keeps shrinking. Product runs are much smaller than they were a decade ago, and a decade before that, and reliance on digital product is rising. Even then, customers measure value based on faulty perceptions like "it shouldn't cost that much if I'm not paying for paper." So, price shfits have been small, if at all, over the past 20 years.

But the cost of living goes up.

So, when you say things like artists and writers deserve a living wage? I agree. They deserve it. But if they want it, the RPG market isn't the place to go. This is objectively true by the very simple fact that 99% of the people paying them can't make a living wage in the market. Outliers at LotFP are able to pay more but it comes at the cost of not actually being able to compete in the core market. The industry is driven by people who need other jobs to sustain their households while also doing RPG publishing. That's just the economic truths of our market. Thus the joke "how do you make a small fortune in the RPG industry? Start with a big fortune."

RPG publishers don't pay rates that are much smaller than in other industries because they want to. They aren't "pocketing" or "hoarding" it as you suggest. That's just ridiculous, and you keep using that language because, as the conversation continues, you've clearly got a reason to specifically give black eyes to Evil Hat and Green Ronin. But positing that "the money is there" and that these publishers are sitting back lighting cigars with dollar bills is just ... silly.

Are there companies that can afford to pay more? Sure. Are there companies that can't? Yes, with even more certainty. Will the model used by LotFP apply to every game publisher? Absolutely not. And arguing that it would is a faulty premise clear to anyone with even the slightest business acumen, let alone experience publishing RPGs, because the differences between who those businesses are, where they are, who they are, and the scale they operate at -- SHOCK! -- have actual, practical implications that influence their financials.


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## Zak S

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> So ... you're advocating that they fire people in order to pay freelancers more? That they output less product and not keep up with their demand? That also sounds like poor business.




I do advocate that.

And it's only bad if you're *not* the creator (who gets paid more) and *not* the consumer (who gets a better product).

And my sympathies are with them, not with whoever owns or runs the warehouse where some indie publisher keeps thousands of copies of some supplement nobody involved cared about.


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## Steve Conan Trustrum

Zak S said:


> Only if you're *not* the creator (who gets paid more) or *not* the consumer (who gets a better product).
> 
> And my sympathies are with them, not with whoever owns or runs the warehouse some indie publisher keeps thousands of copies of some supplement nobody involved cared about.



Yes ...

... because, oddly, RPG publishers are not psychically able to predict the future and know with absolute certainty how well a product will do before placing an order with the printer. And they continue to store product to sell longitudinally to make up their expenses, even if only via liquidation, rather than burning those "failed" books so you can keep your warehousing space down.

But that just bolsters my point:

I'll wager LotFP doesn't have a warehouse. I'd wager any physical product is being kept at a personal storage space or on-site in the publisher's home. Or they are paying to have distribution inventory for them. Why? Because their output doesn't warrant an actual warehousing space. But when a business gets bigger ... say, GR's size ... your output is such that you can't inventory in your basement any more. So you buy a space that has to fit your current need but also has to be a bit future thinking. Which is a standing expense and a risk, both.

Because running a competative business means taking those sorts of risks. Risks that have costs. And do you know what happens if you just stop taking the sort of risks that have sustained your business? Your business is stagnant, if not unsustainable. LotFP is almost certainly only able to pay what it does because it hasn't yet stepped up to the sort of level where it has the sort of risks and outlay as does a company like GR. It's a lot harder to pay absolute monthly bills that come with maintaining salaries and facilities when your income is always in the sort of additional flux that comes with always paying royalties rather than set expenses that only appear in your ledgers once.


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## Zak S

What you're saying is "these bigger companies have to pay creators less and consequently create worse product because they are big".

So clearly smaller is better both creatively and ethically.

So be smaller.


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## Steve Conan Trustrum

Zak S said:


> So clearly smaller is better.
> 
> Be smaller.



For the freelancers, I guess.

Kinda sucks for everyone else.

And since the RPG industry isn't sustanied by the freelancers alone (you know ... since they need the people who actually offer them the job opportunities just like the publishers need the people who fill them), well ... let's just say I don't see the whole "let's fire our staff and stop fulfilling orders so we can downsize and pay writers and artists more" busines model happening market-wide anytime soon.

Because your entire premise depends on the assumption on your part that if people aren't doing business like LotFP is, the only reasons are they are either wasting money or hoarding it to their own unfair benefit. Your points repeatedly rely on circumstances that ignore the basic principles of running a business in general, let alone a larger RPG publisher, which is probably why you don't address these points in your replies, instead cherry picking the ones that allow you to return to your previous refrain without saying anything new.

EDIT: 







> What you're saying is "these bigger companies have to produce worse product and pay freelancers less because they're big"



While it's true that lower rates may come with a bigger business and the accompanying expenses, I've not said anything about worse product. You keep returning to that point without explaining why it is you objectively think GR and Evil Hat have "worse product." Considering I've got products from both companies, all of which are on high grade paper and with good binding that hasn't failed, I'm wondering where that accusation arises from and why you think I've been saying it's an expected outcome.

And the reason why, seemingly paradoxically, larger businesses may only be able to afford less is that, on the scale of economies, they have moved beyond the point of flexibility that a company with smaller outlay (e.g., LotFP) has, but not yet surpassed the point where their net profits allow them to pay more. It's an incredibly common place for small businenesses to find themselves operating in any industry, let alone RPG publishers.


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## Zak S

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> For the freelancers, I guess.
> 
> Kinda sucks for everyone else.




Not the customer--they get multi-award winning, fantastic product instead of unloved stuff pumped out to meet demand.

I haven't cherry-picked anything. 

The following addresses every point you've made, which all just goes to support one idea:

"
What you're saying is "these bigger companies have to pay creators less and consequently create worse product because they are big".

So clearly smaller is better both creatively and ethically.

So be smaller.
"

If you _need_ to be ethically and creatively bankrupt to run a large RPG business--_don't run a large RPG business._


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## Starfox

Morrus said:


> Royalties are unfair, yes. Good for them.




I'm not saying Purple Duck are right, I merely wanted to point out that this happens. Different takes for different folks. When i was brand new, I wanted a royalty, because I overestimated the spash I would make. Telling a new writer like me that this was unrealistic and putting my feet back on the ground was a good thing, in my mind.

Publishers, particularly the small publishers, are struggling. Their struggles are important part of keeping this business alive. I feel they are all heroic, all of them. All of us may not agree with what all of them are doing, but in one way or another, we're in this together. I believe there's a synergy, that the more products are made, the bigger the business as a whole can get. But this does not mean every product will sell. A specific part of the idea behind the original OGL was that every 3rd party product is effectively a promotion of the leading product. In my mind, that applies outside the scope of any particular ruleset too - yes, the market gets divided more and more, but it also grows. 

Sorry if I am sounding grumpy today, I'm ill. Nobody take any of this personally, please.


