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!

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.

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).

Some notes:

• Served ‘em up with sausage links. We already do bacon in the oven, and recently converted over to doing sausage in the oven as well. It’s very effective and, with a little foil used, cleans up right quick. Highly recommended.
• Vermont Grade B Maple Syrup. Accept no substitutes. It’s like the bold complex red wine of syrups.  We serve ours in one of those plastic “ketchup bottle” dispensers — every kitchen should have, like, twelve of those things, because there’s all sorts of stuff that’s not ketchup or mustard that works really well with them.
• My wife mixes the chocolate chips into the batter. While there’s a risk that they’ll sink to the bottom, this means the chips are coated with the batter and less likely to burn onto your griddle.
• Use actual buttermilk.  I hear folks get “just fine” results using milk and lemon juice as a substitute (the juice provides the acid that the buttermilk normally does, key for activating the ingredients in the mix), but it can cause the pancakes to turn out a bit thinner than you might want.

And some pictures.

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

Here’s the recipe – http://www.recipezaar.com/Chicken-Lazone-65768

Read it. It’ll take you about a minute, because it’s that easy.  It’s also ridiculously tasty, in a way that you wouldn’t expect just from reading the ingredients, especially for those who love Cajun food.

At the risk of repeating my tweets, some quick notes:

• Your choice of chili powder makes a difference. We use Penzey’s, medium hot.  If that doesn’t supply enough heat for you, toss in as much cayenne as you care to endure.
• Depending on the amount of chicken, we often increase — even double — the spice mixture. The key is to make sure that the spices are COATING each piece of chicken.  You’ll see some of that in the images below.
• We also increase the amount of cream proportionately to the spices in the interests of making a proper amount of sauce with the flavor all suffused and whatnot.
• My wife says you could leave out half the butter if you wanted to, but why would you do this?

Now, the food porn.

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

Okay, so that’s a game theory concept right there, but it’s also a big underlying current in the stuff I’ve been talking about.  This is Friday, so I’m going to be quick about it with this one.

Commenting on Wednesday’s post, Scott Acker said:

You know, at the beginning of this it was a bit like seeing the ‘trick’ behind the magician. Like where you learn how they saw the lady in half and what not. A little weird and deflating. Not because I didn’t know how this stuff works but I guess its strange having it pointed out and its you, me, etc that [you're] talking about.

And I replied:

You know, it’s easy to read this and employ the advice and do it for completely mercenary reasons only. But that’s not the magic trick, really, that’s just capable sleight of hand. For the actual magic, you have to employ all this with absolutely genuine intent to *be* that peer, to *be* respectful — not just to act like it. If you’re not authentic in that regard, that will become apparent at some point. You’ve got to mean it and live it. I’m not sure I can teach that part; some days I feel like I’m still trying to manage it myself.

At the core of all of this is that game theory idea that “Nash” was on about: doing what’s good for the group (the community) and what’s good for the individual (the community organizer).  Consistency in picking the best options in front of you — where “best” is defined as the greatest aggregate good for both you and your community — pays out.

If you constantly prioritize your community without giving any heed to your own needs in the formula, running the community is going to wear you thin and leave you resentful. It’s going to kill the reason you got that community going in the first place. In the long term, that’s not only bad for your personal joy but also for the community.

If you constantly prioritize your needs over the community’s, at best you’re going to drop the ball a lot and end up feeding into a trend towards stagnancy.  At worst, you’ll come off as a tyrant, and it won’t be stagnancy you’ll be dealing with — it’ll be mutiny.

So what you do is prioritize both.  And in doing so, you’re in easy grasp of that authenticity, that genuine intent I’m talking about.  If the things you do are good for you and good for your community, then there’s no conflict between a selfless motive and a self-interested motive.  And that makes it much easier to be positive about the whole enterprise — for everyone.

You could see someone saying this about the whole Dresden Files Disclosure Pledge thing I talked about on Wednesday: “Sure, Fred’s going to make a few extra sales because he’s doing this — but he’s also giving the fans out there a chance to get at all sorts of information about the game that they wouldn’t normally with another company.” The move both serves the self (Evil Hat) and the community (fans of the Dresden Files and fans of Fate). So it works, and works well from what I can see.

I’m shading over to talking about the Evil Hat side of things, here, and that’s for a reason.  “The individual” and “the company” are pretty similar when you talk about community building strategies, as is “the community” and “the customers and fans”.  One and the same, really, for these purposes.  So all the stuff I’ve been saying about community building applies equally to customer building, to fan building.

Which means you can apply these things as sales techniques.  And that sounds pretty mercenary … until you zero in on the game theory lesson again.  Applying that, it becomes clear that the trick isn’t just to prioritize the company — i.e., the maximized profit motive — when making decisions as a game publisher. And it’s not to prioritize the customers either. The trick is to prioritize both.

And so, at Evil Hat, we have the Disclosure Pledge for the DFRPG, we have PDFs bundled for free with print products, we have the Brick & Mortar PDF Guarantee, we have our general effort to participate with our customers as equals rather than as voices-of-authority, and we have an orientation towards maximum possible transparency as a business.

And, sure: if I factored out the customer angle in the business decisions I’m talking about, and just looked at the company’s, it might well be that I’m making a number of decisions that are less than optimized for the company’s best interests.  I’m certainly investing more work in making those things happen than I “have to”.  But add the customer angle back in, and I think Evil Hat is managing to strike pretty close to the greatest good, there. And long-term, I think that the community-focused benefits form a big feedback loop that makes it actually even better for the company’s “self interest”.

As a publisher, you’re not selling to faceless customers — or at least, you shouldn’t be.  Make those personal connections.  Pull them up on stage and make them awesome with you.  Organize them together in a way that best suits growing as a community.  Because they’re not your customers, they’re your community.  Don’t hold your community at a remove.

Participate.  Deputize. Celebrate. And they’ll celebrate you back.

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.

Before we get into that particular toolbox, I want to talk about the role of the blog, the twitter, the facebook presence in all of this (substitute your favorite social media site of choice).  In a very real way, these are at least micro-communities in their own right, each organized around the central “followed” person or organization and the followers.

A social media presence has an element of personal connection baked right into it, and it is very, very easy for followers to feel like they’re just one degree separate from the person they’re following even if they’ve never actually met or had direct conversation with them.  This feeling is cemented and amplified every time the followed replies to a comment by a follower. The personal connection made to one person feels like a personal connection made to all the followers, via transitive, representative interaction.

If the followers are deep, fervent fans, that sort of interaction is akin to something I saw at a rock festival a few years ago. Green Day was playing (they’re a fantastic live band) in front of tens of thousands of people.  For their next song they call out to the stadium: anybody out there know how to play a guitar?  Several friends of one dude near the front start pointing emphatically at him.  So Billie-Joe Armstrong points right at the dude. “You can play the guitar? Are you fucking serious? Because if you can’t and we bring you up here, everyone in this stadium is going to laugh at you.” I’m rows and rows and rows away but it’s clear the dude is nodding and the crowd around him is lifting him up, getting him to the stage.  The energy in the whole joint goes up several notches.  And the guy gets lobbed onto the stage.  And Green Day hands him a guitar. And he plays through the song with them.  We all played through the song with Green Day, because that’s that representational interaction, that personal connection made to one person that translates out to everyone else in the community.

Social media makes it possible for the inequality boundary to vanish.  It takes us from being creators and fans to just being peers of one another, at least partially.  This peer-to-peer relationship is what can induce and strengthen an emotional connection that a fan feels for an artist.  It’s very potent. The effect exists, and when we take on the role of being a Followed Person instead of a follower, we need to be mindful of it and make the most out of it.  This is that improv principle that’s shown up in indie gaming in action: “here’s how I make you awesome”.  Because when a FP reaches out to a follower, the follower gets that warm fuzzy leveling-up feeling.  And when an FP is a dick to a follower, well, the things you might expect happen, too.  Nobody wants to be a fan of an ass unless that ass is in their corner.

But to come at this sort of presence — like the one I maintain here at Deadly Fredly — from another angle, these venues also offer an element of heightened inequality as well.  Not a paradox: because I interact with you in the comments of my blog, we’re having a peer-to-peer connection; but because it’s my blog, there’s also an implicit authority model in place that I wouldn’t necessarily experience as your peer on a forum or mailing list we both happen to frequent (but not run).

And in a nutshell, that right there is part of why I’m not much for participating in forums any more.  As much as I try to destroy the perception of “the authority that speaks from on high” in venues such as these (as well as on mailing lists and forums that I do run), I rely just a touch on that authority too to enforce an element of respectfulness in the discourse that goes on in those places.

But I have to do that lead-by-example thing as much as possible: to get respect by giving respect, to speak to people as peers, but to take clear, polite action as that authority when conversations are going outside the bounds of what I think is acceptable.  Managing to do all three of these in a community you’re running — whether it’s a micro-community like the commenters on a blog, or a “macro” community like JimButcherOnline.com — is not easy.  The voice of authority can sound like the voice of condescension, and that is absolutely poisonous to the idea of peer-to-peer respect.  I have left forums in the past over such leadership failures, and I’d expect the same from people on my own when I louse it up.

So the core trick in this particular ramble is simply stay aware and stay on top of acting like a peer rather than an authority.  Golden rule, here’s how I make you awesome, yadda yadda.  If this one approach is your hammer and you try to treat every problem like a nail, you actually won’t go that wrong with it (save for in those moments where the Mr. Nice Guy element of it can end up undermining your ability to put a stop to something objectionable).

So if that’s the tool in your box, what are the ways you can finesse its use?  A couple things, to wrap this up:

Celebrate: Your followers have cool ideas too. Do not fail to point at them and call them cool. Better yet, make it clear you see those ideas as cool as or cooler than your own (because they are, in the same way that your kid is cooler than you are; maybe you spawned that idea, but seeing it take a life of its own trumps the original).  This is essentially what Green Day did.  The guy they got up on stage wasn’t as good of a guitarist as their guitarist was, but he didn’t need to be to be, in that moment, the coolest damn guy in the stadium.  Celebrating a follower’s idea destroys that whole inequality aspect of the paradigm in ways that kick off a party.  A community that parties together stays together, grows together.  There’s a reason the Evil Hat guys will offer their perspectives on the FateRPG mailing list, but never declare someone else’s different idea as any less valid (except in terms of whether we’d use it in our own play).  We’re in the business of celebrating the ideas that get kicked off by our products — not the ideas of our products.  That’s what being a game publisher is about.

Deputize: This is, really, the big one. It’s celebration on steroids.  It’s what you do when you take someone from that community of yours and give them some of the power in the authority you have as a nominal “head” of the community.  You’re not pulling someone onto the stage to play a song; you’re picking someone out of the audience and making them a member of your band, for keepsies.

It’s often pretty easy to figure out who should be deputized.  They’re your best fans, the ones who are really regularly adding good positive energy and support to the community.  They’re the people who are making your life easier by running off and compiling that list of information about the books y’all are so geeked about, or finding links all over the ‘net about your particular fandom and bringing them back to the community table so everyone can get pumped about ‘em.  They’re the people who speak up when you say “Hey, I could use a little help with…”

Rather than get into a generalized perspective on deputizing your best fans, I’ll get into some quick examples from my own experience. I’ve done this several times, in several ways, so this will be a cross-section at best.

