Sales and Origins Gaming

By Fred Hicks | Published: 3 Mar 2010 (Wednesday)

I’ve got to beg out from this week of posting as well. Last week was extra heavy with Dresden Files work leading up to the Alliance press release (among other things), and this week is chock full of similar activities (as well as some light anxiety about possible imminent travel).  But there are a few things I want to note quickly.

Evil Hat’s PDFs are 25% Off At DriveThru

The GM’s Day sale starts today and runs for 4 days past it.  Stuff which is on sale is 25% off, and that includes all of Evil Hat’s stuff. Well worth checking out the sale — tons of publishers have weighed in.  The site’s running a little bit slow, though; I’m wondering if they’re getting hit with huge traffic.  Just remember, this “GM’s Day” event is 5 days long, so you’ve got some breathing room.

Origins Game Submissions from Evil Hat Volunteer GMs

We got a ton of volunteer sessions onto the books for Origins 2010.  Most of them are Dresden Files RPG events.  You should head on over to the Dresden Files RPG website and give it a look.

Oh Yeah, That Alliance Thing

Evil Hat got in bed with a distributor last week and that included getting specific about the Dresden Files RPG’s pricing and cover art (don’t forget you can already find out what makes up the mammoth page count already).  Normally this is something I’d be posting about at length, but, well, see the above. I definitely have great plans and intentions to get into the details of it (as I always do), I’m just pressed for time this week/month.  It’s coming, though!

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Holy Crap Friday

By Fred Hicks | Published: 19 Feb 2010 (Friday)

So, it’s Friday, and I don’t have a food post for you. Once I do, it’ll be about The Banana Bread I Grew Up On. Promise.

Today, I’ve taken some painkillers, so I have very little to say that doesn’t dissolve into a suffusion of yellow.

I’ve got some interesting things to say about how a distributor totally backed me up earlier this week — without me being a client (at least not yet).  That, maybe Monday.

But it’s Friday, so I’ll just leave you with this:

Steve Kenson.

Fate-inspired supers.

On preorder.

Holy crap!

ICONS.

Kenson talking about ICONS.

The preorder.

The forum thread.

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Phat Tuesday

By Fred Hicks | Published: 17 Feb 2010 (Wednesday)

Yesterday was Fat Tuesday, so naturally we dove into a pancake dinner. Good times.  We aren’t much for plain pancakes around here — I’m all about the chocolate chip, my wife’s into the banana and/or chocolate chip variety.

Naturally we are right-thinking people and build this around Alton Brown’s Buttermilk Pancake recipe, found over yonder at the Food TV site.  I grew up on the Bisquick variety, so the conversion to this one is extra-welcome, and definitely worth the very minor extra steps (composing your own mix, acquiring buttermilk, separating the eggs).

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Chicken Lazone

By Fred Hicks | Published: 15 Feb 2010 (Monday)

I’m going to try to talk food three times this week.  It’s going to be light on words, unless there’s a recipe for me to offer in-post, but hey, you’ve got some eating to do.

First up is my new favorite dinner. It is not healthy, but it is good: Chicken Lazone.

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It’s Game Theory

By Fred Hicks | Published: 12 Feb 2010 (Friday)

What it all comes down to is what Russell Crowe as John Nash was on about in A Beautiful Mind.  Watch this clip — it’ll only take a few minutes — then come back:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0ywiYboCLk

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This Time It’s Personal

By Fred Hicks | Published: 10 Feb 2010 (Wednesday)

This is nominally the next part in my rambling about the elements of community building.  This time I’d like to talk about the value of the personal connection.

The good news here is that I’m not suggesting that you, the community “organizer”, are obligated to make a personal and direct connection with each and every member of your community.  In fact, if your community is active and thriving, you can’t.  (Not strictly true — in some circumstances, you could, but it would be a full-time activity and that’s all you’d be doing. So for our discussion’s purposes, we’ll call that close enough to “can’t” for the assertion to stand.)

The trick, inasmuch as there’s a trick, is to engage in behaviors that makes it seem like you’re making that personal connection anyway.

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Critical Mass

By Fred Hicks | Published: 8 Feb 2010 (Monday)

I’ve seen a few people ask me how I build communities. Most of what I do relative to communities that I’ve been in a nominal leadership role with just seems to proceed from natural instinct.  I’ve tried to deconstruct this in the more distant past, but it’s a topic worth revisiting, even if I’m not completely convinced that I’m actually doing that much in the way of direct building.  A big part of this has been good timing combined with grabbing onto something big and powerful and hanging on (ala Jim Butcher’s career in its earlier stages, or the preexisting Fudge community when we started running our yaps about Fate).