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## Steve Conan Trustrum

Zak S said:


> Not the customer--they get multi-award winning, fantastic product instead of unloved stuff pumped out to meet demand.



Except that both companies you keep using as your examples as "ethically and creatively bankrupt" have also won awards, are much loved by their customers, and also meet demand.

But the demand is much larger because their businesses are operating at a level where the core market knows they even exist.



> I haven't cherry-picked anything.



Yes you have. I'll even grant that maybe you don't realize it because your approach to business is so limited and binary in its scope of perspective (in so far as, yes, you actually only ever give two possible options in your examples of business operations), but you certainly are cherry-picking.



> The following addresses every point you've made, which all just goes to support one idea:



No, you really haven't. It could be that's because of your singular, tunnel-vision perspective of how you think publishing businesss do/should operate, but the outcome is that you have not addressed all my points, regardless. You just pass them by and repeat your previous point, thinking that your perspective is self-evident because you can name a few companies most of the industry isn't even aware of as examples of how you think things should be industry-wide. To you, the word "outlier" doesn't seem to be a thing that actually exists.



> If you _need_ to be ethically and creatively bankrupt to run a large RPG business--_don't run a large RPG business._



If only running a business could actually be couched in such binary thinking. Reality doesn't work like that, however. The fact that you believe it does, though, is the crux of why you believe you've addressed all my points rather than just bypassing them with your refrain. And the fact that you think any business that doesn't run as you expect is "ethically and creatively bankrupt" says far more against your agument than it does in support of it.


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## Zak S

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> Except that both companies you keep using as your examples as "ethically and creatively bankrupt" have also won awards, are much loved by their customers, and also meet demand.




Well which argument are you making here:

-These companies that don't put much money into their books but make lots of money somehow miraculously manage to make good books anyway. And publishers making living wages while paying freelancers subpoverty wages is ethical.

-Ok, fine, they don't manage to make books that are that good and paying freelancers subpoverty wages is unethical but they have no choice because they are large RPG businesses so its unavoidable.

?




> but you certainly are cherry-picking.




Then, if you can, please restate which of your points is not addressed by the summary "These companies are bigger than LotFP therefore have to adopt these practices you don't like". Because I honestly in good faith cannot find them.

If you do then I'd be happy to address those concerns.

LotFP is obviously an outlier. People have done well for their customers and creative people copying that outlier's model. So: do that.

If you can't: do something else, like crowdfund and self-publish.

But don't do the thing where you pay people 3-5 cents a word and make more money than they do. Anything but that.


----------



## Steve Conan Trustrum

Zak S said:


> Well which argument are you making here:
> 
> -These companies that don't put much money into their books but make lots of money somehow miraculously manage to make good books anyway. And publishers making living wages while paying freelancers subpoverty wages is ethical.
> 
> -Ok, fine, they don't manage to make books that are that good and paying freelancers subpoverty wages is unethical but they have no choice because they are large RPG businesses so its unavoidable.



Remember when I said you were stuck in a realm of binaries because your examples of business operations only present two possiblities?



> Then, if you can, please restate which of your points is not addressed by the summary "These companies are bigger than LotFP therefore have to adopt these practices you don't like". Because I honestly in good faith cannot find them.



My point is that businesses of different scales of operations have different realties governing how they run. These logistical and financial facts are the things you attribute to ethics, waste, hoarding, etc.

See my previous post about a company that is stuck between two sets of goalposts, for example.



> But don't do the thing where you pay people 3-5 cents a word and make more money than they do. Anything but that



First off, the idea that publishers can't earn more than their freelancers without being unethical is a false narrative. If I, as a publisher, pay a fantastic flat fee but don't end up making much (as in I don't pull in as much as if I had paid myself as a writer at my offered writer rates) I'm an ethical publisher, but if I pay that same fantastic flat fee but the product ends up taking off to the point that I make triple what my fantastic flat fee was, I'm now unethical?

My point would be to pay as much as you can while still keeping the business sustainable. If your pay rate to freelancers is such that it begins to cause the publisher to treat itself unfairly (e.g., it has to pass on opportunities), that is itself a problem. But your stance hasn't addressed that, and when I've brought it up you've not responded to it beyond saying that reaching for those opportunities or maintaining sustainability, at a cost to the freelancer that typically also comes at a cost and a risk to the publisher, is therefore unethical or mismanagement.


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## JimLotFP

Owner of LotFP here. To clear up some things that have been brought up:

Yes, I work out of my apartment and warehouse my books here. I have an extra room solely for that storage, and there are around 10,000 books and a few hundred t-shirts in there. I could have gotten a smaller apartment and then rented offsite space for the inventory, absolutely, but what a pain in the ass that would be for various reasons. It's here because it is easier. I write off all that square meterage as part of my home office deduction. (Similarly, a large number of books are warehoused in the US for distribution, because due my not being on the same continent as my distribution partners, it doesn't make sense to have my own space in the US, and it's much cheaper sending lots of books all at once across the ocean than on demand.)

It's conceivable that I'll need offsite warehousing here. Maybe even this year if certain projects get completed and released. Maybe someday I'll even need to get a proper office and actual employees that need to go there to work.

But the thing is, those things will be made necessary by the increased business activity of more releases and more sales. They'd have to pay for themselves. Or else it would be absolute insanity to take those steps and have that new business infrastructure.

I can't see how I could ever tell someone "Oh, our business has grown and we've got all these expenses to deal with, so you people who make the stuff that make the growth possible have to get paid less." 

There are 33 projects in various stages of production over here at LotFP. Some of the people writing them got advances. Most didn't. If they start getting delivered in clusters, that may create a bottleneck as I'd have to pay for a bunch of art and layout etc at once (mostly those are negotiated one-time fees, as I consider the author to be the "creator" and everyone else involved is working from their creation). That's going to happen hopefully this summer as several projects are waiting on a particular rules supplement to be finished and tested because they need to reference those rules. Maybe books will have to be prioritized, but that just means books will need to be released in succession rathan than a pile all at once.

But the idea that I need a bunch of money to start projects just isn't true once I established that the royalty model I use tends to pay out multiple times what freelancers get from the big companies.

And I see it as a total point of pride when people who make stuff for me make two or three times (or more!) what they've made working with companies like Wizards of the Coast. When they pass the point of what they would have made with a flat-fee payment, I am happy. Happy the system is working for all of us. Happy I can tell creators that LotFP is a place you can come to make money. (And win awards, as it turns out.) Happy that I get to make a living facilitating the release of all this cool stuff.

If they don't make more with me than they would have elsewhere, then I have failed them. Their jobs aren't to make money for me. It's my job to make money for them. Or else why would they do anything for me instead of for someone else, or on their own?

And as time has passed, more and more projects are produced using the royalty model and I don't think it's a coincidence that the business has also grown, in terms of both units sold and money earned, every year.