Lenny: That guy who’s the lead system developer for The Dresden Files RPG, and Fate in general at this point? Yeah. He’s a community member from the FateRPG mailing list who regularly posted showing keen insights as to the nature of the system, the finesse of play, all that.  He and I started chatting about Fate after several of his posts caught my eye.  After a while it became clear he had an incredible amount of energy for what we wanted to do, so I asked him to help us get Spirit of the Century to completion.  It was ten kinds of rocky as Rob and I tried to figure out how to go from a duo to a trio on this, but we pushed through the work (eventually — I had my own flameouts here and there, everyone did) and ended up with a really satisfying new iteration of Fate in SOTC.  There’s a reason Lenny’s name is on the cover of that game: his relentness energy for Fate kept things going when fatigue was taking the rest of us.  Deputizing him has paid off in spades.

Priscilla: Priscilla Spencer’s one of the original superfans on Jim Butcher Online.  She’s a constant, positive presence there. She collated and maintained the timeline of the Dresden Files books. She posted a lot.  Hard not to notice her, and notice how much of a contribution she was making.  So I invited her to help moderate the forum.  That went well.  Then I started to notice how much I was failing to update the news items on the main jim-butcher.com website, so I asked her if she’d be willing to take that on too (she usually scooped the rest of us on newsworthy Jim items anyway).  Jim noticed her too. She also happens to be a capable artist.  Got a copy of First Lord’s Fury by Jim Butcher?  Like the Map of Alera found inside?  Art credit on that: Priscilla Spencer.  In my particular corner of fandom, she’s the guy up on stage strumming the guitar along with Green Day.

Rick, Stacey, Scott: There are plenty of other names I could list here, too. Each of these people — Rick Neal, Stacey Chancellor, Scott Acker — are part of the alpha testing crew that we assembled for the Dresden Files RPG.  When I assembled the Alpha groups, I didn’t have them sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement). I had them sign a Disclosure Pledge — they had to promise that they’d get out there on the net and actively talk about the playtesting experience, offering perspective, answering questions, and (frankly) achieving a grass-roots free advertising effect.  Each of these are accomplishing this in different ways.  Scott has helped make sure talk about the Dresden Files RPG occurs on RPG.net and in other venues, and he’s run several demo sessions of the game at conventions (rather than just running the game for a private group of playtesters).  Stacey makes sure the Dresden Files RPG community on LiveJournal gets updated about the progress of things, helping us cover that vector for getting the word out.  And Rick Neal — man, Rick Neal.  You want to see what he’s doing for us, go read his Dresden Files posts over on his blog — which he started, originally, to satisfy the Disclosure Pledge’s requirements.  It’s turned into a real destination for me, and not just because he talks occasionally about the game we’ve been working on.  These are all the result of a (stealth) act of mass deputizing — the Disclosure Pledge is all about doling out portions of the authority to speak publicly about the game Evil Hat is working on.

One thing you might notice in these examples is that in each case, the deputized folks are able to get more accomplished on the part of the community than I was able to do by myself.  That’s the true benefit of deputizing.  Communities that exceed the leadership’s ability to push for growth and activity will fall apart in some way (not necessarily die; just fall into chaos).  Deputizing is how leadership can grow in response to the growth of a community, and it uses the peer-to-peer value of those occasional personal connections to do it.  And every time it happens, it brings along the rest of the community for the ride.

Rock on.

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.

Communities result from common interest, collected into one place, focused on an exploration of its enthusiasms.  In that respect, you need to locate those common interests that have a critical mass and build on that, or you need to create common interests and focus them into a critical mass.  I’m not sure that there’s much I can say about the “how” of that, because you either have something that many people are interested in or you don’t.

That said if you’ve generated lots of smaller interests, you might be able to aggregate them usefully to create a larger common interest.  On the opposite end of the spectrum it’s possible you can have too much mass for your, uh, “containment mechanism”, to the point where the enthusiasm getting generated is in excess of the members’ ability to parse through it.  So there’s definitely some right-sizing going on here.

For small press games, there’s a very real chance that there’s not enough quantity of interest in an individual product to sustain a mailing list or a forum.  By “sustain”, I mean generate regular self-producing traffic to the extent that the community doesn’t fall into stagnancy.

If the publisher only produces that one game, they’re going to be out of luck in terms of having a viable community on their own.  If the publisher produces multiple games, it might be possible to create community around the aggregated interest in the publisher’s entire body of works, though that can be tenuous as wildly different styles of games are going to have a hard time finding enough common areas of overlap for the community to hang together sustainably.

If you’re such a publisher without that quantity of interest available (the critical mass), your only real path of action is to direct fans (and yourself) to larger communities that align with the interest you do have.  That means putting on your swamp gear and wading into the mucky territory of online gaming forums: RPGNet, Story-Games, the Forge, etc.  That’s no guarantee your area of interest will thrive there, but if it dies there it’ll be from something other than the lack of feeding it gets as a solo endeavor.

Once you do have that critical mass, it’s a case of right-sizing how you contain and focus it.

For most focused interest communities, at their inception, a web forum is not the right idea.  Web forums require people to remember they exist, and need to be interesting and important enough that the members have an incentive to make time in their days to venture out onto the Internet and check in at this specific destination.  Web forums also fragment conversation: people can participate in a single thread or a small selection of threads, and ignore all the rest.  For those small focused interests, that can be deadly, and will often lead to stagnancy rather than sustainability.  For this reason I only look to web forums as the solution for high levels of traffic and conversation, where the conversation is so active that it would drive more people away from a mailing list than it would bring in.

A mailing list is like a forum with a single thread. In order to participate, you have to parse at least on a basic level every message that comes through (even if that act of parsing is “nope, no interest, delete” or “do the subject lines in this digest interest me?”).  That’s a pain in the ass for large and highly varied conversations, but it’s perfect for focusing a lower-traffic interest into one continuous “stream” with enough mass and energy to become sustainable.  (If a mailing list version of your community is falling stagnant, moving to a forum won’t fix it; you simply do not have enough mass there to do the job. See above for what to do then.)

A lot of what I’m talking about here is art rather than science. I’m not putting numbers or quantified frequencies on what I’m talking about, because I can’t.  I do it by “feel”, and your “feel” very likely does not match mine.

There’s a point at which a mailing list feels dead or stagnant: that means the community doesn’t have a critical mass.  There’s a point at which a mailing list feels too damn busy for people to keep up with and still do everything else that’s important in their lives.  That’s where you have too much mass for your container, and it’s time to consider a move to a web forum, where your community’s nascent subcommunities can all coexist and occasionally cross over to one another conveniently without it feeling to the members like these interests are constantly intruding.

So as a community-runner, you need to keep an eye on these trends and be willing to take action when it’s clear that the community’s location is not a good fit for the community’s level of activity.

A few real-world examples from my experience:

The FateRPG Yahoo Group (a mailing list) is where we took conversation about the Fate variant of Fudge when it threatened to get large enough to drown out rest of the traffic on the original Fudge community mailing list.  It has stayed in this form for its entire lifespan to date.  Occasionally bits of off-topic conversation can pop up, but at this point it allows for discussions of Fate in general, Spirit of the Century, Starblazer Adventures, and Diaspora — as well as some other fan-produced variations.  Traffic is reasonably constant but rarely overwhelming.  There’s no reason to split it off to a forum, even though I’ve had it suggested to me before.  Frankly I think a forum version would just result in a lack of sufficient traffic; I’m betting the move would take an active community that’s thriving in its current “container” and put it into an environment where things would fizzle. Folks would leave due to the transition, and those that remained wouldn’t keep the conversation going enough for the value of community to really work.

Here, I’ll pick on my good friend Chad Underkoffler a bit to talk about another mailing list community I’m in occasional contact with. Chad insists on giving each of his individual PDQ-derived products their own mailing list.  Most of them have little to zero traffic.  While he has recently (at a fan’s request) started a general PDQ interest mailing list, that’s been done without shutting down the other specific-product lists and funneling traffic to the one place.  I suspect — though this is just my gut feeling — that this move is keeping the PDQ fans at large from achieving a critical mass.  The versions of PDQ in each individual product are not so different that there wouldn’t be plenty of value in some cross-over talk amongst the various small groups of people interested in each.  The Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies group has perhaps the best chance right now of sustainability, though part of the energy burst happening there is due to its relatively recent publication.  But who knows? I could be wrong. I just think that the various sub-groups of the PDQ community have much more to offer each other as a collective entity than they do as satellites nominally orbiting one another.

The Jim Butcher online community started as a mailing list a decade or so ago that I called McAnallys, named after the pub in the Dresden Files.  It worked great for the first few years of Jim’s post-publication career.  We encouraged a pub-like atmosphere, where folks could talk about whatever so long as we always circled back around to the reason we were gathered together in one place: Jim’s writing.  But Jim kept getting more and more popular, and the mailing list got to the point where it could kick out multiple long digests in a single day.  Plenty of folks on the list liked the fact that it was a mailing list, that they didn’t have to go out and check a forum, but the conversations were just too active. That started to create an “insider effect”, where the list was active and hoppin’ and great for the people who were already there and thriving in it, but which ended up being unpleasant to get into as a new member.  The thirsty man could either go thirsty or try to drink from a firehose pointed right in his face.  So I bit the bullet and moved the community to a web forum.

Today’s web forum on JimButcherOnline.com is still crazy-active, but by being a forum we’ve managed to support the continued idea of a pub atmosphere for some members, while allowing others to focus their interests only on the parts of the conversation that are actually about Jim’s works.  The “pub” area dates back to July 2007, with 93980 Posts over 2651 Topics. It outnumbers the board that discusses, say, the books of the Dresden Files by a 3-to-1 factor, and that’s after some pruning.

We absolutely lost some people in the transition — which is part of why I advocate making a move after a mailing list feels too busy, not in anticipation of it getting there. Change by its nature cuts off some of the old guard. In this regard, I was something of a casualty in the move to a web forum.  I just don’t directly participate that much these days, unless you’re talking about the Dresden Files RPG board on the forum. The way I work, I need something to intrude a little for me to participate in it.  At least a forum lets me pick & choose in that regard — I can subscribe to a thread that interests me, and it’ll “intrude” on my mailbox when something happens there.

…

So that’s my take on communities and the management of their critical mass. The term is particularly apt here. A community is a volatile substance. You have to handle it carefully.  Bring too little of it together and you might get a little radioactive but you won’t produce sustainable energy.  Bring too much of it together and it’ll blow up on you — unless you can contain it in something that can turn the explosive possibilities back into a sustainable energy source.  When it comes down to it, that’s what you want: the presence of enough common interest in one place that people fuse together and vibrate excitedly about the discovery of enthusiastic peers. That’s a community.

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

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.

I think where I’m at is encapsulated well enough in my response to Jennifer Jackson’s question over on livejournal. I’ll mostly repeat what I said there, here, with some edits and expansion:

My take is I’m torn.

Amazon is right that prices on eBooks need to be lower, possibly vastly lower, to give them a real chance to take off.  Publishers generally have their heads up their asses on this point.

