About Fred
Fred Hicks does layout and art direction for role-playing games. He also publishes and plays them. He likes his television and he likes his cooking. He loves his wife and daughter. Life is good.
Tag Archives: publishing
It’s Game Theory
What it all comes down to is what Russell Crowe as John Nash was on about in A Beautiful Mind. Watch this clip — it’ll only take a few minutes — then come back:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0ywiYboCLk
This Time It’s Personal
This is nominally the next part in my rambling about the elements of community building. This time I’d like to talk about the value of the personal connection.
The good news here is that I’m not suggesting that you, the community “organizer”, are obligated to make a personal and direct connection with each and every member [...]
Critical Mass
I’ve seen a few people ask me how I build communities. Most of what I do relative to communities that I’ve been in a nominal leadership role with just seems to proceed from natural instinct. I’ve tried to deconstruct this in the more distant past, but it’s a topic worth revisiting, even if I’m not [...]
Everyone Is Talking About It
… so maybe I will, too.
Yes, Amazon screwed up the public relations — you really should read John Scalzi’s excellent analysis of why, but as usual, skip the freakin’ comments.
I don’t really think that’s arguable. Everything outside of that is where things turn into a sort of wiggly, wobbly munge.
What A Difference A Day Makes
In the last 24 hours, my wife — formerly an employee of Sun Microsystems, now acquired by Oracle — got laid off, and Evil Hat started getting courted by a distributor now that our press release about the Dresden Files RPG is getting more circulation. Both bear talking about.
The Shelf Is A Gamble
I want to talk about the notion of a book on a shelf in a game store (and relatedly, in a book store), as well as how that ties into the math of pricepoints in RPG publishing.
This is on my mind because at Evil Hat we’re getting ever closer to the release of the Dresden [...]
Evil Hat Sales: Finishing 2009
IPR numbers are in!
Here’s the skinny.
Midnight Post: Help Haiti, Get $1400 free
So, over at DriveThruRPG, they’ve set up a “donate $20 to Haiti” thing. That’s cool in and of itself. But that’s not where it stops. Because publishers have donated products which you get when you donate. Their total value? $1,481.31.
So that’s somewhere around a “get these products for 99% off!” deal.
You should perhaps take all [...]
Direction and Detail
Quick Blog Note
So my updates are likely to get more sporadic over the next few weeks. I started layout on the Dresden Files RPG right at the beginning of the year, and all my previously queued blog posts have been run through, so the myth of regularity I’ve been operating under is shortly to evaporate. [...]
To (Sell|Talk|Play)
Short post today.
I was looking at Chad Underkoffler talking about whether or not to go to Dreamation this year, and it reminded me of my perspective on conventions in general. Since I’m both a publisher and a hobbyist, conventions are always composed of some mix of selling (and buying), talking (networking), and playing. The question, [...]
Evil Hat Sales: 2009 Observations
On Monday I posted the missing 8 months of sales data I’d been too busy most of this year to post. So, that’s done, bringing us up to the end of the year (save for a big chunk of sales reckoning from IPR — I don’t get confirmed, official reporting on that until the 15th [...]
Evil Hat Sales: 2009 Catch-Up
So, once upon a time I regularly updated my livejournal with Evil Hat’s sales numbers. I fell off that horse a goodly time back — evidence points to May 1st as the last time I did this — so it’s time to play catch-up. I don’t have the end of year numbers from IPR yet, [...]
PDF, Print, Pricing
Today I want to talk about PDF pricing, after seeing my friend Matt react poorly to the pricing of the recently released Dr. Who RPG PDF. (Don’t take this post as an attempt to jump on Cubicle 7’s case. As I’ve said before, I like the guys at Cubicle 7, and there are things I [...]
Obligation.PDF
There are a lot of good things I could say (and have said) about Diaspora. I liked it enough that I offered to run the publication of it for VSCA, the current publisher, if they wanted to transition off of Lulu (which at least as of a couple weeks ago looks like it might have [...]
Discount
This isn’t a full-blooded real blog post. It’s a plug. Because Diaspora is back, and with a discount available until the end of the year.
I’ll just quote the publisher:
Not strictly blogworthy, but it links to prior posts a little. Anyway, you can again get Diaspora at Lulu now. Problem resolved and Lulu has assuaged our [...]
Loyalty
Part of what I do in my freelance work is art direction. As briefly as I can put it, art direction is the process of conceptualizing the art used for a project, then commissioning and coordinating the artists contracted to execute on the concept.
I’m a very email-driven guy — my inbox is my to-do list [...]
Sales and Origins Gaming