(The only projects that haven't pulled a nice profit have been those crowdfunded books that were budgeted and commissioned at specific wordcounts... and the author totally blew the wordcount, sometimes two or three times more than what they were commissioned for. And I just went with it, even though at that point hundreds of people had already paid for what was supposed to be a lot smaller book. But I couldn't pay the authors any more than promised, so on those projects the per-word rate is quite low, although I do give them a cut of the PDF sales.)

I don't know a thing about the business workings at places like Evil Hat and Green Ronin. But I do know if they are larger and more successful companies than LotFP, the people who make their stuff should get paid more than the people who make LotFP stuff. (And I hope, if we could start comparing like to like, such as the definition of "creator", that they are.) What else is even the point of being a larger company?


----------



## Steve Conan Trustrum

JimLotFP said:


> It's conceivable that I'll need offsite warehousing here. Maybe even this year if certain projects get completed and released. Maybe someday I'll even need to get a proper office and actual employees that need to go there to work.



And you understand those costs come out of somewhere, yes?

As in you either need to ramp up sales to absorb the expenses in your margin, you need to cut back on what you're paying, or you need to put less into the business.

You factually cannot increase layout without that money coming from somewhere. Which is my point.



> But the thing is, those things will be made necessary by the increased business activity of more releases and more sales. They'd have to pay for themselves. Or else it would be absolute insanity to take those steps and have that new business infrastructure.



But again we're not talking binaries here.

One of your projects worked out to $0.21/word after royalties, yes?

Well, if it works out to $0.19/word, or $0.15/word, or $0.05/word due to an increase in expenses, it's still "paying for itself." "Paying for itself" is any point where people are actually putting money in their pockets beyond expenses.



> I can't see how I could ever tell someone "Oh, our business has grown and we've got all these expenses to deal with, so you people who make the stuff that make the growth possible have to get paid less."



And where will the money be coming from? Because if you think you'll deal with more expenses while maintaining current rates etc., that money has to come from somewhere. If you think the answer is as simple as "sales," then what happens when you reach the point I mentioned upthread?: business growth plateaus between sustainability and further expansion. This is a point where your business either needs external infusions of cash or you need to cut expenses to keep growing because you can't reach further market growth at your current output levels, and you can't increase output levels without paying more using money that comes from ... somewhere.



> There are 33 projects in various stages of production over here at LotFP. Some of the people writing them got advances. Most didn't. If they start getting delivered in clusters, that may create a bottleneck as I'd have to pay for a bunch of art and layout etc at once (mostly those are negotiated one-time fees, as I consider the author to be the "creator" and everyone else involved is working from their creation). That's going to happen hopefully this summer as several projects are waiting on a particular rules supplement to be finished and tested because they need to reference those rules. Maybe books will have to be prioritized, but that just means books will need to be released in succession rathan than a pile all at once.



Which is a model you're able to accomodate. But understand, as I've previously pointed out, you're describing how your payment structure influences your output in ways that are detrimental to larger companies. What you describe is not something businesses with salaried positions, set monthly expenses (e.g., warehousing) can easily afford to tango with.



> But the idea that I need a bunch of money to start projects just isn't true once I established that the royalty model I use tends to pay out multiple times what freelancers get from the big companies.



Which works great for you.

Honestly, do you consider it an industry-wide model for sustainability, especially for companies with set expenses? Because you've been able to keep at it now because this same model keeps your business low risk. What happens when your operations scale up to the point where you have more risk but this part of it means less certainty?



> And I see it as a total point of pride when people who make stuff for me make two or three times (or more!) what they've made working with companies like Wizards of the Coast. When they pass the point of what they would have made with a flat-fee payment, I am happy. Happy the system is working for all of us. Happy I can tell creators that LotFP is a place you can come to make money. (And win awards, as it turns out.) Happy that I get to make a living facilitating the release of all this cool stuff.



Which is great. No one is disputing that it works for you or that it benefits the freelancers working with you.

The point at hand is that not everyone who doesn't pay what you do does so because they are "unethical" or "hoarding" their money rather than paying freelancers more. The point is also that not all businesses can operate under your model.



> If they don't make more with me than they would have elsewhere, then I have failed them. Their jobs aren't to make money for me. It's my job to make money for them. Or else why would they do anything for me instead of for someone else, or on their own?



Which is a great mentality to have, but let's be honest: it's the sort of approach to business you can afford before you stretch your wings into the world of larger operations and greater risk. It's easy to say your business is not your primary concern when you're mostly piggybacking it off personal resources. Don't take that as a dig at what you're doing, but it's a fact of what your business is and how it accomodates your philosophy versus a company that also adds in "oh, and paying all those logistical bills also need to be taken care of."



> And as time has passed, more and more projects are produced using the royalty model and I don't think it's a coincidence that the business has also grown, in terms of both units sold and money earned, every year.



Sure, but as you state yourself you're still absorbing many costs with personal resources (e.g., you home) and the good will of the people working with you. Because that's what any royalty-based system relies upon: the providers trust and faith in your ability to deliver. A flat rate is what it is and people can walk away knowing what they get. So far you've a good record with delivering, but it is possible for you to reach a point where you can't deliver on those expctations and that damages that faith. 



> I don't know a thing about the business workings at places like Evil Hat and Green Ronin. But I do know if they are larger and more successful companies than LotFP, the people who make their stuff should get paid more than the people who make LotFP stuff. (And I hope, if we could start comparing like to like, such as the definition of "creator", that they are.) What else is even the point of being a larger company?



See my previous post about larger business =/= more money to spread around. It is very easy to have a "big" small business and actually have less net worth than one guy publishing out of his apartment.


----------



## Zak S

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> Remember when I said you were stuck in a realm of binaries because your examples of business operations only present two possiblities?




Pointing out that you've moved goalposts from argument A to argument B isn't being "stuck in a realm of binaries"

Pointing out that companies like Evil Hat and Green Ronin and those who pay 3-5 cents per word has made decisions that are worse for creators and audiences than LotFP and companies that find ways to pay people more isn't being "stuck in a realm of binaries". It's contrasting 2 different ways of doing business, of which one is better.



> My point is that businesses of different scales of operations have different realties governing how they run. These logistical and financial facts are the things you attribute to ethics, waste, hoarding, etc.




That is just a way of rewording what I already said: 

"These companies are bigger than LotFP therefore have to adopt these practices you don't like".



> First off, the idea that publishers can't earn more than their freelancers without being unethical is a false narrative. If I, as a publisher, pay a fantastic flat fee but don't end up making much (as in I don't pull in as much as if I had paid myself as a writer at my offered writer rates) I'm an ethical publisher, but if I pay that same fantastic flat fee but the product ends up taking off to the point that I make triple what my fantastic flat fee was, I'm now unethical?




Let's start with an important fact:

We are not discussing companies that pay a "fantastic" flat fee.

We are discussing companies (Evil Hat, Green Ronin, their ilk) that pay a subpoverty level flat fee.

And "triple" doesn't describe the difference between the subpoverty wages they're paying and the amount these people are keeping.