But I think Macmillan is right, too, in that the publishers should be free to set their prices. A competitive marketplace is going to reveal the flaw or lack thereof in the prices they choose to set.

I think most parties are deeply wrongheaded as far as the whole DRM thing goes, but that’s a big kettle of fish and I’m just looking for an appetizer-scale comment here.

Someone laid out a price model above as indicative of what (some) publishers are doing right now with books, along the lines of:

$7 for a paperback
$15 for an ebook
$20 for a hardcover

But that’s an incomplete listing.  Here’s what it’s more like:

$7 for a paperback released one year after the hardcover
$15 for an ebook released the same time as the hardcover
$20 for a hardcover released as the earliest available form of the product

Pricing isn’t just about format. It’s about availability and urgency. If you feel you MUST get your hands on “Changes” by Jim Butcher the first day it’s available, in an eBookless world you’d be spending that hardcover price, period, or you’d have to sit on your thumbs and wait a year for the paperback. It’s as simple as that.

The fact that there have been explicit statements from a few publishers in this kerfluffle that talk about sliding the ebook pricing scale around as the physical format options of a particular book become available makes sense, honestly, because of the urgency principle.  If you want the convenience of first-available access, you pay more, and you pay more because that author’s content is so valuable to you that you cannot wait for it to become available later in a cheaper form.  And one hopes that a hardcover/higher-pricing-period-eBook generates a proportionately larger payout for the author, since that’s who you’re (psychologically) supporting when you make an urgency rather than patience oriented purchase.

YES, some — even many — publishers have completely screwed the pooch on following the logic of this approach, pricing back catalog works at ridiculous levels.  People can and should be angry about that sort of stuff.  It’s just silly, and it’s going to hurt the form (but maybe the publishers want that, because the market hasn’t yet screamed “give us eBooks or go out of business” at them enough).

But let’s also remember eBooks in this format (kindle/iPad friendly) are still in their infancy.  Babies poo outside their diapers all the damn time, I can say from experience. But eventually they grow up and start to get it right more consistently.  It’s a matter of time and a matter of market pressures.

I’m going to be real interested to see what if any independent eBook marketplaces open up, ones oriented on getting good content from “unknown” authors available to voracious readers at a cheap and DRM-free pricepoint.  That’s where I think smaller, nimbler mammals are going to outstrip the dino-publisher set.  Whether or not the bigger guys will go extinct once something like that really gets rolling is the question.  Maybe, maybe not, but either way I’m hoping the environmental changes ahead teach the good ones how to survive — or present our favorite authors with ways to get it done themselves.

It may simply be a matter of time before a few reasonably big name authors decide that it’s time to buy into the new way of doing things, and do something really splashy — think about what’s happened with some music-makers after years of iTunes’ presence in the marketplace. “Pay whatever you think it’s worth including free” ala Radiohead, for example. Now, I don’t think that the music model works 100% with fiction — musicians go on tour and make a lot of their money through those ticket sales, rather than via albums, and there’s no easy analogue for that from the perspective of an author.  But imagine what happens if, say, Stephen King says: I’m gonna publish my next book myself, as an eBook, for five bucks (or one buck). You can buy it from my website.

Right now, the old way of doing things is still the dominant way of doing things. It’s going to take years more to get to where it becomes clear that the old way is built on what’s now a foundation of sand.  Until then, many successful authors are going to want to support the old way because the new way is hard, and because the publishing world is really very, very small and as an author you don’t want to piss off your friends and colleagues who’ve so far been a part of your success and will have a very palpable impact on your ability to get your works out there and selling.

As with so many things in publishing, though, the middle-man — whether you’re talking distribution or non-creator-owned publishing — is in trouble.  The middle man will continue to have some value over the years, though, as the guy/organization that is focused on reaching people and the selling and the skills that are involved in doing both effectively.  But those middlemen will eventually only have value to those creators who don’t, themselves, feel like they have or want to have those skills (or exercise the time to use them). Some will say this has already happened for a number of creators. They’re mostly right. But it’s not a widespread phenomenon yet.

And that’s a shift to where the middlemen are the clients of the creators, not the other way around.

Speaking to my personal experience, that’s pretty much exactly what Evil Hat did for Chad Underkoffler with Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies.  Chad didn’t want to deal with the business particulars of publication, so Evil Hat stepped in to do that job for him, for a cut. This is less a change of process than it is of perspective.  If you view Chad as Evil Hat’s client — we take on his content, we publish it, it’s “our” game that he happened to create — you’re old school.  New school says that Evil Hat is Chad’s client — he created his content, figured out what services he wanted us to provide, and we provided them for an agreed-upon price.

There’s very little that’s procedurally different between the two, but the change in the minds of those parties involved is a big deal. It changes the perspective on who is thought to be in control, and a hundred other things that tie into that.  And once someone feels like they have more control over their options, those options get just a little bit closer to being something that could eventually be turned into a pointy-clicky self-serve solution.

I’ll be real interested to see how all that comes about.  Next to that, this whole Amazon/Macmillan thing is just a side-show, an amusing light-show that is at best a mild precursor to the main event.

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.

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?)

That’s a complicated question, and one that I’m not sure I can get completely surrounded in today’s post, but it breaks down to two main things for me: the cold hard math of publishing and price points, and the curious state of The Book On The Shelf in today’s marketplace.  In the specific case of the Dresden Files RPG, it also has something to do with the degree to which we can make direct contact with Jim’s fan-base — I certainly have a unique advantage in that I also run Jim Butcher’s official website and forums for him — but I’m trying to think about the more general case, here.

The Cold Math

Selling something direct through our webstore gets us around 90% of the cover price. Selling something direct to an end-consumer through IPR gets us 70% of the cover price.  Selling something to a retailer through IPR gets us about 44% of the cover price (the retailer gets the book at 55% of the cover price, and IPR gets a 20% cut of that; 0.55 * 0.80 = 0.44).  Selling to a distributor gets us 40% of the cover price, minus any additional costs due to covering the shipping ourselves (distributors often ask for a minimum order amount at which they can get free shipping, and then hit that minimum amount; the threshold is usually no more than a few hundred bucks total on the order’s bottom line).

Mathematically, in order to make sure you stay solvent as a publisher, you have to plan for the smallest amount of revenue per sale. If a distributor is a major factor, I have to plan on something in the mid-30% range (let’s say 37.5%, though reality may slide that a few points in either direction depending on what your shipping costs are; a recent order from Esdevium came out to about 37-38% after adjusting for shipping cost).  The difference between planning on 37.5% and 44% might seem small, but that’s still a difference of 6.5% — an over 14% drop in the revenue source.  So all the same I’d prefer to plan for that 44% mark

And that’s just talking gross revenues.  Depending on how you’re able to work the math, the cost of producing that book could be 20% of the cover price (maybe as little as 10%, maybe as much as 25%, and hopefully never more than that).  I’m gonna use 20% in this discussion because “five times your cost” is not a bad rule of thumb in general. So look at those numbers again, through the lens of net profit per sale.

(This is shaky ground, that said: it supposes that you’ll sell every single one of your books! Otherwise you have to absorb the cost of those books that you didn’t sell through and spread it out across the units that you DID sell. But it’s a useful abstraction for the kind of algebra I want to do here. And in essence, the “net” I’m talking about here IS that buffer through which you accommodate unsold product — as well as your other non product specific costs of staying afloat.  It may also be where you’re making back production costs that you aren’t working into the formula; I often run my formula strictly off printing and shipping, and hope for the profits to cover things like our art budget, etc.)

Knocking the 20% off gets us: 70% in the web store, 50% in direct sale through IPR, 24% sold to retail through IPR, and 17.5% to distribution.  Now the math of profit gets pretty harsh when comparing IPR-to-retail to distribution-to-retail: 24 vs 17.5 is a nearly 30% drop.  Flip that over and you’re saying that distribution needs to increase your sales volume by at least a third in order to maybe be worth it.  And consider: distribution comes hand in hand with new risks such as delayed payments (yes, IPR “delays” its payouts to quarterly milestones, but I know they’ve collected money for every copy sold already; not so with distro) and other assorted issues and constraints.  And while distro’s “alpha strike” order might be respectably large, follow-on orders are usually going to be pretty small.

So say you have a $40 book, and you’re looking at making $28 off a sale, $20 off a sale, a little less than $10 off a sale, or $7 off a sale. Where’s your cut-off? Especially given that you have other costs and future growth that you’ll need to pay for out of that revenue?

A number of small publishers might cut that at $20. Understandably. In doing so, they’re cutting out ALL game store access, since that eliminates IPR’s sales-to-retail option, but they’re making the most money off of high quality sales that often have an element of personal connection and fandom. They’re serving the alpha consumers and alpha gamers, there, and looking out for themselves.  That’s not Evil Hat’s approach, but I get it.

Evil Hat cuts it mostly at $10 per sale.  That final $3 difference can really add up over time, and as yet I haven’t seen strong evidence that the theoretical additional volume that a distribution service would get me would make up for that gap.  On the other hand, I’ve seen plenty of evidence that IPR is getting our product out to plenty of retailers.  Half our sales volume through IPR is in sales to retailers, after all.

Then there’s the social motive, which I have to use to “warm up” this cold math, at least a little. Getting into some retail stores is good for connecting with gamers.  So there’s the compromise, and the mostly comfortable “rest state” at which Evil Hat finds itself when it comes to getting our products out into the world.  Seeing as this has gotten us 2500 sales (digital copies included) of Don’t Rest Your Head, and nearly 5000 sales (digital copies included) of Spirit of the Century … I think we’re doing all right with that compromise.

Sidebar: The Specific Case of the Licensed Product

So the real bitch with a licensed product is the cost of the license itself.  Here’s the double edged sword: you can either work that cost into your base product cost that you quintuple to get a reasonable cover price, or you can take it out of the profit margin.

The former approach will drive up your cover price but will make sure you’re doing well (making money) in almost all of your sales scenarios (save for the catastrophic Nobody’s Buying one). The latter approach will keep your cover price down (which is socially good, as it looks out for your buddy gamers that are the reason you got into publishing for the hobby in the first place), but leave you with a very thin profit at the end.

Licensors are often looking for a percentage of cover price, so you’re often (as far as I can tell) looking at a case where you pay less when you sell a book at 55% of the cover price vs. 100% of the cover price.  From a licensor perspective that makes total sense: it’s good protection against the licensee losing his damn mind and selling the game at 90% off, reducing your take to a pittance. (There may also be other guarantees worked into the contract, like “licensor will make at least $X,000 from this, and if licensor doesn’t, licensee will pay up for the difference”.)  This percentage could be 10%, 15%, or something else. My experience on those specifics is of course massively limited, but let’s use 15% for the example.

If we’re going with the latter case (taking it out of the profit margin), our theoretical $40 book is now, in the licensed scenario, paying out $6 per sale to the licensor.  So the webstore makes a $22 profit, IPR direct makes $14, IPR to retail makes $4, and distribution makes $1.  Nasty, huh?  But making $4 per sale (10% of the cover price) at least sounds better than $1 (2.5% of the cover price), right? Plus, it suggests that a direct sale is worth at least 3.5 sales to retail (sticking strictly with IPR).