But that doesn’t mean I can’t dig into it at least a little.  Today, I’m going to talk about managing your critical mass and using it to power your community.

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No More Posts This Week

By Fred Hicks | Published: 5 Feb 2010 (Friday)

No more posts this week — Dresden Files RPG grows large in my schedule, along with some other things — but you may content yourself with running over to Blue Collar Space to watch me harrass Brad about our friendly philosophical divide. :)

http://www.vsca.ca/halfjack/?p=388

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Everyone Is Talking About It

By Fred Hicks | Published: 1 Feb 2010 (Monday)

… so maybe I will, too.

Yes, Amazon screwed up the public relations — you really should read John Scalzi’s excellent analysis of why, but as usual, skip the freakin’ comments.

I don’t really think that’s arguable. Everything outside of that is where things turn into a sort of wiggly, wobbly munge.

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What A Difference A Day Makes

By Fred Hicks | Published: 29 Jan 2010 (Friday)

In the last 24 hours, my wife — formerly an employee of Sun Microsystems, now acquired by Oracle — got laid off, and Evil Hat started getting courted by a distributor now that our press release about the Dresden Files RPG is getting more circulation.  Both bear talking about.

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The Shelf Is A Gamble

By Fred Hicks | Published: 27 Jan 2010 (Wednesday)

I want to talk about the notion of a book on a shelf in a game store (and relatedly, in a book store), as well as how that ties into the math of pricepoints in RPG publishing.

This is on my mind because at Evil Hat we’re getting ever closer to the release of the Dresden Files RPG.  (Yes, we’re splitting it into two books. No, I don’t want to talk about that here. I’m talking about it enough other places already.)  Our press release doesn’t talk about distribution; it says we’ll have it on sale through Indie Press Revolution (and therefore through retailers who get books from IPR), and we’ll have it on sale through our own web store.

Now, that’s not the whole picture, but it’s most of it. (We have a good relationship with UK-based distributor Esdevium, and we’ll likely continue to work that relationship for getting products over to the other side of the Atlantic.) The question, then, is why is that most of the picture? (i.e., why aren’t we diving at distributors aplenty and trying to get signed up?)

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Bunt

By Fred Hicks | Published: 25 Jan 2010 (Monday)

Today, I bunt. I’ve got layout on my mind, in the sense that I need to get back to doing that, rather than blogging.

But it occurs to me that by this point, if you’re following this blog you know why you’re coming here.

Why is that? And what should I be writing about to keep your particular itch scratched?

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Evil Hat Sales: Finishing 2009

By Fred Hicks | Published: 22 Jan 2010 (Friday)

IPR numbers are in!

Here’s the skinny.

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Invincible

By Fred Hicks | Published: 20 Jan 2010 (Wednesday)

My wife got me Invincible: The Ultimate Collection Volume 4 for my birthday, and of course I’ve already read through the whole thing.  I love this comic, though I say that as someone who doesn’t really have a regular comic reading habit.  (Mainly I read stuff in collections, often gifted or borrowed from a friend. This has the upside of getting lots of story in big coherent swaths, but it also has the effect of mainlining the entire season of a TV show in two days. You’re simultaneously full up of the good stuff, and empty because there isn’t a similar volume waiting for you on day three.)

Invincible has me from the word go. I know a few folks I’ve recommended the series to found it to come off a little flat, though several others have seemed really jazzed by it. I flippantly described it on Twitter the other day as “what Smallville wanted to be before it succumbed to a fatal case of kryptonite poisoning”, though I suppose that does more to tarnish the appeal of Invincible than elucidate it. (Ah, Smallville, what an acid-trip of a show you were before I took my leave of you.)  At its core, Invincible is the story of an alt-Superman’s kid, run through a heavy Peter Parker’s Life Sucks filter.  And boy, does it make my I-want-to-play-in-some-supers-genre-games itch flare right the hell up.

But I’m also not sure that I would want to play a straight up “adaptation” of Invincible at my gaming table.  So I need to deconstruct this thing, figure out what its basic working parts are, and which of those parts speak to me as a gamer. If only so my friends can get a little closer to running the game I want to play in! (That said, the analysis will not go that deep in the interests of keeping things spoiler-free.)

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Midnight Post: Help Haiti, Get $1400 free

By Fred Hicks | Published: 20 Jan 2010 (Wednesday)

So, over at DriveThruRPG, they’ve set up a “donate $20 to Haiti” thing. That’s cool in and of itself. But that’s not where it stops. Because publishers have donated products which you get when you donate. Their total value? $1,481.31.

So that’s somewhere around a “get these products for 99% off!” deal.