So, rewording:

"If I, as a publisher, pay a terrible flat fee but don't end up making much (as in I don't pull in as much as if I had paid myself as a writer at my offered writer rates) I'm an ethical publisher, but if I pay that same terrible flat fee but the product ends up taking off to the point that I make (probably way more than triple because even triple would be barely minimum wage and the publishers are making way more than that) what my terrible fee was, I'm now unethical?"

_Bingo_.

The *creator* should benefit from their *creation*. 

If DC has some product (say: Superman) that Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster have done the creative work on then but DC's benefitting from this arrangement more than Jerry and Joe because the product did better than they expected and Jerry and Joe took a bad split because they wanted to eat, then when the business takes off, the ethical thing for DC to do is to ignore how the law says it can technically benefit wildly from Jerry and Joe's desperate situation and cut them in on the deal.

And the end result of that would be that Jerry and Joe stick around and happily do more good work for DC's fanbase.

If Jerry and Joe are at a ripe age sitting over a desk making Junior Woodchuck comics until their fingers are falling off while DC is rolling in dough from Superman, this situation is unethical.



> My point would be to pay as much as you can while still keeping the business sustainable.




If the business is only sustainable by paying *creators* subpoverty wages and making bad product for *customers* that business does not need to be kept "sustainable". It should stop existing.


----------



## Steve Conan Trustrum

Zak S said:


> Pointing out that you've moved goalposts from argument A to argument B isn't being "stuck ina realm of binaries"



I haven't moved goal posts. I've actually conceeded where you've made points.

Your continuing inability to understand what I'm talking about, or refusal to see it as possible, does not a moved goalpost make.

You are LITERALLY posting, time and again, just TWO options when you present examples.

TWO.

As in "either / or" ... "this or that" ... "a or b" ... "1 or 0"

You know ... BINARY options.



> Pointing out that company Evil Hat and Green Ronin and those who pay 3-5 cents per word has made decisions that are worse for creators and audiences than LotFP and companies that find ways to pay people more isn't being "stuck in a realm of binaries". It's contrasting 2 different ways of doing business, of which one is better.



So, just so I'm clear on this again ...

When you say "it's contrasting 2 different ways of doing business," which you've presented as the only possible options ...

You're saying you AREN'T stuck on presenting binaries?



> That is just a way of rewording what I already said:
> 
> "These companies are bigger than LotFP therefore have to adopt these practices you don't like".



No, it's not just "rewording it". It's an entirely different context and tone.

Because when you talk about it, you qualify what you "don't like" as therefore being "unethical," "pocketing" money, "extra" (i.e., above and beyond) money, "hoarding", etc.

There is absolutely a distinct difference in what we're saying even if our points cross paths at times and agree on some founding facts.



> _Bingo_.
> 
> The *creator* should benefit from their *creation*.



You benefit when you get paid _any_ amount of money you didn't previously have. If merely _benefiting_ is your benchmark, it's pretty low. I get what you're aiming for, but you're presenting it in a rather narrow, unrealistic manner.

And let's just get really practical here for a second: the way you're intending to present "benefit" goes in a direction where one must therefore conclude all salaried creators are victims of unethical business practices because their pay isn't scaled to the success of their creations. While this CAN be true, based on how much they are paid, it isn't true by default.

So, now let's look at where you're point is failing on another level. When I write for someone in a commercial capacity, yes I'm a creator, but I'm doing so in someone else's sandbox and under their terms, which I can choose to agree to or not. I can say if their terms are fair or not. But I accept I'm working for someone else. What I produce becomes theirs unless I work out something re: IP retention. If I work in construction and "create" a house, I shouldn't have any expectation to earn a share of any rent paid to the property's owner once I'm done at the build site. Do the people who made the clothes you are wearing right now get additional money every time you put them on or is it their responsibility to negotiate a good wage they can accept before they created your clothes?



> If the business is only sustainable by paying *creators* poverty wages and making bad product for *customers* that business does not need to be "sustainable". It should stop existing.



News flash:

99% of the RPG industry isn't sustainable in pure business terms if everyone expects a living wage from it.

Few people who work in it make above a living wage. That's why the norm is for just about every person creating RPGs to have another job. And that includes most people who own most of the RPG companies. And that isn't necessarily because they are bad business people or crookedly mistreating freelancers. That's the nature of the market's relationship with its creators. So, knowing most publishers are working second jobs to keep outputting products, it seems entirely unrealistic to say that freelancers (and I'm saying this as someone who also still freelances) should be the ones everyone else should break their backs over or "stop existing."

If people acted on your view of what this hobby-driven industry came to pass, 99% of publishers would shutter up. 

And, clearly, removing 99% of the job opportunities available in the market is TOTALLY to the benefit of those freelancers, right?

Simple fact: if you're making a living wage in the RPG industry, you're one of the blessed few that have worked through the industry's cracks to become positive outliers. But if you come into the RPG industry EXPECTING to make a living wage, well ... that's just crazy talk.


----------



## Zak S

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> When you say "it's contrasting 2 different ways of doing business," which you've presented as the only possible options ...




I am saying the model Evil Hat and Green Ronin and their ilk have a is worse for customers and creators than LotFP's.

I never said it was the only model.

Since typing more than that clearly has confused things, I am going to wait and see if you acknowledge that before moving on to addressing anything else you've said.

Do you understand that my argument here is "Evil Hat and Green Ronin and their ilk have a model and it's worse for customers and creators than LotFP's model. There are other models"

?


----------



## JimLotFP

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> And you understand those costs come out of somewhere, yes?
> 
> As in you either need to ramp up sales to absorb the expenses in your margin, you need to cut back on what you're paying, or you need to put less into the business.
> 
> You factually cannot increase layout without that money coming from somewhere. Which is my point.




And what I'm saying is that any additional investment in business infrastructure will only happen when an increase in sales justifies it.

With X amount of sales right now, I can sustain the business as it is. I need Z sales to, for example, to afford say an independent office space. Z will be defined as the amount of sales that will allow me to retain my current income, spending on projects and "payroll," AND afford the additional expenses.

Without the rampup in sales, the additional expenditures won't happen. Cutting "payroll," so to speak, sounds to me like the the worst place to cut corners when looking to prop up business expansion.

Doing it the other way around, setting up business infrastructure and then wondering how it's all going to be paid for, is doing it bass ackwards.



Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> business growth plateaus between sustainability and further expansion. This is a point where your business either needs external infusions of cash or you need to cut expenses to keep growing because you can't reach further market growth at your current output levels, and you can't increase output levels without paying more using money that comes from ... somewhere.




If sales plateau, I'd take it as an indication that I shouldn't try to expand any more.



Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> It's easy to say your business is not your primary concern when you're mostly piggybacking it off personal resources.




What personal resources? The only reason I can afford an apartment big enough to both live in and run a business out of is because of the income I get from the business. There is nothing else. (I chose this apartment specifically for its suitability to run the business out of.)