Or, considering the $40 book is based on the notion of a $8 cost base, what happens if your cost base gets $6 added to it. That’s $14, and quintupling it gives you a fresh new cover price of $70. Yuck. Even adjusting your formula a bit and just quadrupling it gets you a cover price of $56.

The reality is that I think most licensed product publishers go for something in the middle — part of the cost of the license goes against the base cost of the book, and part of it goes to the profit margin, or the “5x multiplier” is reduced as I suggest above. Regardless, a whole lot of praying goes into the idea that the license will boost the sales volume considerably to make that work out.   Or maybe other more manageable deals are being made, where the cut for the licensor isn’t based on the cover price or on sales volume at all.  Every license is its own special snowflake, and data is especially thin on the ground.

However you slice it, though, a licensed product brings in a whole host of other factors that can make the math extra messy.

The Book on the Shelf

All of this points, then, to the Book on the Shelf, as has been told of in songs and legend.

There are two kinds of shelves we’re talking about here: the ones in game stores, and the ones in book stores. I’m going to talk about the second one first.

There’s some overlap there, but the book store shelf brings some extra risks to the party. Your volume can be a lot higher, but you’re usually getting a faceful of fun risk factors like “returnability”.  The policy of returnability has killed off (or at least gravely wounded) plenty of small publishers. The idea is that when you sell a few hundred books into that particular market, it comes with a guarantee offered by you that if the stores/distributors can’t sell the products, they can return them to you and get a refund.  Which makes some sense in terms of wanting render the bookstores and bookstore distributors willing to place larger orders … but only if those stores and distros can figure out how to sell your product.  Many don’t: there are a ton of products and not a lot of time to devote specific attention to each one, and that means your product has to sell itself, reliably, everywhere it shows up.

In essence, the bookstores and bookstore distributors asking for returnability are saying: we’d like to take a gamble, but we want you to cover all our losses if the gamble doesn’t pay off.  And that, simply, is not something a small publisher — as most in the game industry are — can really afford.  Yes, in theory, you could cover all this and remain solvent by carefully watching how much money came in from those sales sources and making sure you don’t spend any of it until the window for returns has expired.  But a lot of businesses need to spend the money they make, and since we’re talking distribution here you’re looking at shipping costs tied to the order that you the publisher probably had to cover both coming and going.  Fail to be perfectly vigilant and your awesome, profitable company could go bankrupt the moment the UPS guy knocks on your door with a truck full of unsold product.

This has happened, and will probably continue to happen so long as this business model exists.  And all of it is balancing against the idea that what you’ll sell through that “channel” will more than make up for the risks.  But do you really want to take that gamble, as a publisher (especially if you happen to agree with me that the other guy isn’t)? To me, this particular gamble feels a lot like Russian Roulette. Life is on the line, and that’s a stake too high to venture.

Run all that through the feedback equation of the free market a few thousand times, with small publishers reacting reasonably to the risks and the big bookstores having their own set of reasonable reactions, and you get our current circumstance with bookstores.  Big physical stores that don’t carry as wide a variety of product as many of us wish they would (because stocking a few books in many many physical stores is a big expense), and online stores that provide a crazy amount of variety because they can better handle the idea of only having one or two copies of a book in stock (or drop-shippable through a back-end deal with the publisher). And those online stores are getting fed through the same deep-cut distro system, but since their overhead is so much lower, they can turn those deep cuts into deep discounts for the end consumer, and the physical store has to match it or at least try to get close … hence the shaky ground on which the big bookstore currently stands.

So that physical book on the physical shelf in a physical bookstore is a huge gamble. Will anyone notice it and pick it up? If they do, will they just use it for its window-shopping value, and then seek out a cut-rate lower price through an online sales venue instead? Will the book need to be returned to the publisher? More and more it will, all for perfectly reasonable reasons.   The only exceptions are those which will always reliably sell all of its copies through that venue, usually through little effort of the bookstore itself.  And when we’re talking RPGs… Well.  How many of you go to a chain bookstore instead of a game store to get yours?

So, the first case, the game store.  That book on that shelf is a gamble, too, but more often it’s one that the store is shouldering.  They can’t return the products for refunds in many cases (and if they can, the returns might just go to the distributor, not to the publisher).  Hopefully, because they’re a smaller store, a focused-purpose store, they can get to know the product and make a more directed effort to sell it to their customers.  In return for this risk, those stores ask that they get a significant discount on the products (45-50% off the cover price).  Unlike the big chain bookstore scenarios above, here the tit-for-tat seems more evident, more plausible, and thus as a publisher it’s something I’m willing to tap into.  It might not be my most revenue maximized situation (though with the IPR vs. distro math, clearly there’s a range of options for choosing a better vs. worse revenue strategy). But tapping into it is probably my healthiest scenario, from the perspective of sustaining the hobby industry, because it hits that balance point where the publisher can exercise both self interest and community interest.

But it also touches on the third case, the one I didn’t mention, the inverse scenario: the book that ISN’T on the shelf.  That’s a gamble too, one shouldered wholly by the publisher, one that plays counterpoint to the whole set-up.  When you choose not to put a book on a shelf in a retail store, how many possible customers and fans are you failing to reach?

The answer, in a quantifiable sense, is pretty damned close to unknowable.  So you roll the dice.  You listen to your gut, and you try to weigh the unknowable cost of the “lost customer” vs. the cost of sending a book at a big discount down one of the channels to a store’s shelf.  Every publisher’s gut is going to rumble a little differently, there.  Some will say the gains of selling into a full on distribution channel outweigh the risks, that you find so many “lost” customers that it’s a no brainer.  My gut isn’t convinced, and that’s not much of a surprise — honestly it’s a pretty conservative gut given how Evil Hat has incrementally, gradually accepted one risk at a time over the last few years.

We’ve taken a different approach at the Hat, one that tries to find those lost customers not through the riskiest of shelves but through making direct contacts, whether we’re talking about forums, blogs, the FateRPG mailing list over on Yahoo Groups, Jim Butcher’s website, and so on.  At the end of the day, we can’t ignore the shelf — we feel we need to take that gamble, at least in a smaller stakes sense, because we DO gain some customers we wouldn’t otherwise.  But it just feels like folly to make everything about the shelf when the age of the network has opened up so many other ways of reaching people.

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?

Here’s the skinny.

Previous Totals

2009Q4 to date:
Penny PDF: 19
Penny Print: 12
DLYM PDF: 21
DLYM Print: 7
DRYH PDF: 41
DRYH Print: 25
SOTC PDF: 47
SOTC Print: 33
SOTC HC: 12
SOTS PDF: 30
S7S PDF: 23
S7S Print: 12

Lifetime:
Penny: 342
DLYM: 709
DRYH: 2473
SOTC: 4812
SOTS: 576
S7S: 814

Let’s see what IPR adds to that, shall we?

2009Q4 for IPR

Penny PDF: 11
Penny Print: 45 (27 to retail)
DLYM PDF: 2
DLYM Print: 41 (28 to retail)
DRYH PDF: 11
DRYH Print: 78 (56 to retail)
SOTC PDF: 9
SOTC Print: 116 (96 to retail)
SOTS PDF: 9
S7S PDF: 3
S7S 51 (33 to retail)

Final Totals for 2009

2009Q4 final:
Penny PDF: 19+11 = 30
Penny Print: 12 + 45 = 57
DLYM PDF: 21 + 2 = 23
DLYM Print: 7 + 41 = 48
DRYH PDF: 41 + 11 = 52
DRYH Print: 25 + 78 = 103
SOTC PDF: 47 + 9 = 56
SOTC Print: 33 + 116 = 148
SOTC HC: 12 + 0 = 12
SOTS PDF: 30 + 9 = 39
S7S PDF: 23 + 3 = 26
S7S Print: 12 + 51 = 63

Lifetime:
Penny: 342 + 11 + 45 = 398 (so close!)
DLYM: 709 + 2 + 41 = 752
DRYH: 2473 + 11 + 78 = 2562
SOTC: 4812 + 9 + 116 = 4937
SOTS: 576 + 9 = 585
S7S: 814 + 3 + 51 = 868

Observations

A few quick observations about this final chunk of data. (If you want to see commentary on the other parts of 2009, check out the sales numbers tag.)

IPR Slows Down In The Winter

This was the weakest quarter we’ve had with IPR in a while. I think it was a weaker quarter for IPR overall, however — there just aren’t that many new items coming into the catalog over there, and new products have been clearly indicated as a prime driver of sales at that site.   People get reluctant to buy games for themselves during the holidays, I think, so that plays in too.

IPR vs. Our Own Store

Q4 was also our first full quarter with the Evil Hat Web Store in effect, and I think it stripped off the richest topsoil of direct sales both in PDF and print.  PDF sales of our products in the fourth quarter were almost vanishingly small at IPR, as can be seen with the above numbers.  In order to maximize revenue, the Evilhat.Com website switched over to linking to the webstore as the “first link of preference”. IPR formerly occupied that position. So I suspect that has grabbed the folks who come to Evilhat.Com as the first point of entry when looking for our products. IPR is clearly still capturing a lot of sales — more than our webstore — as its own first point of entry, so I’m of course still happy we’re working with them.

IPR to Retail = Good Times

The general trend of IPR sales skewing more strongly toward retail continues. In terms of print sales, 60-80% of the print items sold in Q4 were to retail, depending on the title (SOTC’s percentage was largest, Penny’s was smallest.)

I suspect this is in part due to the “topsoil” stripping I mention above. But I also believe that the long tail effect is playing out in retail stores, as far as our “back catalog” goes.  IPR and direct sales have allowed us to “alpha strike” the marketplace to our financial benefit — we’re making the most money per unit on those earliest sales — but once that presence-via-product is out there, it starts feeding back into retail, and retailers then comes knocking to order a few copies for their stores.  It’s clear the products continue to sell in these storefronts, and that makes me happy: I certainly don’t want stores ordering copies only to see them sit on the shelves. But it also suggests that stores which don’t get right in on the ground floor with a new product are still going to have the opportunity to make something of it after the market has a chance to demonstrate that the product is worth placing some confidence in.  While that might net the retail store less cash overall, it does mean that they can make the purchases with less inherent risk. In this economy, that doesn’t suck.

IPR Works As Our Primary Outlet For Retail

This also legitimizes my feeling that I’d prefer to stick with IPR as my primary retail method in the USA. As I mentioned before, we do sell to an honest-to-god distributor (Esdevium) as well, but that distributor’s scope is outside the USA. That helps manage the whole exorbitant overseas shipping cost thing (at least for the European market) for direct and retail customers across the Atlantic.

I do think I’d be willing to sell direct to retailers (i.e., selling directly from Evil Hat to the retail store) on a case by case basis, but IPR’s continuing retail strength for us means I don’t have to feel like I must. (Tho if you’re a retailer and want to talk to Evil Hat about making a direct order, speak up.)

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.)

The Art, Part 1: Dark things might happen, but it’s all brightly colored (I think the colorist has said that folks have called his colors “fruity” before). In a way the colors reflect the exuberance of the supers genre. It’s all a brightly-colored mess sometimes, a rainbow chaos. To read Invincible is to fill up your eyes with the truth of this. It’s a reality like our own, but poppy and bright and a little bit nuts.

