We at Posthuman Studios have published our Year End Review 2010. It’s lengthy, contains sales figures for Eclipse Phase, discusses our successes and failures in 2010, and speculates on 2011 a little bit. Enjoy!
Pricing for Niche Electronic Titles
January 3rd, 2011 § 10 comments § permalink
A disclaimer: I wrote most of this post before Adamant Entertainment announced they were re-pricing all of their PDFs at $1, or what Gareth dubbed the “app-pricing” model. I think the approach is interesting, but this post is not a “response” to his decision … although I am incredibly curious as to how it turns out, of course!
If you are publishing a niche RPG—material not compatible with Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder—you should maximize your profits by not underpricing your exclusive electronic releases. An “exclusive electronic release” is material not available in print (not including true Print on Demand, but including short run printing) or that don’t have costs subsidized in a substantial way.
So, by way of example:
- Eclipse Phase core rulebook PDF: not EER because it’s available in print.
- Lack: Not EER because it was commissioned and subsidized for and by the core rulebook.
- Continuity: EER; it’s only available in PDF.
A PDF or other electronic title sold on OneBookShelf (DriveThruRPG/RPGNow) gives the publisher 70% of sale price (65% if the publisher is not an exclusive vendor). This means a five dollar title leaves the publisher with $3.50; a two dollar title $1.40.
I think that Eclipse Phase has proved that low price points on electronic core rulebooks can lead to a raise in the number of sales—enough to make up for the difference in per-unit profit. Customers are interested in saving 10 bucks (typical RPG electronic core rulebooks are 20-25 or even more, while Eclipse Phase is 15) and much more willing to try a new game if it’s inexpensive—but supplements are most often sold to existing customers, people who already like your game. They already perceive themselves as invested* (time, money, emotion) in your game, and so a difference of a few dollars is less likely to make a negative impact in your sales. However, it can make a big difference in how much money you have to invest in the projects … And the amount of profit you end up making.
An Eclipse Phase PDF project like Continuity has a total budget of $800. It breaks down like this:
Writing: 200 (5000 words at four cents a word)
Editing: 200 (this covers a copy-edit and dev-edit pass from Rob Boyle. He deserves a raise on this.)
Layout: 100 (I do all the layout and maps in-house.)
Art: 300 (2 to 3 pieces, playing the same as we pay for artwork destined for print.)
There is no budget for “other stuff” yet … so for example, in Continuity, the audio files we included came out of the art budget.
This means that we need to sell 229 copies of a $5 exclusive electronic release to break even. Priced at $2, we would have to sell 572 copies just to break even. What if we sold 572 copies at 5 bucks? Profit of $2002—enough to fund two and a half more releases. Now, our exclusive electronic releases aren’t making huge profits yet, but we are breaking even relatively quickly—and we have a formula for, at the least, supplying the fanbase with a steady flow of material!
* I try not to use the words “invest” or “invested” when talking about my hobbies. I feel that it’s too loaded. But that’s a personal thing.
Backing up and Reinstalling OS X
December 26th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink
Are you drunk on holiday wine and reinstalling OS X on your Mac? This is my procedure for backing up and reinstalling.
Note: This backup/restore process requires manual twiddling during the restore process, and isn’t recommended unless you’re comfortable dealing with that. It takes more active user time/effort than using Apple’s Migration Assistant, but it allows you more fine-grained control; you won’t be porting over applications and settings that you don’t actually use. This assumes you have an external hard drive of some sort; if you have a second hard drive in the computer, instead, that will work just as well.
- I manually backup obvious large folders to my backup drive (Such as my iTunes Media folder, my current work documents, etc.) and then delete them from my boot drive.
- I search through frequently-crufty folders like my Downloads folder and consolidate them, then move them up to the backup drive and delete from the boot drive.
- I reboot, closing any software that auto-launches.
- I use Carbon Copy Cloner to backup the remaining files on my boot drive to a disk image on my backup disk. (this step takes a long time. It’s certainly a “Go for dinner and read a book while it happens” step.) I use a disk image because this means I just have one giant file with my backup in it, so it can easily be ignored, not indexed by Spotlight, etc. The settings I use are these (CCC version 3.3.7):
- I deactivate all software that needs activation/deactivation (such as Creative Suite.) During this step, I get sad about copy protection and think about all the money I’ve spent on this software.
- I download the latest Combo Updater from the Apple site and store it on my backup drive.