----------



## Steve Conan Trustrum

Zak S said:


> I am saying the model Evil Hat and Green Ronin and their ilk have a is worse for customers and creators than LotFP's.



Worse for creators? For sheert takeaway per word? Sure. I've previously said that. For customers? Well ... you're going to have to explain your reasoning there, just as I previously asked you to explain your "worse product" claim.



> Do you understand that my argument here is "Evil Hat and Green Ronin and their ilk have a model and it's worse for customers and creators than LotFP's model. There are other models"
> 
> ?



Sure.

But for someone who says "there are other models," do you understand that you keep driving at "but if it's not THIS model, it's necessarily wrong."?

And that you pointedly avoid talking about the reasons behind those other models being what they are, including when I provide you with detailed examples from my own company?


----------



## Steve Conan Trustrum

JimLotFP said:


> And what I'm saying is that any additional investment in business infrastructure will only happen when an increase in sales justifies it.
> 
> With X amount of sales right now, I can sustain the business as it is. I need Z sales to, for example, to afford say an independent office space. Z will be defined as the amount of sales that will allow me to retain my current income, spending on projects and "payroll," AND afford the additional expenses.



And I get that. But you're forgeting factor Y: sales aren't likely to always cover Z once you've made that move and invested your company on that path, so you also need A, a cash reserve.

Based on your previous post about not being able to pay everyone up front all the time, I'm going to assume you don't currently work with an operational cash reserve, correct?

Some of the most common reasons small businesses fail is they either expand too early (not your situation), too fast (that would depend on what you do), and because they do so without sufficient planning. Expansion and growth success isn't just about the "sales justifying it." It's about being prepared to look beyond your current sales and where they are driving you. It is about realizing that now, with regular expenses, your currently mutable business model is going to have some very rigid and unforgiving expenses to handle. So, you're not just looking at monthly incomes covering your new office and warehouse, for example, you're looking at creating a cash reserve to account for product delays that interrupt the cash flow, to deal with potential problems with your facilities, for insurance increases, for unforseen property tax increases, for your distributor evaporating overnight with unpaid invoices and stock (e.g., Wizard's Attack), etc. 

Because this is what I'm talking about.

This kind of thing means you would need to take in either a larger percentage per sale than you are now or you'd need to sell a lot more product to build your cash reserve. This is the sort of thing that happens to a business once it leaves the basement and starts acquiring actual business assets and debt. It is how "big" small businesses can be larger than your operation, but actually have a smaller net worth.



> Without the rampup in sales, the additional expenditures won't happen. Cutting "payroll," so to speak, sounds to me like the the worst place to cut corners when looking to prop up business expansion.



Which is how businesses plateau instead of growing. Business growth almost always requires a risk to things like pay and jobs. It's usually unavoidable unless you build a massive cash reserve first or receive an external investment.



> Doing it the other way around, setting up business infrastructure and then wondering how it's all going to be paid for, is doing it bass ackwards.



It sure would be!

... but that's not what I'm saying.




> What personal resources? The only reason I can afford an apartment big enough to both live in and run a business out of is because of the income I get from the business. There is nothing else. (I chose this apartment specifically for its suitability to run the business out of.)



"Personal resource" is something in your name and not your business'. If your business gets into financial or legal trouble, it isn't attached to that issue, for example.


----------



## Zak S

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> Worse for creators? For sheert takeaway per word? Sure. I've previously said that. For customers? Well ... you're going to have to explain your reasoning there, just as I previously asked you to explain your "worse product" claim.




The physical production of LotFP books is better. James prints with a local printer in Finland and produces books that are immediately more impressive than EH or Green Ronin's.

As for the art and writing: if you would like to argue that, even though in recent years LotFP is doing way better than EH or Green Ronin in terms of awards given both by fan vote and industry-insiders, they are actually giving us better art and writing, I'm happy to concede that this is ultimately a matter of taste.

However: the only book by either of them I've ever even _heard_ praised for art or writing content is DC Adventures, which uses art from DC Comics.

If there's buzz about the quality of the work from these publishers (rather than buzz just about people liking the base systems published years ago) then that is news to me.

If you want to say they are actually doing great, innovative work: ok. But until now I was unaware this was any part of your argument.




> do you understand that you keep driving at "but if it's not THIS model, it's necessarily wrong."?




If that is the impression you had of my pov, then I apologize for not being clear. That is not the idea I meant to express. 

I meant to express the idea that if it *is* the Green Ronin/Evil Hat model it necessarily *is* wrong.



> And that you pointedly avoid talking about the reasons behind those other models being what they are, including when I provide you with detailed examples from my own company?




My comments were about LotFP as compared to some conspicuously successful companies (Evil Hat's sales figures and profits were released by the owner, Green Ronin has its DC book in every local game store I've seen) who pay subpoverty wages.

Any reference to companies outside that situation (successful indie, published other people, subpoverty wages) is outside the scope of the thing I came to this thread to point out.

If you would like to discuss some other companies besides these companies I am referring to, that is a separate discussion.


----------



## Zak S

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> Which is how businesses plateau instead of growing.




You keep talking as if businesses growing is preferable to them putting out anything worth using.


----------



## Steve Conan Trustrum

Zak S said:


> The physical production of LotFP books is better. James prints with a local printer in Finland and produces books that are immediately more impressive than EH or Green Ronin's.



I am quite happy with, and have never had any problems with either GR or EH products, so I'll just take your word for it.



> As for the art and writing: if you would like to argue that, even though in recent years LotFP is doing way better than EH or Green Ronin in terms of awards given both by fan vote and industry-insiders, they are actually giving us better art and writing, I'm happy to concede that this is ultimately a matter of taste.



Yeah, I'll chalk that one up to taste. I'm not a fan of a lot of the art style I see in many LotFP products, for instance, but love a lot of the art I've seen in GR books.



> However: the only book by either of them I've ever even _heard_ praised for art or writing content is DC Adventures, which uses art from DC Comics.



I've seen plenty of compliments over the art in GR's Freeport and MnM products.



> If there's buzz about the quality of the work from these publishers (rather than buzz just about people liking the base systems published years ago) then that is news to me.



But not to me, but I'm also deply entrenched in MnM communities and the like.



> If you want to say they are actually doing great, innovative work: ok. But until now I was unaware this was any part of your argument.



Innovative =/= quality. They can still be doing excellent source material for MnM, for example, without innovating new aspects to it. One of its strengths, in fact, is that you can take the core book and just run with that.

And the difference between those markets and, say, LotFP's is that LotFP thrives from serving a divergent niche in the market that is saying "I want something that innovates away from what most people are asking for."

The fact that GR keeps a larger group of people happy by giving them "safer" (for lack of a better word?) products doesn't mean they aren't good quality or have crappy writing.



> If that is the impression you had of my pov, then I apologize for not being clear. That is not the idea I meant to express.



Well, like I was saying ... the use of some loaded words was tilting your meaning into a specific context.