The Art, Part 2: Those rubber faces! I’m not talking about some sort of super-deformed cartoony thing; I’m talking about how faces look in Invincible when they take a punch from someone who can bench a couple hundred tons. We are squishy beings, and the art shows that. It gives the bodies a sense of floppy, squishy volume that really serves the presentation of violence in the comic — which can get pretty bloody at times.

The Fights: Like I said, they can be bloody. But they can also be wacky (bad guy has device strapped to chest containing super-strong alien pet that looks like a knot of semi-sentient rubber bands), comical (squid-headed extradimensional freak has speech impediment during villainous rant), dreadful (our hero gets turned into meat paste), and poignant (family issues playing out on the battlefield). Best of all they’re pretty unpredictable. People are fragile, and this is a world where hypersonic fists and explosive power get flung around. Injuries result. Characters you’re sure will be around for a while longer turn up with a sudden case of being dead.

The Relationships: The relationships in Invincible get probably a good 75% of the screen time. You can get multiple pages of a conversation between the hero and his mom. Or his girlfriend. Or that girl who’s had a secret crush on him for years. Or his college dorm-room buddy best friend. Or the government agent guy with a mysterious facial scar. Or his tailor. You get the idea. It’s a story about growing up while shouldering the burden of massive, save-the-world responsibilities, and it never turns away from the chance to dig deep on how it’s affecting his “normal guy” life.  It regards all of this as such a priority to the story, in fact, that folks looking more for the pow-bang-zoom part may find the title disappointing. But if you buy in, as I do, it’s eat-this-up-with-a-spoon time. (And this is where the Smallville touchpoint came in for me: that show is also a place where the relationships are meant to shine, but good god the writing of those relationships is just dreadful. Invincible by contrast gets the relationships just right.)

The World, Part 1: The world is new, but recognizable. Looked at from the corner of my eye, Invincible is a DC Universe parody (among other things). The hero’s from-another-planet father is Omni-Man. There’s a big group of superheroes called The Guardians Of The Globe. Etc. But like I said, the world is still new. When they show up, they’re not standard takes on the tropes of other comics — something is askew and bent about it. At the end of the day I dig reinvention. When it’s done right it’s just magnificent — like a great, reinterpretive cover of an original song. That’s what Invincible is pulling off for me with its reinventions and homages.  It’s easy to dismiss the comic as “just another Superboy story” — which is both correct and completely off the point.

The World, Part 2: The implicit world of the comic is so much larger than the part that intersects with the hero’s story. This is a big one for me, because in a superhero story the universe itself is one of the stars.  Invincible really shines at implying a huge amount of story and setting in a small number of pages. Check out the one-page revelation (I think it was one page) of  The Immortal’s back-story as one example.  Or the just-around-the-edges bits of alien cultures. Characters that show up seem to be coming out of the middle of something else — and that makes the world feel weightier, bigger, realer.

There’s more I could get into, and specifics I could cite, but the avoidance of spoilers is important to me here.

For gaming application, my takeaways, none of which are particularly revelatory I’m afraid:

I like pain and consequence, whether it’s in relationships or in physical injury. That just about sums up the first four parts from the above list. Being a hero requires that a price has to be paid. You can either pay it deliberately or let the law of unintended consequences play out. Either way, it’s gonna hurt.

Reinterpretation/reinvention is fun and does a nice job of excusing liberal borrowing from other sources. By enabling that kind of borrowing, you bring along a lot of ideas that exist in the original source, ideas which can be understood quickly by the others at the table without having to front-load a lot of original setting knowledge. That’s a powerful shorthand (and tangentially, a big part of why I think Amber works so well for gaming).

Don’t bring anything into the story without knowing what its story is — even if it’s just to give 15 seconds of added detail. This is really a broad story-telling lesson, when it comes down to it, but is super effective for GMing. (I know that Jim Butcher has plenty of backstory in mind for the supporting cast of the Dresden Files, for example, that will rarely make it into a story, but it’s there to be tapped for his stories when he needs to motivate a character or provide foundation for a quick few paragraphs of dialogue.)  Knowing that there’s a story there, even one broadly sketched in two or three sentences on an index card, gives your world volume, weight, and life.  While the game’s story might be all about the player characters, the world isn’t all about them, and many players will respond well when it’s clear the world is not a paper-thin mirage existing only to serve them.  And by keeping these hidden little stories implicit, you’re free to change the unspoken details if you need to later. The only thing that’s locked down about that particular iceberg is the tip that’s showing above the waterline.

Pacing is a matter of paying attention to player priorities. That’s a fancy way of saying that if your players are showing up with a lot of investment in how their characters’ love lives are falling apart, don’t respond to that by giving them a session-spanning fight scene. Sometimes the fight is just a quick-cut breather between the heavier relationship stuff. Then again, sometimes it’s time to fly off to Mars with a team of heroes to see what you can do about that nasty mind-controlling squid-thing problem. Look where the camera of the players’ attention is pointed, and make things happen there. That’s a choice they’re making, and you should make sure there’s something for those cameras to film there. Combined with the implicit story strategy from my earlier point, this is a pretty easy one to follow. If everything has a little bit of story already going on with it implicitly, then wherever the cameras get pointed there’s going to be something to see.

I think there’s more here, but I’m running out of steam. Share and enjoy.

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.

17 Archer Feats
17 Bard Spells
17 Magic Shields
17 Monk Feats
17 Plants
17 Rogue Feats
43 Space Opera Adventure Seeds – Space Opera Support #6
90 Phenomena in the City of Copenhagen
API Demon Codex: Lochs
API Demon Pack 01
API Worldwide: Canada
Advanced Fleet Designs: Titan Class Scout
Adventurer Essentials: Holy Water
Adventurer Essentials: Rope
Afterpeak Systemless Setting
Albenistan: Election Day (Modern Dispatch 113)
Apocalypse Prevention, Inc.
BASH! Basic Action Super Heroes (New and Improved)
Barbarians Versus
Basic poker playing cards 1
Beast Hunters RPG
Behind the Monsters: Skeleton
Behind the Spells: Sanctuary
Best of The Rifter
Bits of Darkness: Dungeons
Bits of Magicka: Pocket Items
Blood Games II
Blood of the Innocent: A Savage Worlds mission set in the jungles of Evil
Book of Races
Book of the Faithful: Power of Prayer
Brandy’s by the Bay
Breathe Life Into #1
C&C Arms and Armor
C&C Shadows of the Halfling Hall
COPPER DRAGON: Basic Dungeons 1         5 downloads remaining
Castlemourn Campaign Setting
Character, Hero
Chronica Feudalis
Class options volume II: Paladins Prevail!
Classic Spycraft: Shadowforce Archer Worldbook
Classic Spycraft: Spycraft Espionage Handbook
Colonial Gothic: Secrets
Cortex System Role Playing Game
Counter Collection 4th Edition Paragon 1
Creatures of the Wastelands: A Menagerie of Mutants and Mutations (Revised Edition)
Creatures of the Wastelands: Habitats
Creatures of the Wastelands: The Thrasher Gang
DRAGONSHIRE: City Interiors
DRAGONSHIRE: City Ruins
Damnation Decade
Dark Raiders of Misty Ridge
Degenerate Seaside Town
Demimonde
Dept. 7 Adv. Class Update: Bar Room Berserker
Dept. 7 Adv. Class Update: Gravity Slinger
Dept. 7 Adv. Class Update: Lucky Bastard
Dept. 7 Adv. Class Update: NeoWitch Guardian
Dept. 7 Adv. Class Update: The Innocent
Dept. 7 Adv. Class Update: The Prince of Doggs
Dept. 7 Adv. Class Update: The S.L.A.M. Soldier
Dept. 7 Technology Update: AAP/CPR Med Kit
Destinations: Spaceport Trident Vespa
Diana: Warrior Princess
Divine Homelands
Divine Quests
Dork Covenant
Earth Space Marines
Ephemeris
F-211 Copperhead
Fantastic Maps: The Dragon’s Lair
Fantasy Firearms
Fantasy Women Clipart JPEG 7
For the Love of Dungeons
Forlakh’s Tower – CR 4 D20 Module
Full Light, Full Steam
Future Firearms Pack One
Gravitic Thrust Vehicles
Grumlahk’s Troll Tales
Hollow Earth Expedition Earth Drill
Instant Antagonist: The Selfish Succubus
Interface Zero: Modern20 edition
Items Evolved Rituals
Karma Roleplaying System Core Rules Book
Kiddy counters
Kids, Castles & Caves
Kobold Quarterly 11
Labyrinths & Lycanthropes
Lady’s Rock
Liber Sodalitas: The Dream Healers (Pathfinder edition)
London Fires module A101 for Fellowship of the White Star
MADS Role Playing Game
MARS: Savage Worlds Edition
Magpie Codex 2
Martial Cultures: Arytis
MegaCity Sector Maps
Mini Nuclear Plant
Modern Dispatch (#104): Line Zero
Modern Dispatch 120: Cyber-state Avatar Toolkit
MonkeyGod Presents: From Stone to Steel
MonkeyGod Presents: Frost & Fur
More Mighty Than Steel
NEO MONKS: The Dragonlord
NEO RANGERS: The Spider King
No Dignity in Death: The Three Brides
OSRPG CCG Card Template 1
Objective Interim Modern Combat System
One Shot Adventures! Days of Knights
Open Game Table – The Anthology of Roleplaying Game Blogs, Vol. 1
Piledrivers and Powerbombs: Chokeslam of Darkness Edition
Pimp My Paladin
Police Precinct
Portrait of a Villain – The Desire
Power Pics Heroes 1 -Female Speedster
Power Pics Villains 1 -Male Cyborg
Privateers and Pirates
QAGS Second Edition
Qalidar
Quirin Encounter #3: Healing Device
Quirin Maps #14: Bandit’s Territory
RIO DRACO: Base Set
Reign of Discordia (Traveller Edition)
Rise Of a Legend:NEW Issue #1
Roma Imperious
Rugged Adventures
S.C.A.R.E. Vol. 2-Viesca Melin Aella
Scenes of Space Hex Battle Maps
Serenity Role Playing Game
Seven Leagues roleplaying game of Faerie
Shambles
Shaolin Squirrels : Nuts of Fury
Shrouded Agendas for D&D 4E: The Purifiers
Slivers of Dawn
Special Vehicles
Spirit of the Season
Squirrel Attack! Operation: Get Mr. Jones’ Nuts
Stolen Blood
Summerland Revised and Expanded Edition
Tales of Wyn D’mere Role Playing Game!
Tendril’s Oak Inn
The Black Book
The Black Spot
The Book of Dumb Tables
The Book of The Dead
The Fate of Inglemia – Superlink Edition
The Kerberos Club
The Lazy GM: Lizardfolk
The Lunar Scrolls
The Otherworld
The Squared Circle:Wrestling RPG
The Veggie Patch
Thousand Suns: Foundation Transmissions
Thousand Suns: Transmissions from Piper
Threat Record Vol. I, Issue #2
Three Sixteen
Thrilling Tales 2nd Edition (Savage Worlds)
Torn Apart by Radiation Wraiths
Trail of Cthulhu Player’s Guide
Treasure Chests: Volume 2
Turris Lemurum : Tower of Ghosts
Unorthodox Sorcerers
Valherjar: The Chosen Slain Core Rulebook
Vampire Castle
Wayfarers
WorldWorksGames / Deadly Encounters Combo
WorldWorksGames / DungeonLinX: Dragon God
WorldWorksGames / Uncharted Space: Sathrican Homeworld
WorldWorksGames / UrbanMayhem: Streets of Mayhem
WorldWorksGames / Wormhole
Wyrd of Questhaven (PFRPG)
Zombacalypse
Zombie Apocalypse
Zombie Bytes: The Anthology
[PFRPG] GM’s Aid VII: Condition Cards – Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Edition
[PFRPG] Loot 4 Less Vol. 1: Armor and Weapons
[PFRPG] The Book of Arcane Magic
[Savage Worlds] Strike Force 7 – Savaged!
d66 Ship Names 2
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Ápocrypha – Myths of the World

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.