- I do a full reinstall, formatting the entire boot drive. I dicker with the installation options to not install stuff I don’t need (tons of extra printer drivers, for example.) Please note that even though you have a Snow Leopard ‘upgrade’ disc, it will function fine for a full install.
- I run the Combo Updater to bring my install up to the newest version. Reboot. Install all Software Update updates. Reboot again.
- I drag over the big folders I backed up in step 1 from the backup drive to my boot drive. I then delete them from the backup drive. (I’ll back them up again later … but at this point, I want to make sure I know what I’ve restored and what I havent.)
- I install software that I know needs to be installed from original discs, like Creative Suite.
- I mount the disk image that I created, and I slash and burn through it: I open the Applications folder and delete all the Apple-provided applications [Dictionary, DVD Player, etc], and applications that will need a proper reinstall in order to work.
- I drag over the applications that I know I’ll need. In some cases I’ll dig around in the preference/library folders and restore all their preferences, as well. Plus stuff like my Keychain (stores passwords), Mail, etc. A few specific examples of which files to restore for which applications are below. Most applications follow similar patterns.
- Restoring Keychain: The Keychain is the file on your computer where all your passwords live. It’s at ~/Libary/Keychains/login.keychain and you can just copy the backed-up version overtop the new file that was created in your new install.
- Restoring Mail: this is the big one for me. In my disk image, I grab the directory ~/Library/Mail/, and drag it onto the primary hard drive, replacing the default ~/Library/Mail/ directory completely. Then I grab the preferences file from ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist and copy it to the same directory on the primary hard drive. If you had previously installed any mail plugins [such as the workhorse Mail Act-On then you may need to drag their preferences over as well. Then I fire up Mail, and it converts the mailboxes over to the new format, an apparently necessary step even though the version of Mail doesn’t change. After that, I replace the default mail icon with the delicious “Love Letter” icon from Cian Walsh’s iLust icon set.
- Restoring Adium: Same process, with the folder ~/Library/Application Support/Adium 2.0 and the ~/Library/Preferences/com.adiumX.adiumX.plist file.
- I install printer, Wacom drivers, etc.
- This step is optional: After emptying the trash and unmounting the disk image, I use the following terminal command to compact the image:
hdiutil compact /path/to/Backup.sparseimage
So, if your external hard drive is named “Ralphus” and your backup was named “Ninja”, the command would be:
hdiutil compact /Volumes/Ralphus/Ninja.sparseimage
This command will take a few minutes to run, but eventually it will reduce the amount of space the disc image takes up on your backup drive.
This is more steps than simply restoring from Time Machine, for sure—but I think it’s far better for actually getting rid of cruft you no longer use by identifying and restoring only the things you actually use … and you have a complete backup of the stuff you don’t use, in case you do need it down the road.
Three Basic Twitter Guidelines for Sanity and Clarity
December 9th, 2010 § 4 comments § permalink
1. If you have to break a thought into two tweets, end the first one with [...] and begin the second one with [...].
2. If you use an old-style retweet for something and want to add your own commentary to it, add your commentary before the RT text. For example: “I really like this movie, too! RT @weaselpunk I just watched Mr. and Mrs. Smith for the kabillionth time. Swoon!”
(I think that you should use old-style retweets precisely for this reason—it allows you to add context and commentary for your audience.)
The text “RT” creates a nice wall between your text and the person you are quoting; it makes it easy to tell who said what. When you recommend something to someone, you typically don’t say “Watch this first and then I’ll tell you why I like it”—you tell someone the reason they should watch it first.
Don’t RT someone to reply to them. There’s a reply button for that. Don’t quote someone when replying to them.
3. The more you deviate from proper spelling and grammar, the harder your tweets are to read. Some comments just can’t be “twitter-sized”—so use one of the services that allows you to post a longer comment and link to it, break your comment up into multiple tweets, or email/IM/something else the person you’re trying to talk to. If the majority of your tweets are jam-packed with shortenings (shrtngs, u c wat i mean?), it doesn’t matter how jam-packed they are with info and commentary: they will get looked over. A “u” and some digits once in awhile aren’t a big deal, though!
iPad Notes & Eclipse Phase Updates
December 3rd, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink
PlainText is a great little tool for the iPad; a simple text editor that syncs everything to a Dropbox folder. I’ve been using it to scribble notes and start blog posts while away from the computer lately, and very much enjoying the experience. The iOS 4.2 update has really cranked up the iPad in my eyes, making it more of a tool and less of a gadget. I’ve stopped using my Sony Reader entirely; iBooks and the iPad is more convenient.