> I meant to express the idea that if it *is* the Green Ronin/Evil Hat model it necessarily *is* wrong.



Well, and I guess that what I've been stearing towards isn't that it's necessarily their business plan to pay less. It's where some companies can find themselves out of the necessities of their operations. Most publishers, in my dealings with them, would prefer to pay people more if their margins allowed for it.



> My comments were about LotFP as compared to some conspicuously successful companies (Evil Hat's sales figures and profits were released by the owner, Green Ronin has its DC book in every local game store I've seen) who pay subpoverty wages.



Sure.

And I usually pay myself subpoverty wages, if we look at what I self-publish based on what I could demand if I were writing stuff purely for my day job. But that brings me back to my point that if you want to work in the RPG industry, you have to accept that shrinking markets and the customer's unbudging refusal to let prices rise comparable to inflation for 30 years is likely more to blame for that than greedy publishers lining their pockets at freelancers' expense.



> If you would like to discuss some other companies besides these companies I am referring to, that is a separate discussion.



Use whichever examples you like, but when you start getting into specific details I'm going to ask for specific proofs, is all.


----------



## Steve Conan Trustrum

Zak S said:


> You keep talking as if businesses growing is preferable to them putting out anything worth using.



Nope.

It's just accepting the fact that business growth is one of the riskiest things a business can undertake, and you don't always end up where you expect. See my latest response to James for further explanation.


----------



## Zak S

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> The fact that GR keeps a larger group of people happy by giving them "safer" (for lack of a better word?) products doesn't mean they aren't good quality or have crappy writing.




I think that is quite literally what that means.

Fans are happy to throw money at all kinds of projects, as recent Kickstarters have shown. They just maybe aren't tripping over themselves to throw money at ones that pride themselves on being safe.

This industry can support great creators and innovative product. It just can't support more of the same over and over.


----------



## Steve Conan Trustrum

Zak S said:


> I think that is quite literally what that means.
> 
> Fans are happy to throw money at all kinds of projects, as recent Kickstarters have shown. They just maybe aren't tripping over themselves to throw money at ones that pride themselves on being safe.



How do you figure?

When I say "safer," I mean "hey, we're putting out a comic book game. What do people expect because what are they going to try playing?"

Filling that need is knowing your market and has nothing inherently to do with quality unless your sole or primary definer is being edgy or fringe or the like. Considering how many people buy the products and enjoy them, that doesn't make them poor quality. And it certainly isn't the same as throwing money at crowdfunding. With GR's products, for example, someone can go pick it up. They can read reviews about it. The product exists before purchase. You're buying with the ability to have a look and then decide rather than putting your faith in expectations.



> This industry can support great creators and innovative product. It just can't support more of the same over and over.



For different systems? It absolutely can, so far as anything can be said to "survive" in this industry against the external factors squeezing on it. Sure, you'll get instances like the d20 glut, but that's an example of too much of the same for the same system market. The competition cannibalized itself. Someone who likes playing MnM for their super-heroes games isn't going to hold up a Savage Worlds supers product they'll never play, however, and say "just what we need, more supers characters!"

Innovation is great for bringing new perspectives into the industry, to be certain. But your idea that you can't have "great creators" while serving large market shares is provably false. And that's not just a subjective opinion -- the fact that the market leaders are who they are proves that.


----------



## Zak S

I never said anything about market shares.

You keep bringing up the best interest of large, safe companies and their "growth". 

Those things are not important.

Good new work is important and paying people fairly is important.

The rest is something you keep insisting matters but keep refusing to say why


----------



## Steve Conan Trustrum

Zak S said:


> I never said anything about market shares.



No, I did. Because understanding how the market segments is important to knowing why and how particular products are succeeding while others are failing.



> You keep bringing up the best interest of large, safe companies and their "growth".



Yep. Because people work for those companies, too.



> Those things are not important.



The largest share of the industry's market would seem to disagree with you based on where they are spending their money.



> Good new work is important and paying people fairly is important.



Both true. But your definition of both suffer from a matter of tunnel vision. If you're looking for "fair" pay in terms of a living wage, as I've said repeatedly, the RPG industry isn't for you unless you get in with the few outlier companies that pay more. For whatever reasons you attribute that to, but attributing it to "hoarding" money is, as I mentioned earlier, silly.



> The rest is something you keep insisting matters but keep refusing to say why



Refusing? I've actually explained it several times. In detail. Both with real examples and hypotheticals.


----------



## Zak S

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> No, I did. Because understanding how the market segments is important to knowing why and how particular products are succeeding while others are failing.




All of the companies we're discussing: LotFP, Green Ronin, Evil Hat, are succeeding. So that's not relevant.



> Yep. Because people work for those companies, too.




You could say that about literally any business no matter how exploitive or even illegal.

The fact a business exists isn't a justification for it to exist--especially if its making bad product and exploiting workers.



> The largest share of the industry's market would seem to disagree with you based on where they are spending their money.




Yes. Many people currently involved are ok with mediocre product and exploitation. 



> Both true. But your definition of both suffer from a matter of tunnel vision. If you're looking for "fair" pay in terms of a living wage, as I've said repeatedly, the RPG industry isn't for you unless you get in with the few outlier companies that pay more.




You're giving no reason anyone shouldn't get in with these better companies.

Your only reason for saying the worse companies we're discussing couldn't follow this model is they are bigger, and the only reason you've said it's ok or necessary they be bigger is...



> Refusing? I've actually explained it several times. In detail. Both with real examples and hypotheticals.





The only example you just now gave is: noncreative employees require employment.

And I've explained above that the only reason to hold this value is that if you believe that if any company no matter how exploitive exists it should continue to exist.


----------



## Steve Conan Trustrum

Zak S said:


> All of the companies we're discussing: LotFP, Green Ronin, Evil Hat, are succeeding. So that's not relevant.



Understanding market segments is ALWAYS relevant if you're talking about how businesses succeed. Especially if your conversation is about how one business works one way and another works another way successfully.



> You could say that about literally any business no matter how exploitive or even illegal.



True.

But my answer to those situations wouldn't be "that's not important".



> The fact a business exists isn't a justification for it to exist--especially if its making bad product and exploiting workers.



The markets will sort out "bad product" on its own (which speaks to your whole point about GR putting out "bad product" but still being highly in demand) and if companies are exploiting people, that too will typically sort it self out in this kind of market. Of course, we also have to acknowledge that in this conversation you're talking about "exploiting" and not exploiting.



> Yes. Many people currently involved are ok with mediocre product and exploitation.



It's like reading a fortune cookie, but in this case I'm just assuming you are adding "... in my personal opinion despite the markets saying otherwise."



> You're giving no reason anyone shouldn't get in with these better companies.



Are you under the impression I was trying to?

I've stated upthread that people will work for who they want to, as they choose for themselves which terms they are okay operating under.



> Your only reason for saying the worse companies we're discussing couldn't follow this model is they are bigger, and the only reason you've said it's ok or necessary they be bigger is...