My wife took me to see Avatar (3D and in IMAX, thankyouverymuch) for my birthday. When I came back, I wanted to talk about it plenty. But I wanted to have a uniformly positive conversation about it.

And frankly I just can’t trust the Internet to provide that. Nor should I.  As a collective entity, the Internet is in chronic pain, the kind that strips away all kindness and leaves a body making a choice between do I lash out now? and do I lash out later?, no third option. People are wrong on the internet, after all, and the rage that inspires — in me included — is flatly unconscionable and requires the immediate application of said rage to the object of our ire-du-jour.

This makes a blog a terrible, horrible, awful, no-good place to commit acts of pure celebration. Yes, many acts of celebration ala blog come off just fine, but at the end of the day I have to regard that as mainly a matter of luck, akin to throwing a birthday party in a war zone: just because a stray bullet didn’t zip through and kill one of the celebrants is no indication that it wasn’t an incredibly dangerous thing to do.  As Nathan Paoletta has said, the Internet’s supervillain power is its ability to strip away context from any conversation.  Inevitably, someone is going to get accused of white privilege, or of sexism, or some sort of variation of Godwin’s Law is going to break out. It’s enough to send this particular groundhog scurrying back into his hole at the slightest hint of shadow.

Worse, sometimes the interloper, the guy that fires the bullet into the party, has a fine point to be made. But in a mixture of both perception and actuality, the point comes with a stark lack of forgiveness and compromise. I blame the presentation layer, text, for this.  Text often comes without subtext, without tone, and thus a statement that is in contradiction of or otherwise at odds with the object of celebration can only be read in the harshest fashion possible. I say “can only be read” because reading charitably is a skill, and skills are not exercised in the moment of first impression. Skills come in later, if at all. So when you have X, and someone comes in proclaiming Not X, the “not” is the sum total of the message. It is stark, and it gets right the heck up one’s nose.

My gut, not my brain, believes that the immediately correct response is to kick the Not-X-ers in the teeth, to believe with a fiery passion that they are idiots of the lowest order, and to be honest I spend a lot of time even after I wrestle that reaction to the ground still soaking in the negative response.  There has not been a single unpleasant interaction I’ve had on the Internet that hasn’t stuck with me for days on end, even when the guy on the other side of it IS an idiot of the lowest order.  It’s an incredibly uncomfortable way to live and the fact that it happens to me is a strong indication that I should maybe rethink this whole life as a public persona thing. If my emotions are so easily mastered by others to my detriment, it’s stark insanity for me to continue to open myself to that, right?

Well, obviously, no, not right, at least not entirely. There’s value to be had in engaging others, in attempting those acts of celebration.  But man, strategies must be employed to make sure the center holds.

Moving my conversations off of forums has been a big part of the strategy for me. Blogging, at least, carries an implicit authority model with it, one which I am at least in some degree of control over. If I don’t like the direction a commenter is going, I can shut that down — though that’s really an extreme measure and circumstance. More often it just doesn’t come to that because the implicit authority tends to be respected by (most of) the participants in the discussion.  Historically I’ve rarely encountered this “respect effect” in forums (and relatedly, I’ve encountered plenty of forums where the figures of authority evince an utter lack of skill at pleasantly exercising said authority).  While blogging reduces the audience level vs. forums, I think that’s a good thing, and I find it tends to elevate the quality of the material (the initial posts themselves) and of the responses (the comments). The vulnerability problem still exists, but at least I’m strapping on a parachute before diving out of the plane: the risks are better managed.  It’s why I encouraged Rob Donoghue a while back to blog more, forum-post less, and I dunno, I think that’s turned out pretty well.

There’s also the strategy of persona. Not coincidentally, around the time I realized Evil Hat was going to become something of a “real company” (or would at least try to become one), I realized I had to change much of how I conducted myself online.  The gut (the teeth-kicker from above) needed a damn muzzle. I was very much a part of the Internet’s chronic pain problem, and usually went for the lash out now option, because doing immediate damage to an object of ire feels good to the demon gut, even if the brain is smart enough to see the regret inherent in the act.   Rob comes up here again, as someone to emulate: he has vast powers of remaining reasonable that I can only manage a glimmer of at the best of times (I do not know how he does it, but I think there’s something in the water up in Vermont that has something to do with it).  So the last five or so years of me on the internet has mainly been an act of shouting down my gut-response every damn time and firmly, deliberately instructing myself to respond as much like Rob as possible.  Most of the time I even manage to pull it off, and I’m pretty sure it’s worked — enough so that I always laugh when I see folks describe me as a consistently pleasant, reasonable guy on the net. I mean, I know that I’ve been trying to be that, but the internal reality of my success just isn’t as sunny as its outward face.  That’s not to say that there is falseness in that outward face, that outward response. It is who I want to be and in many ways it’s who I am, stripped of the nasty gnashing pointy teeth part that’s trying like hell to defend me from my daily insanity of engaging with the Internet, leaving only the part that wants to like most everything and celebrate the stuff that’s worth celebrating.

But some days the strategies are not enough to overcome the fear, the certainty, that some part of the conversation will just go to places that request the demon’s presence. Respectfully, I shall decline to pursue such opportunities. And thus, my last week’s absence.  Maybe this week will be different. Or maybe some shadows will continue to linger just outside my hole.

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:

In our Baltimore setting, there’s a quartet of folks who live at the Montrose estate, which existed back in Edgar Allen Poe’s time.  They are:

- Wellington, a “runt” ogre (so he’s only 7-or-so feet tall) who serves as the estate’s butler. An ancient compact compels him never to leave the estate’s grounds.  He usually glamours himself up as a (mostly) human looking guy, a classic butler but for the fact that he’s very tall by human standards.
- Evan Montrose, a young, meticulous wizard who has inherited the estate following his father’s death
- Maya Mckenzie, a thin-boned girl who can shapeshift into a mouse
- Biff Abernathy, a friend of Evan’s from the Ivy Leagues. He’s got old money, is an accomplished athlete, but still lives like he’s at college

We’ll be showing them in the (full page, full color) picture, prominently; I think I’d like Maya to be in human form, though, since if we have her in mouse form we end up with a picture of three dudes, and I’d like to have a lady in there too.

THE IMAGE

(I was originally thinking of something more static, but then I realized that a little more action here would better suit the character of the rest of the pieces in the book.)

An exterior of the mansion at night; a glowing human skeleton is in a fight with Wellington, who’s still dressed as a butler, but his glamours have slipped a bit and we can see a bit of the ogre in him showing through. Wellington has a great big freaking axe and is readying to swing it at the skeleton. The skeleton meanwhile is lunging for him, maybe already tearing into him, rendering his butler’s suit ragged.

Evan is a short distance away looking out of sorts; this is not what he had planned for the evening.  A classic car (like, 1950s or 40s) behind him has had its hood caved in by a big impact, and it’s billowing smoke. He has whipped up some kind of wind spell that is causing big gusts all around him, lifting him a few inches off the ground, and he’s pointing his copper rod at the skeleton, just starting to push power into it, causing a glow.

Biff clearly got into a fight with the skeleton and lost; he’s on the ground, scuffed and bloodied but still conscious.  A soccer ball, ruptured and flattened, should be seen on the ground somewhere nearby.  He’s trying to get up, maybe up on an elbow but otherwise on his back, rubbing his head, trying to shake off whatever was done to him.

Maya is down on one knee near Biff; she was in the middle of checking on him, seeing how hurt he was, but now she’s looking back towards the fight, towards Wellington and the skeleton and Evan.

Perspectivewise, I sort of visualize Maya and Biff foreround, but down in the lower left quadrant of the image, with most of the action deeper in, Evan and the crushed car mid-field, Wellington and the skeleton and the mansion a little further back.  Does that make any kind of sense?

REFERENCE STUFF

Baltimore inspiration — Here’s a flickr of Baltimore that a friend of mine who lives up there has put together. http://www.flickr.com/photos/jwiv/sets/72157600042294212/

The estate itself is a few dozen acres of partially wooded grounds, but some Baltimore skyline over the treetops (if the image’s orientation happens to be able to support it) wouldn’t stink — tho you may need to do more research to get a good view of that. There aren’t a lot of TALL buildings in Baltimore, tho, so I don’t know if that’s even feasible. We’ll survive if so.

Here’s the writeup of the montrose estate:

The Montrose Estate

Threat: Skeletons In The Closet…And Basement

Located on the northern edge of Baltimore, the Montrose house and events that happened there in the early 1800s were the inspiration for Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.” So, you can imagine that the house is a really great place.

The estate is, on the surface, a well-managed and elegant old-money mansion. (And I mean really, really vast amounts of old money.) Very recently, Old Man Montrose passed on (the cause of death is still mysterious; the medical examiner claimed “natural causes,” but nobody in the know thinks that’s right) and left the entire estate, grounds, and his fortune to his 20-something son Evan.

The estate consists of a dozen acres of partially wooded grounds along a tributary of the Patapsco. There are a few cottages used for servants’ residences, a garage/maintenance building, and of course the big house itself. Imagine the classic Old Money Mansion, and you’ll get it: dozens of rooms, a huge hall, a kitchen able to provide a state dinner, high ceilings, sweeping staircases in the entryway, and a vast cellar. The estate is managed by a collection of faceless accountants and maintenance personnel, but an unusual gentleman who goes by the name Wellington serves as the lord of the manor’s personal aide and performer of “odd” jobs.

(The big “secret” of the Montrose Manor is that the family name was originally Montressor, and Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado” was a thinly veiled indictment of Old Man Montrose’s father’s alleged revenge visited upon an enemy. There may quite literally be skeletons in the closet.)

The characters. We don’t have a lot of physical description in the chapter, so I’ll give you some scant notes on my notions of them and an excerpt of the writeup to get the “attitude”:

Evan – You could dress him like your husband in his finest suit, very classic lines and all, but I see him as a sandy-blonde (we don’t want all of our wizards in the book to have the dark hair brooding look, that’s Harry’s turf).  Writeup reads:

Educated in magic by his father and in mundane matters by the finest Baltimore prep schools and European colleges, Evan Montrose’s hope of spending a few post-Oxford years sailing with his best friends Maya McKenzie and “Biff” Abernathy (see below) was interrupted by his father’s mysterious death. He’s returned to the manor (see page XX) as a well trained wizard of the White Council, but lacking the seasoning to go with his power. The Wardens want to recruit him, but he’s managed to evade their attempts thus far. Evan is meticulous, detail-oriented, and a bit of a neat freak. Despite his tendency toward indulging his playboy side, he never does anything without a plan.

