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.
Distribution first. I’m not going to say a lot about this just yet, since the conversation with the distributor in question is ongoing. But some interesting things have been laid out, and it’s clear that if you have a strong property that a distributor can have confidence in ab initio, there’s some flexibility in them thar hills that wasn’t otherwise expected. I still don’t know where I’ll land decision-wise on this, but it’s new and interesting territory, and once I feel like I’ve explored it enough to come back with a rough map, you can expect a report.
The contact has also reminded me of how incredibly important it is just to know people. If I’d just gotten cold-called here, there would be no chance of a deal. Instead, a personal connection was made through a friend. That friend knows both me and a particularly approachable guy at the distributor. He enabled the conversation. And the conversation started with information already in hand: distributor-guy read my blog post from Wednesday first, so he knew where I’d be coming from right away. So that’s the value of knowing people right there: both in making the connection, and in taking the time to learn a little bit about someone before you try to sell them something.
Anyway, my wife, and her former employer.
As I said over on Twitter, Sun has played an important role not only in my wife’s career, but my own*. Her move over to work for Sun was the watershed event that gave us a stable enough household that I could quit my former job working in the internet industry. It was stressing me out — or more accurately, it was crushing me. I really had no love for it any more, but leaving it meant a truly drastic drop in our income. My wife, being my wife, insisted that happiness trumps cash, and I listened. That worked out well.
If you like who I am online today, and what I’m able to focus on doing — publishing as Evil Hat, customer service as IPR, layout for Hero Games, and blogging here — the thanks is owed all to Sun and to my wife. Hating my job, soaking in a constant soup of stress, made me pretty damn spiky online before all that. Stepping away from that stress gave me some real clarity, just enough distance to develop a buffer that can contain my ire at Someone Being Wrong On The Internet more effectively. That still leaks through on time, but it’s so much easier to prevent than before. And so, a sea-change in persona over time. I still giggle when folks talk about me being this Nice Guy On The Internet, but it’s who I’m trying to be, and more and more it seems to be working.
The new direction following my wife’s job at Sun, and my exit from mine, also let me rediscover my love of layout. I’d been into the whole desktop publishing thing back in late high school, but college took me off-course, and then, well, the Web stood up and demanded my attention. From thence, a ten-year detour. I’m really loving that I’m back on track. I don’t always feel like I’m the strongest at it — I’m self-taught, and I don’t truly have the patience to learn all the science behind the typography — but I think I’ve done pretty well all the same, and I’ve been able to see continuing incremental improvements in my approach over the last several years.
And it’s a good thing, too: my “web programmer” skills have all but atrophied, so layout’s where it’s at for me, and right now it’s at least bringing in some keep-us-afloat money so we don’t have to cut as deeply into our rainy-day fund. You can expect I’ll be looking for a few more contracts to take on in the gaps between Hero and Evil Hat books if my wife’s job hunt takes longer than we’d like, but for the moment I’m still loving that those gaps mean more time with my baby daughter.
* Sun also played an important role very early on — my wife and I met while both doing customer support for a sun-hardware-based website hosting company back in 1996. So long, Sun; sorry to see you set.
6 Comments
Good luck. Hope you can weather the transition without being forced to dial back what you love to do.
Your work on the Hero 6th edition books just does not get enough credit. You crushed it.
Good luck to your wife with her job hunt!
My profanity-laden response would echo off the hills were I ever to actually release it, but this doesn’t need that kind of negativity.
I think it’s safe to say I can profoundly appreciate where this journey’s gotten you, and I raise a glass to the vehicle that got you there.
And I’ve got every confidence in things working out, but there’s no way I can let this pass without making it clear we’ve got your back in any way we can.
-Rob
If you need anything from the VSCA — which includes a place in Vancouver to crash and eat if you ever need such a thing — shout out.
Two quick musings about the distributor possibility:
1. Do you foresee Dresden fans who have no interest in playing an RPG being interested in buying the second Dresden book as a setting reference? If so, they might be easier to get at in regular book stores instead of hobby stores, but then only if the Dresden RPG is stocked in a place where Dresden fans who have no interesting in playing an RPG will actually notice it. Hmmmmm, like you say, risky.
2. Most books have a short burst of sales when they hit the market and then go out of print. With SotC, I remember seeing sales charts of slow but steady sales over a long period of time. This difference might make it easier to deal with returns since for most novels there’s nothing that can be done with them except for pulping the lot but with a title that has steady sales (like SotC) it might be easier to sell some of the returns, in theory at least.
#1 — Yep, and that’s part of why I’m giving this consideration.
#2 — I think the slow & steady pattern (though SOTC did have its burst) is due to our sales potential playing out over a longer timeframe: distribution might speed that up, make it fit the more classic pattern of a big burst up front.
But I ain’t doin’ returnability, no way, no how.