Actually, that's far from the only reason I've presented. As in INCREDIBLY far. The fact that they are bigger has simply been the springboard to those points as I've explained the sort of circumstances that can affect such businesses.



> The only example you just now gave is: noncreative employees require employment.



Nope.

I've explained it with hypotheticals directly to James. I've explained it using examples from my own company. And I've explained it using multiple hypotheticals with you.



> And I've explained above that the only reason to hold this value is that if you believe that if any company no matter how exploitive exists it should continue to exist.



Sure, you've explained it's your opinion.

You've not even come close to proving it as fact, however. That's an important distinction. Indeed, the fact that you conflate a broad range of possibilities into one word, "exploitive," would indicate your either not aware of how this industry works or don't care about any of the realities of its economics beyond "as a freelancer, I gots ta get mine."


----------



## Zak S

Steve Conan Trustrum said:


> The markets will sort out "bad product" on its own




This statement makes clear your assumptions about how reality works are so vastly different than my own that we would only go in circles if this conversation continued.

I regret to say that at this point I therefore must withdraw.

The conversation has been however, revealing  and explains your point of view and I thank you for engaging in good faith.

Also, as it is Valentine's Day I have to meet some young women of my acquaintance at a local establishment devoted to chicken wings. Have a good week.


----------



## Steve Conan Trustrum

Zak S said:


> This statement makes clear your assumptions about how reality works are so vastly different than my own that we would only go in circles if this conversation continued.



No assumptions. I put "bad product" in quotes because the intent of my statement is a "bad product" is what the market defines it to be based on what people refuse to purchase. I was talking measurable outcomes and not subjectivity. 



> Also, as it is Valentine's Day I have to meet some young women of my acquaintance at a local establishment devoted to chicken wings. Have a good week.



Enjoy.


----------



## J.L. Duncan

Okay...

So I've updated my (working list) to make it a bit more manageable. I don't imagine I could write a better article than this OP, but I'll probably thumb-key something later.

Some of these are on the OP list, some are not. The list is on my blog is here. Most of what I focused on were periodical style productions... And general open calls, whether the call is continual such as what EN Publishing is doing with it's Patreon projects, or singular. My main focus has been companies which have a public point of contact (via submission page); and that the rate of pay is listed. Occasionally, I've contacted them the editor or company directly if the rate wasn't listed and asked. If a company refused to disclose their rate, I didn't put them on the list. 

One thing of note. I contacted Bard & Sages (OP) last year. They were not interested in RPG content at that time, nor did they seem to be interested in it going forward.


----------



## Von Ether

Extra stars for including the famous clip of Harlan Ellison who has made ... interesting decisions to get publisher motivated to pay him promised monies.


----------



## Wicht

I'm thankful the bot managed to grab this thread and give me the opportunity to read the last few pages of interesting discussion I missed back in February; who says spam bots don't serve a purpose. 

I will say, as a duly chosen representative of the market (I picked me), that when it comes to comparing Green Ronin, Evil Hat and LotFP, when I look over my shelves of game books, I probably have about three dozen GR books, going back to their 3E days, and continuing right up to Advanced Bestiary, which is one of the best OGL books ever made, imo. I have three or four Evil Hat books, including, Do: Fate of the Flying Temple, which is definitely a niche product. The production, art and writing of both companies is always good, and with Green Ronin in particular, its easy to see how far they have come in quality from their early days. I don't have any LotFP books, and have only heard of one or two of them, mostly through author's self-promotion, and an award they once won. 

As an occassional designer, I am glad to hear that LotFP is able to pay very well, but their business model doesn't ever bring any of their products to the attention of me, the consumer, nor have I, as a consumer, ever felt compelled to buy any of their products. All of which is to say that the whole, "worse product," claim is definitely a matter of personal preference.


----------



## Calithorne

When I was 20, I quit the journalism major because I could already see there were too many journalism students and a very small number of jobs for them.  I never looked back.  Now, I'm a lawyer and I still write for a living, but I can make a decent amount of money.  I don't recommend YOU go to law school, because it's very expensive and many law graduates never even get a first job as a lawyer.


----------



## Calithorne

I think the lesson this thread teaches is that if you want to eat, don't try to write for a living.


----------



## M.T. Black

I've put together a guide to RPG Freelance rates, based on my experiences over the last few years. Your feedback is appreciated!

http://bit.ly/RPGRates


----------



## RichGreen

M.T. Black said:


> I've put together a guide to RPG Freelance rates, based on my experiences over the last few years. Your feedback is appreciated!
> 
> http://bit.ly/RPGRates



Looks good to me - thanks for pulling this together!


----------



## Zak S

M.T. Black said:


> I've put together a guide to RPG Freelance rates, based on my experiences over the last few years. Your feedback is appreciated!
> 
> http://bit.ly/RPGRates




As I said on Twitter when this was circulated: I do not think there is any reason for anyone to accept rates this low.

As the author notes, you can make way more self-publishing, what they don't say is that you can also make way more with a profit-split deal or by just working with a more honest indie publisher.

Dead Planet sold only 637 copies and the authors and 2 authors made 10 cents a word _each_.  Neither was self-publishing. 

The reasons given for not working like this in the doc are:

"
1. It can help you build your audience.

2. It can help you network with industry people.

3. You will very likely learn things.

4. You will work on properties that you otherwise can’t.
"

1. Simply isn't true. There are people who have swum back and forth around the 3-6 cents a word payscale for years and never made more than that. Working on projects for big companies like this does not in any meaningful way "Get your name out there".

Pretty much anyone younger than Kenneth Hite who can command decent rates in RPG publishing did it not by taking these bad freelance gigs and working the "ladder" but by self-publishing or profit-splitting. The large companies offer large positions to people who have done something impressive, not acted as gap-filler. The mid-size indies have had the same exact people at the top for years and have little or no room to hire new people for the interesting jobs.

Every single person I can think of who got offered interesting work further up the ladder from Chris Spivey on Harlem Unbound to all the OSR people who got this kind of work did not start freelancing at those low rates.

2. Is definitely true: if you accept a low rate you'll meet industry people--at least one has to email you to work with you on yr project. But whether that helps at all is dubious: Everyone I know met *more* industry people doing independent projects that impressed those industry people.

By and large the industry knows it can find cheap cheerful writers to create shovelware. It turns ont he tap and there they are. "Contacts" do not mean that these people have bette work for you lying around.

3. Yes, you'll learn things. Mostly what freelancers tell me is they wish they'd not accepted those low rates. You'll learn way more doing your own projects--including things the rest of the industry hasn't yet.

4. Sure. If you want to work on Star Trek you have to take a rate with the company making the Star Trek RPG.

But , please, do _not_ accept the false hype that doing that is the gateway to bigger things.


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## M.T. Black

Zak, thanks for responding! I saw your comments on twitter but didn't have a useful response in 240 characters. 