Evan’s wizardly implements should be at least somewhat visible: an oak staff (neatly carved and runed, with a few copper bands along its length, not a gnarly thing like Harry’s), a copper rod (like a hand-held lightning rod of sorts), and a quartz pendant (not quite in the new age style, but you get the idea)

Maya – She’s a dress-to-not-impress type, and probably has some “looseness” to the fit of her clothing to suit the shapeshifting (while she’s a shrinker when she shifts, it still helps in terms of “escaping” from her outfit), and also as bit of a social dodge (form fitting stuff attracts attention!).  She doesn’t have a *nervous* demeanor, but her appearance shouldn’t lead one to think it’s surprising her nickname is “Mouse”.

Maya McKenzie met Biff and Evan as a pre-teen at their prep school. Maya was on scholarship at a school of very wealthy people; a trailer park kid among the trust fund crowd, she quickly learned how not to attract attention to herself. One day in ninth grade, Biff Abernathy finally noticed her, and mentioned that she was “Quiet as a mouse.” He’s been calling her Mouse ever since. She thinks of him as her steady boyfriend, but the relationship runs hot and cold depending on how much of a jerk he seems to be in a given month, but her platonic friendship with Evan Montrose, based on their magical talents, has been more consistent.

Biff - An athletic guy with an Ivy League Educated look to him. Old money, like Evan in a way, but more relaxed in his stance and attitude, and build bigger, like a real world athlete (not like a muscle bound comic book guy, tho!).

Biff was a jock through school, and is still quite the athlete. He’s an outstanding soccer and rugby player, as well as an accomplished martial artist — he’s especially skilled at Krav Maga (a form devised by the Israeli Defense Forces), leading to a great deal of speculation about just how he spent that semester abroad. He has an undeserved reputation as a dumb jock. He’s in a long-term but tempestuous relationship with Maya McKenzie (see below); he, she, and Evan are a more or less inseparable trio.

Wellington – As noted above, he’s a smallish (7 foot tall) ogre disguised as a human. The disguise should be a little ill-fitting, though he’ll still be dressed like a butler in a very classic sense, and will hold an incongruous greataxe or massive cudgel in one hand when pictured.

Wellington is actually an ogre in the guise of a human — a creature of Faerie, bound to serve the Montrose Family. While he is somewhat dry in his wit, his loyalty is absolute. Unfortunately, most of the Secrets of the House are things he has been bound not to reveal, so he can be frustratingly unhelpful when it comes to providing information. He currently serves as aide to Evan Montrose.

So, one thing to note is that I’ve worked enough with Jenn to know she is a master of detail and color. I communicate a lot of up front to get her imagination fired, and I tend to over-ask for details in the picture mainly as an effort to fire off her imagination. I know not everything is necessarily going to make it in, but that she’ll still make the image feel very “populated”. So keep that in mind as you see how things go.

• Here’s the sketch that came about from that.
• And here’s the color study.
• You should follow her LJ to see more updates as the piece comes together. It’s pretty incredible to watch her work.

The other thing you may have noticed is that I provide what might be called an insane amount of information. (At least, that’s how it’s been described to me.) More than one artist has mentioned that I provide reams more information than they’re used to from other art directors. The above is sort of an extreme example (maybe), but we’re talking a full page piece here, so the amount of detail tends to be proportional to that. That said…

Extensive Up Front Communication Is A Ninja Tool For Control Freaks

I’m a not-so-closet control freak to some extent. Honestly that’s part of why I love doing the layout and art direction for my own publishing: I’m there at the very start and at the very end to make sure the final product matches the version I’m visualizing as much as possible. So how do I exercise that without some of the more negative aspects of control-freakery? I take care of it all up front.

I write uber long emails, extensive art specs, etc, because I’m a control freak. I put everything I’m looking for in there right from go (I honestly hate asking for corrections, and I usually don’t have to as a result).  I establish a multi-stage process with the artist (e.g., sketch, pencils, final inks) so any course-correction needed is done as early into the process as possible. Because ultimately, if you’re not the artist, you have to be willing to lose a little control over the course of the process. Even if you’re a control freak you have to acknowledge this. Art is a process of exploration, and the product between two collaborators (art director and artist in this case) is a result of that mutual exploration. So to get that freak-itch scratched, I put it all out there as early as possible. That’s when I have the most control over how things will turn out, with the art. That, really, is about momentum; it’s the direction part of art direction.

When you shoot a gun, the most control you have over where the bullet goes is right there when you pull the trigger, after all.

I’ll probably come back to this topic a bit more over time on this blog, as I do more AD work. It’ll be worth talking about how the Hero Games art direction is a different beast, and what I do there vs. with my own Evil Hat art direction projects.

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.

I go to GenCon to sell (and, if I make it out of a booth, to buy). For me, the commerce element of GenCon absolutely dominates it. I recognize that part of this is because I’ve never attended the convention as anything other than a boothie. Even my first GenCon was done to spend some time hanging about in the Lulu booth, talking about Don’t Rest Your Head as a Lulu product, as well as a little-known upcoming game called Spirit of the Century. The booth-staffer perspective skews this already commerce-heavy convention more thoroughly in that direction, enough so that the other two points on the triangle are pretty minimal for me.  I’m okay with that.  There are so many people to talk to at GenCon that the talking part tends to drown under the weight of its own embarrassment of riches. And while I fully recognize many folks get great play experiences at GenCon, whenever I’ve peeked over towards that side of things it seems like such stark chaos.  So my personal ranking of GenCon, then, is: Sell, Talk, Play, in descending order.

I go to Origins to talk. I love this convention. This is the convention where Ken Hite took me out to lunch to talk about Don’t Rest Your Head and generally get to know one another. The same day I sat down with Paul Tevis and the guys from the Game Master Show Podcast in the “Big Bar on Two” and talked forever, with drinks getting poured down my gullet (I eventually declared myself The General, which kicked the GM Show crew into later awarding me with a T-Shirt as the head of the Hicks Army, or HA).  Chris Hanrahan and I finally met in person and have become fast friends. And Tevis also brought me along to a dinner (at the resplendent Burgundy Room) where I got to sit down with Will Hindmarch, Jeff Tidball, Chris Hanrahan, Ken Hite, Hal Mangold, and of course Paul. I may be forgetting one other there, in which case I am profoundly embarrassed.  Hal leaned over to me at one point that night, grinned, and said, “You might be one of those indie guys, but you know how to hang.” And overall this is a convention where the completely artificial membrane that separates fans from creators is permeable enough that it all but dissolves. Sure, I’m naming a bunch of awesome creators here, but there were just as many fantastic moments just talking to brother and sister gamers. So many good moments at this convention, and they’re all about talking — also paired with eating, and thankfully the food options here kick GenCon’s ass. The convention center’s right across from the original location of Jeni’s Ice Creams after all. The convention’s all right for commerce, and I hear it’s pretty good for playing, but I get very little of either done on a personal level when I’m there; talking occludes all other activities. For my experience, this is Talk, Sell, Play, but I suspect for most attendees it’s Talk, Play, Buy.

Finally, there’s Dreamation, which happens twice a year but gets called Dexcon when it happens in the summer. But that summer instance is hard hard hard to accommodate when you’ve bracketed it with GenCon and Origins in the same summer, so Dreamation tends to get the somewhat larger attendance (though it’s still small) as it kindly takes place in January or February of each year. Dreamation is hands down where I get my play on. It’s crawling with small press designers and play opportunities. Absolutely crawling. Occasionally we get crazy bigger-press outliers like that Chuck Wendig joker — it’s where I met him, over breakfast or something with Rob. Plus the convention often ends with a Indie Design Roundtable event that I’ve occasionally helped run — an incredible pressurecooker for taking peoples’ game ideas and adding extra sauce of the awesomeberry. So Talk gets a strong secondary placement here. But anyway, the play. Oh god, the play. It’s so abundant, so good, that it took me several years to get to a point where I remembered to give myself permission NOT to play in every slot that I could. This is where Judd won my cold dark heart with a session of Dictionary of Mu. This is where I met Bill White’s Ganakagok. And much much more. Plus there are sightings of the elusive Jennifer Rodgers in the wild. Anyway: Play, Talk, Sell. No two ways about it. (The “sell” part would be vanishingly small too if it weren’t for the presence of the IPR booth.)

This year, Origins is going to get the win as I attempt to amp up the sell side of it just a bit — we’re going to be launching our Dresden Files release or preorder there, as I’ve announced over on the Dresden Files RPG website. And because of that, the usual “rank my priorities” approach doesn’t really fly this year. I mainly have time for one convention, and Origins is preordained. If I make it to Dreamation, it’ll be last-minute at best, but I’m not planning on it. I’ve got layout to do.

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

Milestones Galore! Wait — What?

Spirit of the Century hit the 4000 copies sold mark (digital and print combined) right around the end of the third quarter. Huge, huge news, there. SOTC launched its preorder in the third quarter of 2006, so that means it took us almost exactly three years to sell that amount.  SOTC’s first year total was 2168 , and second year total was 3815 … wait, that can’t be right … apparently I can’t add! Turns out that back in October of 2008, I added 3815 and 13 together and got … 3128. So I dropped 700 copies off the SOTC total and never noticed, and then kept propagating that error forward. BEHOLD! The 4000 mark was actually broken much earlier in the year. Whoops.

Let’s try that again. SOTC’s first year total was 2168, and its second year total was 3815 (about 1650 sold that year). Third year, 4722-ish (about 900 sold that year).  Sure, it trends downward, but we’re within sight of the 5000 mark (with the total up to this point of 4812 copies sold). I’d we’re likely to hit that somewhere this quarter. And again, no IPR data for 2009’s fourth quarter yet, so we’re likely a fair bit closer than 4812.

Other products hit some lovely totals as well: Our youngest product, Penny, broke 300 nicely. Don’t Rest Your Head broke 2400 and Don’t Lose Your Mind broke 700. Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies has been doing Chad proud, breaking 800 sales by this point, putting it within striking distance (with a little bit of reaching yet to go) of 1000 copies, a goal of ours.  Spirit of the Season sold out its last print run and is now solely virtual.

Opening Our Own Store: Good Idea!

If for some reason all this Evil Hat talk is making you think, “Hey, I should go pick up…”, don’t forget that Evil Hat’s webstore awaits you. We opened it late-ish in the third quarter, but the initial numbers — especially given that they’re all direct sales, which means that aside from paypal transactional fees the money’s almost entirely ours — were promising, and got way more promising in the fourth quarter.  Combined, the two quarters grossed us shy of $3900 in product sales (about $2600 of that was our fourth quarter).  We contracted with the same shipping agency that serves IPR to do this, which means that transferring stock between the Evil Hat store and IPR is easy, reasonably fluid, and incurs no extra shipping expense.  It does look like the webstore may be pulling a few PDF sales off of One Bookshelf (OBS) and some direct sales traffic off of IPR, but I suspect we’re also capturing a few extra sales direct at the site that we weren’t otherwise.