Eclipse Phase
Our next hardcover book, Gatecrashing, is at the printers now. The introductory fiction from it, An Infinite Horizon, by Steve Mohan, is available for sale in two different ways: PDF/ePub/Mobi bundle from DriveThruRPG and directly from the Amazon Kindle store. It should be $0.99 no matter where you buy it, but the Kindle store jacks up prices if you’re outside of the USA, so I suggest overseas customers get the PDF/ePub/Mobi version.
More Gatecrashing previews will hit the Eclipse Phase site soon.
We also released Continuity, a funky adventure where … oh, no, I’m not going to spoil it for you. Here’s the tagline:
The characters, researchers on a remote outpost, check in for a backup—and awaken in new bodies to discover two weeks of their lives are missing. They have limited time to find out what happened to their previous selves—and deal with a looming threat.
It’s a $5 PDF, in both landscape and portrait formats, with original artwork (Including a great piece from new-to-EP artist Anna Christenson, maps, and audio snippets by J.C. Hutchins (read what he has to say about it.) and Mur Lafferty.
Enjoy!
Piracy “Doesn’t Matter”
November 30th, 2010 § 5 comments § permalink
I’ve said that “piracy doesn’t matter” several times, and people like to argue with me about that. Of course, it’s a phrase said for effect. Piracy matters, but: publishers can do little to influence piracy. Giant conglomerates like the RIAA, MPAA, and BSA are incapable of stamping out commercial and non-commercial piracy. Does such an organization exist for publishers? I don’t know, and I don’t care.
(As usual, when I say piracy, I mean non-commercial duplication of content without paying for it. Commercial piracy is a whole different ball of wax that is harmful, but not something that I personally encounter in my industry.)
Piracy doesn’t matter because we can’t stop it, and we can’t control it. If you can’t control it, it’s a waste of time to worry about—so I worry about the things I can control and influence:
- Improving my books so people want to buy them.
- Building titles in formats that people actually use.
- Marketing and distributing my works to new venues.
- Empowering existing fans so they want to and can more effectively share the love.
- Continued business practices focused on respect for our markets, partners, and customers.
- Not vilifying pirates; no use making enemies out of people that might become or are already customers. (You would be surprised how many people comment on torrent sites using handles that they use on other sites … including the publisher’s own site.)
And that’s just off the top of my head, big-picture things. Plenty to work on, productively, with actual measurable results; and an ongoing learning process towards producing and selling Better Stuff. Stuff that matters.
Bite-Sized Fate
November 22nd, 2010 § 1 comment § permalink
Over on RPG.net, there’s a thread discussing TheMouse’s “bite-sized” explanation of Fate. Several people have made 1-page (front and back) pamphlet-style versions of his condensed rules. My rough take on the idea is here:
http://adamjury.com/files/BiteSizedFate_Nov22_2AM.pdf
(if I update this file, I’ll just update that link and post a note. For now, I’m asking that people don’t distribute/mirror the file—please link back to here, and people can grab the most up-to-date version.)
eBook Piracy
November 17th, 2010 § 1 comment § permalink
Attributor, an “anti-piracy solutions” (I’m already LOLing) company, says there are “1.5-3 million daily Google queries for pirated e-books” and “54 percent increase in pirated e-book demand since August 2009.”
Eric Hellman says Attributor eBook Piracy Numbers Don’t Add Up.
Richard Curtis of ereads.com page says: “So, even if one is willing to grant that Attributor based its claim on ambiguous stats, we still believe with bedrock certainty that piracy represents the Number One threat to the success of the digital book industry. You can knock your knuckles on that one until they bleed, we won’t change our minds.”
And that is the difference between believing in the inherent good of people vs. the inherent bad. More people reading ebooks is more people buying ebook readers and in the end more people buying ebooks.
My Friends and Their Kids
November 16th, 2010 § 2 comments § permalink
I went out for dinner with a couple friends last week during NeonCon, and on the walk back from the restaurant, the discussion turned to their children. Both of them have a couple kids, some of them old enough to have started gaming. The discussion went back and forth until one of them said “Whoah, we’re probably boring Adam, sorry dude.”