One thing to note is that I'm not commenting on whether these rates are reasonable or acceptable. I'm just reporting what I've seen in the market. 

I think you are right that more money can be made (potentially) with kickstarting. What I feel like you are not acknowledging is the need to build an audience first, and the amount of work that can be. For many successful kickstarters, it is the culmination of years spent investing in the hobby and growing an audience. This (along with the work to execute the kickstarter) has to be considered when looking at the real "rate" you are being paid. And not every good writer has the skills to build the audience and execute a kickstarter anyway.

In terms of whether working for established publishers can help you build an audience - it clearly can. Look at Monte Cook, Rob Schwalb, and John Wick - all of them established their reputation writing for mainstream publishers. And this meant there was an audience eager for their material when they went independant. Is it the only way to build an audience? Of course not. But it is *a* way. 

I also think that these existing publishers provide more opportunities for networking and learning than you allow, but there is not much point arguing about that. 

Look, I think that Kickstarter is a great way to go, and well done to folk like Chris Spivey who create an audience and a great product. We are on the same page regarding that. Where I disagree with you is the idea that working for established publishers is *always* a bad idea. That seems like too much of a generalisation. 

Cheers!
MTB


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## Zak S

M.T. Black said:


> Zak, thanks for responding! I saw your comments on twitter but didn't have a useful response in 240 characters.
> 
> One thing to note is that I'm not commenting on whether these rates are reasonable or acceptable. I'm just reporting what I've seen in the market.




I accept that but when people point out to the companies involved that these rates are sub-poverty line and predatory, they often go "That's the industry standard, you must not know much about the industry".

And the fact is we need to make sure there is no rhetorical room for that position: that is only the "standard" for companies where 1 or 2 people make a living wage and the rest are working on what amounts to a content farm and in 2019 we can all do better.



> I think you are right that more money can be made (potentially) with kickstarting. What I feel like you are not acknowledging is the need to build an audience first,




Again:

1  Mothership and Dead Planet (and the original pre-Lotfp Carcosa) all made more than 10cents a word  off less than 1000 sales. All they did to "build an audience" was hang out on forums and put out something good.  And they didn't need much of an audience to make decent money

2 Being an underpaid freelancer will _not_ help build an audience.

3 You keep saying "kickstarter" and "self-publishing" without acknowledging the simplest option: partnering with a small publisher who thinks you do good work and will just pay you. I pay people more than that and I'm just one guy. I don't want to see your freelance credits, I'll hire someone on the strength of a single page of great game prose.




> In terms of whether working for established publishers can help you build an audience - it clearly can. Look at Monte Cook, Rob Schwalb, and John Wick




That was decades ago. Pre-internet in Monte's case. Things have changed.




> I also think that these existing publishers provide more opportunities for networking and learning than you allow, but there is not much point arguing about that.




If that's true then where are these people? I've seen dozens of people complain about how little they get paid by the big companies after years of knowing their names as just "random internet people" i didn't even know had worked for these companies. The "contacts" didn't get them anywhere. 

Whereas Sean McCoy puts out Dead Planet which is basically a zine, or Ben Milton makes some Youtube reviews and Maze Rats, or someone just has a cool blog and they're getting more substantive offers than anything in that pdf.


It may be true that once upon a time you started by writing an article for Dungeon or Dragon and slowwwly building trust starting at 3 cents a word and slowwwly working your way up until finally someone like Monte left WOTC and you got a coveted spot but:

1. That isn't how the industry works any more o has to work, and

2. The idea that it does has allowed Green Ronin, Evil Hat and others to exploit authors by claiming their offering them a rare opportunity and it has lead to extremely forgettable product as well.

Things are different than they used to be--and better. Writers who demand respect and write what they love are getting recognition for it a lot faster than people who were promised the world in exchange for putting time in down in the salt mines.


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## Zak S

I'll say again what I said on twitter:

I don't care how much experience you have--if you can write a good page of RPG stuff and you've been suffering at these rates i will pay you 10 cents a word_ right now_. Nobody deserves to be treated this way just for the chance to work on the Atomic Robo RPG or some .


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## M.T. Black

> You keep saying "kickstarter" and "self-publishing" without acknowledging the simplest option: partnering with a small publisher who thinks you do good work and will just pay you.



I'll acknowledge it now - that's a great option! But I'm sure you know that there are many small publishers out there who don't pay well - look at the first page of this thread for evidence of that. That includes some OSR publishers (things may have changed since Morrus wrote that page).

Aside from yourself, are you aware of any other small RPG publishers out there that pay a minimum of 10 cents per word? I know Schwalb does. You've said Raggi virtually guarantees a minimum of 20 cents. Do you know any others? I will list them in my rate document.


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## Zak S

> You've said Raggi virtually guarantees a minimum of 20 cents




I don't think I did say that. He does do well though, here's his original statement:

https://plus.google.com/112262093672917983853/posts/4B6j9CaezK7

"
Not that I want to brag or anything, but looking at how LotFP authors' royalties break down on a per-word rate...

My 21st best selling book (meaning 20 other books I've released have sold more copies) has earned the author 21 cents a word in royalties to date. Euro cents, not those weak-ass dollar cents.

That seems kinda nuts.
"





M.T. Black said:


> ...are you aware of any other small RPG publishers out there that pay a minimum of 10 cents per word? I know Schwalb does. Do you know any others? I will list them in my rate document.




Here's the thing: most of these small publishers don't pay by the word. They partner together with people they get along with and work out a way of splitting profits or working together that doesn't incentivize bloating word count.

You should talk to Daniel Sell at Melsonian Arts, Daniel Fox at Zweihander, Jacob Hurst who did Hot Springs Island (dunno his company name), Mike Evans at DIY RPG.

Basically look at the DIY companies won Ennies last year and ask them how they split profits.


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## M.T. Black

> I don't think I did say that.



My apologies, I must have misunderstood you, or mixed up your words with Raggi's. 

And I'll drop a line to a couple of those publishers to chat about rates and profits.

cheers,
MTB


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## 5ekyu

So, this isn't a thread on  dystopic genre games and black market organ sales economy?

Nevermind.


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## Creighton

Just to chime in on freelancer rates:

Paizo pays 10 cents a word
WoTC pays 18 cents a word

(Or at least they all did the last time I worked for them).

Additionally, I'm the publisher at Raging Swan Press and we pay 11 cents a word.

Hope that helps!


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## M.T. Black

That's very helpful information Creighton! I assume I can quote your Raging Swan rates?


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## Creighton

Absolutely, M.T.--I'm jolly proud of our rate!


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## Cobalt Sages

Cobalt Sages Creations hires at a base of $0.02/word.


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## aramis erak

Creighton said:


> Just to chime in on freelancer rates:
> 
> Paizo pays 10 cents a word
> WoTC pays 18 cents a word




WotC also has super high standards, and that's not starting rate, but established rate. (The job I applied for was for less. I didn't get it, but did get to second round... and told to reapply later.)


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