In the end, we’re optimizing the sales potential of the Evil Hat web presence as the point of entry, sending people preferentially to the webstore that gets us the highest percentage of the sale.  But that doesn’t mean that the webstore replaces the need for those other presences — they still act as potent points of entry in their own right. Speaking of which…

IPR Sales: Still a Good Idea!

IPR is definitely skewing more and more towards retail sales for us, while still making a significant number of direct-to-consumer sales. IPR used to trend more towards a 50/50 split between direct sales and retail sales, but in the most recent data from Q3, it was more like 75% retail or convention sales. Prior to that, the 50/50 split shows more with newer products, with older leaning more towards retail — so I suppose that the long tail of our longer-running products lives in game stores. I can’t say as I expected that, but I’m pretty excited to see it: it suggests that there are at least a few retail stores out there that aren’t afraid to bring in somewhat older games, at least experimentally.

I think the EHP webstore and OBS have largely eaten IPR’s lunch regarding PDF sales, however, as many PDF purchases are one-item, and the preferential funneling of the EHP store and the massive eyeball grab of OBS eats up the vast majority of those.  Back when IPR and OBS were the only places I was doing significant PDF business, IPR was hitting about 20% of the total. I think (though I have not calculated to prove) that that percentage has dropped off a bit.

But the IPR outlet to retail is a strong one that I’m not inclined to ignore. IPR’s brand has grown and gotten recognition with enough retailers to provide us with a lot of extra business. Yes, we’re not making more than a thinnish profit on each of those retailer sales, but we’re getting more eyeballs that will turn into future fans and purchasers, and I believe making sales we wouldn’t have in other channels. Worth the expense.  IPR also offers s an easy way to get our products showing at a few conventions across the year — especially GenCon, which is becoming increasingly onerous to personally attend on my part.

And in the end, the direct sales might be a smaller percentage, but they’re still offering people an option the EHP store can’t — the ability to buy other games from other publishers at the same time, together with Evil Hat’s stuff. The EHP store requires you to have a singular interest; I like serving folks with a diverse palate as well.

OBS Sales: Good!

I’ve said before that OBS (DriveThruRPG and RPGNow) is the big dog of PDF. They continue to be. Woof. We’re still making several hundred a month off of our small catalog there; yes, we’re giving them a 35% cut, but the sales volume supports me sucking that up.  And given that OBS’s exclusive deal only saves you 5%, making that a 30% cut, I’m confident that staying non-exclusive was the right move as well.

Lulu and e23: Anemic As Expected; YGN vanished

Lulu lets people buy the hardcover of SOTC, and seems to have a very small “walk-in” crowd. This, for no risk. Since that means free money, I’m happy to stay, even though Lulu long since dropped off my list for getting books printed (we print in quantities over 40-or-so copies, which is the point at which Lulu stops being cost effective if you’re preprinting stock, if not well before that point).

e23 was looking anemic (for us) before, so we haven’t been particularly motivated to list newer products there.  That’s fine — it’s another sort of walk-in opportunity for a handful of sales once every month or two.

Your Games Now has dropped off the list — we stopped having our products listed there when it went off the co-op model. The YGN folks are lovely people, but the sales volume was never more than a trickle, and often ran dry. Not worth the hassle of setting up a product.

Penny Dreadful?

I feel like Evil Hat could (and likely should) be doing more to get A Penny For My Thoughts more sales. Over 300 isn’t bad, especially given that the game is a little “weird” in terms of how to pitch it and who will be interested, mind you, and neither Paul nor I have had abundant primary-focus energy to put into the thing. But we’ve talked a lot about this and we’re fine with it playing out over a longer timeframe.  Penny made back its money, no problem, so more than anything it being a laid-back product suits us just fine given our mutual tendency to be involved in many often larger projects at the same time.

Invisible Experiment

There have actually been a few sales that I’m not reporting in the numbers, partly because I haven’t been tallying them and it’s a little bit of a pain in the ass to go and do that. A number of months back I started toying with distribution (gasp!) in the form of Esdevium. Esdevium is a distributor serving (I believe) primarily the EU — I was referred to them via Angus of Cubicle 7 (and formerly of Leisure Games).  It helped that several of the employees at Esdevium appear to be fans of Spirit of the Century.

Since IPR’s retail channel is global but best serves the USA, and Esdevium’s channel largely does not point at the USA, I thought this would be a safe way to experiment with the wild and wooly wildness of the dreaded “distro”. Turns out it’s not all bad, but the increased risk is definitely there: you’re sending out product before you get paid for it, something which is unique among my other sales vectors, the rest of whom get paid at the time of sale. That’s a little scary given the degree to which I’ve played it safe before.

Still, it looked like it worked: I’ve probably moved over a hundred SOTCs through them, and a not insignificant number copies of my other titles too, and that includes several reorders past the first biggest one. That said, I haven’t heard from them in recent months, so I think they sold through their initial burst of interest at those titles being suddenly available to the markets they touch.

Jury’s out as to whether or not I feel that distro is something I need to do to get out to the fans.  The combo I have going of EHP Webstore/IPR/OBS is situated right about where I want things, I think, in terms of eyeball reach vs. risk. But time will tell if I feel differently, especially as the Dresden Files RPG monolith moves closer to Origins (I’ve been doing a few days of layout on it at this point, even — the writing folks are taking it easy, because they’re done, making it an editors and layout guy thing now).

It’s Late As I’m Writing This

So I’m probably forgetting something, or missing some observation about the data. What questions do you have that I haven’t commented on? What do you see in the numbers that I haven’t?

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?

Note: This is all raw data, with some interesting totals along the way. I’m saving my conclusions for Wednesday’s post.

SECOND QUARTER

May

OBS:
DLYM PDF: 9
DRYH PDF: 10
SOTC PDF: 16
SOTS PDF: 2
S7S PDF: 27

Lulu:
DRYH PDF: 1
DRYH Print: 2
SOTC HC: 4

June

OBS:
DLYM PDF: 5
DRYH PDF: 7
SOTC PDF: 7
SOTS PDF: 5
S7S PDF: 15

Lulu:
SOTS PDF: 1
SOTC HC: 2
DRYH PDF: 1

e23:
SOTS PDF: 1

July 15th – 2009Q2 for IPR

Penny PDF: 0
Penny Print: 120 (47 from retailers)
DLYM PDF: 7
DLYM Print: 72 (51 from retailers)
DRYH PDF: 24
DRYH Print: 103 (65 from retailers)
SOTC PDF: 16
SOTC Print: 183 (114 from retailers)
SOTS PDF: 10
SOTS Print: 6 (1 from retailers)
S7S PDF: 46
S7S HC: 245 (67 from retailers)
S7S Print: 143 (72 from retailers)

Totals

2009Q2:
Penny PDF: 0
Penny Print: 120
DLYM PDF: 31
DLYM Print: 72
DRYH PDF: 63
DRYH Print: 106
SOTC PDF: 48
SOTC Print: 183
SOTC HC: 7
SOTS PDF: 22
SOTS Print: 6
S7S PDF: 132
S7S Print: 143
S7S HC: 245

THIRD QUARTER

July

OBS:
Penny PDF: 1
DLYM PDF: 14
DRYH PDF: 18
SOTC PDF: 13
SOTS PDF: 4
S7S PDF: 25

Lulu:
SOTC HC: 4
DRYH PDF: 1

August

OBS:
Penny PDF: 5
DLYM PDF: 6
DRYH PDF: 7
SOTC PDF: 13
SOTS PDF: 3
S7S PDF: 18

Lulu:
DRYH PDF: 2
SOTC HC: 1

e23:
SOTC PDF: 1
DRYH PDF: 1

September

OBS:
Penny PDF: 1
DLYM PDF: 5
DRYH PDF: 9
SOTC PDF: 14
SOTS PDF: 4
S7S PDF: 9

Lulu:
DRYH Print: 1

Evil Hat 2009Q3 – Our first few months with a webstore (partial quarter)

Penny PDF: 2
Penny Print: 5
DLYM PDF: 2
DLYM Print: 2
DRYH PDF: 10
DRYH Print: 6
SOTC PDF: 3
SOTC Print: 18
SOTS PDF: 3
S7S PDF: 2
S7S Print: 11

October 15th – 2009Q3 for IPR

Penny PDF: 4
Penny Print: 173 (76 to retailers, 48 at conventions)
DLYM PDF: 8
DLYM Print: 85 (46 to retailers, 22 to conventions)
DRYH PDF: 8
DRYH Print: 97 (54 to retailers, 22 to conventions)
SOTC PDF: 6
SOTC Print: 164 (101 to retailers, 23 to conventions)
SOTS PDF: 7
SOTS Print: 0 (out of print at this point)
S7S PDF: 7
S7S Print: 131 (56 to retailers, 29 to conventions)
S7S HC: 0 (out of print at this point)

Totals

2009Q3:
Penny PDF: 13
Penny Print: 178
DLYM PDF: 35
DLYM Print: 87
DRYH PDF: 56
DRYH Print: 104
SOTC PDF: 50
SOTC Print: 182
SOTC HC: 5
SOTS PDF: 21
S7S PDF: 61
S7S Print: 142

FOURTH QUARTER

October

OBS:
Penny PDF: 2
DLYM PDF: 5
DRYH PDF: 11
SOTC PDF: 10
SOTS PDF: 2
S7S PDF: 4

Lulu:
SOTC HC: 4
DRYH Print: 4

e23:
SOTS PDF: 1

November

OBS:
Penny PDF: 4
DLYM PDF: 6
DRYH PDF: 8
SOTC PDF: 8
SOTS PDF: 7
S7S PDF: 7

Lulu:
SOTC HC: 3
DRYH Print: 1

e23:
SOTS PDF: 1

December

OBS:
Penny PDF: 3
DLYM PDF: 5
DRYH PDF: 9
SOTC PDF: 10
SOTS PDF: 9
S7S PDF: 9

Lulu:
SOTC HC: 5
DRYH Print: 1
SOTC PDF: 1

e23:
SOTC PDF: 2
SOTS PDF: 2

Evil Hat 2009Q4 – Our first full quarter with a webstore

Penny PDF: 10
Penny Print: 12
DLYM PDF: 5
DLYM Print: 7
DRYH PDF: 13
DRYH Print: 19
SOTC PDF: 17
SOTC Print: 33
SOTS PDF: 8
S7S PDF: 3
S7S Print: 12

Totals

2009Q4 to date:
Penny PDF: 19
Penny Print: 12
DLYM PDF: 21
DLYM Print: 7
DRYH PDF: 41
DRYH Print: 25
SOTC PDF: 47
SOTC Print: 33
SOTC HC: 12
SOTS PDF: 30
S7S PDF: 23
S7S Print: 12

Lifetime:
Penny: 342
DLYM: 709
DRYH: 2473
SOTC: 4812
SOTS: 576
S7S: 814

Note: No IPR until January 15th or so, so we don’t have complete Q4 data yet. I’ll post an update when that comes in.

CONCLUSIONS…?

Tune in Wednesday. I’ll have a few things to say about this data. For now, simply getting the numbers out there was the goal, and I’ve done it. Less catching up next time, more prompt disclosure!

Also

The guys over at VSCA have posted about their Diaspora sales numbers. Celebrate this practice! I tend to believe that the industry is made healthier by disclosure.