You should perhaps take all of us publishers up on that. You’ll get Spirit of the Season from Evil Hat, and a bunch of other products too (several of which I did some or all of the layout on, I’m happy to say).  It’s one of those “you’re insane NOT to spend $20 on this” sort of things, even if you aren’t in the least bit humanitarian in your mindset.

There are so many products on this thing that the bundle’s attempt to alphabetically list them all craps out somewhere late in the letter C.

That’s C, for crazy.

Since the listing craps out, I thought I’d grab the full list of what I got after I made my purchase for the curious. Holy crap! Beast Hunters! Chronica Feudalis! Kerberos Club! Damnation Decade! Three Sixteen! It’s just ridiculous. Buy it.

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Blogging Is Vulnerability

By Fred Hicks | Published: 18 Jan 2010 (Monday)

So, my birthday was this past week, on Wednesday, the first day since I’ve rebooted my blogging that I’ve missed out on the Monday/Wednesday/Friday regularishly scheduled posting thing (to be followed by a Friday absence as well, but that’s almost beside the point).

It wasn’t, though, because I wanted to give myself a day or two off. It was because I was paralyzed to speak; I sat there, contemplating my soft underbelly, and thought about whether or not I was comfortable presenting it to the world. And I just wasn’t.

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Direction and Detail

By Fred Hicks | Published: 11 Jan 2010 (Monday)

Quick Blog Note

So my updates are likely to get more sporadic over the next few weeks. I started layout on the Dresden Files RPG right at the beginning of the year, and all my previously queued blog posts have been run through, so the myth of regularity I’ve been operating under is shortly to evaporate. As a writer, when I’m one, I am very, very bursty.

That said, sometimes the hardest thing is coming up with a topic. You all have an idea of the sorts of things I might cover on this blog by this point; what do you want to see me talk about? Toss me a comment and who knows, you might just get what you ask for.

Art Direction

One of the things that I do as part of my career is art direction. Not something I would have anticipated a few years back (which in retrospect seems a little silly). In doing my own publishing, I discovered I really have a drive and a feel for the work, though. I have a very visual brain, and I tend to communicate in great volume (more on that in a moment), and the two seem to work pretty well together. While I can’t personally execute on the art that I want, I can describe it pretty well, and the more that I work with a particular artist, the more I can tailor how I communicate to what they understand and deliver. (Another reason for doing repeat business with proven-quantity artists.)

A Few Examples

So Jennifer Rodgers has been blogging a little bit of an art piece she’s currently working on for the Dresden Files RPG. I’ll give you the links in a moment. But first, here’s what I sent her:

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To (Sell|Talk|Play)

By Fred Hicks | Published: 8 Jan 2010 (Friday)

Short post today.

I was looking at Chad Underkoffler talking about whether or not to go to Dreamation this year, and it reminded me of my perspective on conventions in general.  Since I’m both a publisher and a hobbyist, conventions are always composed of some mix of selling (and buying), talking (networking), and playing.  The question, then, when I consider whether to attend a convention is what that convention does best, and whether or not I’m already getting that “best thing” itch scratched by some other convention that year. If I have limited ability to attend multiple conventions, it also becomes a game of prioritizing those three activities and choosing the one or two that get to “win” that year.

In my own personal constellation of conventions, this boils down to a choice among the pros of three specific cons.

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Evil Hat Sales: 2009 Observations

By Fred Hicks | Published: 6 Jan 2010 (Wednesday)

On Monday I posted the missing 8 months of sales data I’d been too busy most of this year to post. So, that’s done, bringing us up to the end of the year (save for a big chunk of sales reckoning from IPR — I don’t get confirmed, official reporting on that until the 15th of January, so expect a post on that when the time comes).

What’s to be said about it? Turns out I have a few short thoughts.

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Evil Hat Sales: 2009 Catch-Up

By Fred Hicks | Published: 4 Jan 2010 (Monday)

So, once upon a time I regularly updated my livejournal with Evil Hat’s sales numbers. I fell off that horse a goodly time back — evidence points to May 1st as the last time I did this — so it’s time to play catch-up. I don’t have the end of year numbers from IPR yet, so you can expect another post like this one once we get past the 15th or so of the month.

On May 1st, these numbers were where we were at, including all of Q1 2009 for IPR, and adding in April for Lulu, OBS, e23, and YGN.

2009Q2 to date (prior to May 1st)
DLYM PDF – 10
DRYH PDF – 20
DRYH SC – 1
SOTC PDF – 25
SOTC HC – 1
SOTS PDF – 3
S7S PDF – 44

Lifetime:
DLYM: 462
DRYH: 2099
SOTC: 3563 (DISCOVERY! I dropped 700 copies from this total back in October 2008. Whups. Make that 4263 instead.)
SOTS: 500
S7S: 100

Let’s see how things went from there, shall we?

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