And I said, essentially: “Hell no. Your kids are an important part of your life, and I am your friend. Therefore, I want to and need to hear about your kids.”
And that needs to be repeated loud and clear for my many other friends who weren’t walking down the hallway of the Tropicana at the time: I don’t want children of my own, but I want to hear about the cool, funny, and wonderful things your kids do, and that you do together.
The happiness I see in my friends-who-are-parents is wonderful and most Wacky Kid Hijinx amuses me—especially when they are roughly 4-8 years old and get really quotable, IMO.
I’d prefer to still hear about you, too—I don’t want my friend replaced by my friend’s child—but alternately I also don’t want my friends to fade away because they feel they can’t talk to me about an important part of their life.
Creative Commons: (Part of) Why We Give Our Games Away
October 11th, 2010 § 9 comments § permalink
On an industry mailing list I subscribe to, a few days ago, someone pointed out a site that contained pirated PDFs of thousands of gaming books. I sent off a flip comment:
Damnit. Eclipse Phase stuff, which can be legally shared, isn’t there. I wonder if I can just upload it… ;-)
Someone sent me an off-list message questioning whether EP could be legally shared. I said yes, absolutely, and they asked:
[Are you] shooting [yourselves] in the proverbial foot by basically giving away their materials. If it’s free and legal to do so why would anybody buy the materials?
Here’s my replies to that email, edited only slightly to combine a couple emails into one to tie together some subject a bit better:
Well, we sure haven’t shot ourselves in the foot so far. First print run sold out in only a few months, second print run is roughly about half gone (haven’t seen September numbers yet), and our first two print supplements were both 1/4 sold on pre-orders alone.
Our PDF sales have also been exceptionally strong; partially due to the low price point (1500+ sales of the core PDF at $15 — exact numbers impossible to know due to our divorce from Catalyst) and partially because of the Creative Commons licensing. People can check out the game, whether that be from our free Quick-Start Rules, downloading from a torrent (we seeded it ourselves to some bittorrent trackers), or by being given it from a friend. If they know they like it, $15 a low price for a full PDF RPG, and while RPG print prices have crept up to where $50 is a very normal price for a 400-page full-color book, nobody needs to buy it “sight unseen” now.
Our ad-hoc research shows that almost every EP gaming group has multiple copies of the print rulebook and multiple copies of the PDF at the table.
People are good. They want to support the things they like and they want to be treated as individuals and be respected. Creative Commons licensing allows us to do that; we’re giving them gaming material and allowing them to use in the way that gamers naturally want to use it. It allows fans to support us without worries of legal hassles, and it’s given us alternate revenue streams — like the Hack Packs, where we charge a few bucks extra for access to high-res artwork and InDesign files of our material.
Another great factor for Creative Commons and Eclipse Phase is the themes of EP and the spirit of CC collide rather nicely. Hackers and info-junkies and copyleftists also tend to be interested in sci-fi and transhumanism!
And, of course, no publishing company can successfully fight piracy. The RIAA hasn’t, the MPAA hasn’t. Piracy is going to happen unless we say “nope, you can’t pirate our stuff, cuz we’ll just let you give it out!” — and that makes the file-sharers like us and buy from us. I don’t think pirates are evil and immoral people. I know many people who pirate many things and these people also buy many things. They just tend to buy only things they already like. So, of course, giving away your material will only work if your material is good quality!
I’d much rather have someone read our game for free and not like it than buy our game and not like it. In the first case, they’re only out their time. In the second case, they’re out time and money and are more likely to resent us and/or not buy any other games we may release.
Furthermore, Creative Commons isn’t just about “downloading for free;” it’s about giving fans permission to hack our content and distribute those hacks. Permission to do the things that gamers naturally do, without fear of lawsuits or complex legalese or requiring our approval. Our fans have built and distributed complex character generation spreadsheets, customized GM Screens, converted our books into ePub/mobi format, and all sorts of neat things. When they do things like this, that gives us guidance as to what we should be doing: because fans aren’t just saying they want something, they’re putting their time where their mouth is … a strong indication that they and other fans would be willing to pay for those things if we produced them.
And in the end, if licensing our material Creative Commons is not financially successful: it’s the right thing to do, socially. We have to build the future we want to live in. Giant corporations locking up intellectual property is dangerous to society and culture.
Our next RPG will be Creative Commons-licensed as well.