http://thatshowweroll.libsyn.com/webpage/that-s-how-we-roll-season-03-episode-04-evil-hat-level-s-up

I’m pointing you at it here because it’s very specifically Evil Hat stuff in this one — Chris and I spend an hour talking about Evil Hat, focusing on how its brand is maturing over time and digging into what the takeaways are from all that. For folks who are specifically fans of the company I’m running, it’s a great look under the hood. Check it out!

I shot him a couple quick tweets in response of other questions that I think a playtest process should try to answer. I’m not going to embellish them (much) here, but I thought the list might be useful to some folks.

• Is the game producing the effects and story trends you want to see in play?
• What excites folks about the game?
• What bores (or frustrates) them?
• What’s extraneous?
• Does the game work like it should when I am not in the room? (If it doesn’t, what am I doing when I am in the room that I need to put in the text?)
• What assumptions about play am I making that aren’t in the text?

So, what’s on your playtest list?

It’s easy to look at these numbers and respond with alarm, but remember that a) the 4th quarter of the year is typically pretty crappy, and b) Evil Hat’s catalog is aging without a lot of new-product blood, something which we should be remedying over the next two years.

Distribution continues to bring in a large portion of our long tail (seen after the cut).

Evil Hat Productions Announces ‘Atomic Robo’ RPG License

Double 2011 Origins Award Winner Licenses Eisner-Nominated Comic Book

SILVER SPRING, Maryland— January 10, 2012 — Evil Hat Productions, LLC, today announced an agreement to produce, publish, and distribute a role-playing game based on the Eisner-nominated Atomic Robo comic book. The Atomic Robo RPG will be co-written by Atomic Robo scribe Brian Clevinger and Kerberos Club: Fate Edition author Mike Olson, creator of the Strange Fate version of the Fate engine.

“I’m such a big fan of the world Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegener create in every page of Atomic Robo,” said Fred Hicks of Evil Hat. “When I found out they were fans of role-playing games—including Evil Hat’s own Spirit of the Century—it was clear we had a giant-sized opportunity that had to be pursued.”

With The Atomic Robo RPG, Evil Hat will build on the legacy of Fate games like Spirit of the Century and The Dresden Files RPG—together with the ideas of Evil Hat’s upcoming Fate Core project and Mike Olson’s Strange Fate work. The stand-alone game will deliver a fast-paced and fast-to-play role-playing experience focused on the themes of Atomic Robo—action-science, robots, angry talking dinosaurs, high weirdness, and more.

“Brian and I are lifelong RPG nerds, I mean enthusiasts, and we could not be more excited to partner with Evil Hat and Mike Olson to bring readers even closer to the world of Atomic Robo,” said Scott Wegener. “There’s over a century of adventure in our comic book, but we can only show you guys slices of the whole picture. This game opens up so many opportunities to play with that world, its history, the weird unexplored corners, and the might-have-beens,” added Brian Clevinger.

The Atomic Robo RPG  begins development in late February of 2012. “We’d love to get The Atomic Robo RPG out in 2012, and if everything comes together fast and smooth we might just manage that,” said Hicks. “But as with all licensed projects at Evil Hat, we want to take our time to make sure we serve the license and the fans well. Thankfully, Brian and Scott have the same opinion, here. The Atomic Robo RPG that we release will be the best one we can possibly make, period—and that may take us into 2013.”

For more information about Evil Hat Productions, the Fate system, Spirit of the Century, and the Dresden Files RPG, visit www.evilhat.com. For more information about Atomic Robo, visit www.atomic-robo.com. Atomic Robo is published by Red 5 Comics, available at www.red5comics.com and in comic stores everywhere. Kerberos Club: Fate Edition is published by Arc Dream Publishing, www.arcdream.com.

About Evil Hat Productions

Evil Hat Productions believes that passion makes the best games. It is this passion for gaming that raised Evil Hat to its acclaimed position in the RPG community. Our games can be used to build the best kinds of role-playing experiences—full of laughter, storytelling, and memorable moments. Today we don’t just run games, we don’t just make them, we work with you to make your play the best it can be—the kind that upholds and gives birth to passions of your own. That’s the Evil Hat mission, and we’re happy to have you along on it.

Since its inception, Evil Hat has won accolades ranging from the Indie RPG Awards, the Golden Geeks, the ENnies, and the Origins Awards, most recently claiming the Origins Awards for both Best Roleplaying Game (The Dresden Files RPG: Your Story) and Best Roleplaying Game Supplement (The Dresden Files: Our World).

About Atomic Robo

Brian Clevinger is a ten year veteran of online and independent comics. You can laugh at and sometimes with his early work at nuklearpower.com. Follow him on Twitter at bclevinger.

Scott Wegener used to fly planes until he found out it was nothing like High Road to China. Now he draws comic books as a form of very slow starvation. Follow him on Twitter at Scott_Wegna

Press contact

Fred Hicks
Email: feedback [AT] evilhat.com
Website: http://www.evilhat.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/fredhicks

Dear Deadly,

Licenses seem to be a mixed blessing in the industry. Clearly a popular license can increase sales, but the difficulty in getting stuff reviewed and the delays that can introduce seem to be a huge burden, above and beyond the cost of the license.

I know that you had an “in” with the Dresden Files, but what advice can you give for determining if a license is worth the effort and cost? How do you manage the licensor to keep things on track?

Thanks,
Steve

Steve asks good questions here (the subject line is the killer one, though). This is something I’m hoping Chris Hanrahan will be able to cover with me in a future That’s How We Roll, but I can share a few thoughts here as well.

Ultimately, a license is all about managing expectations — both yours the licensor’s. Every license is its own kind of special snowflake, really; it’s hard to really dig into generalized truths because of the differences in morphology here. But all the same, here’s a noncomprehensive list of things you should be thinking about and discussions you should be having with the licensor.

Does the license come with free or low cost assets you can repurpose to or debut in your product?

At its most basic, a license brings you extra audience you wouldn’t otherwise have. Licenses that are really worth it either bring an incredibly large audience to you that you aren’t otherwise reaching, or bring extras along for the ride that help you keep your budget from spiraling out of control.

In the case of the Dresden Files RPG, we got two major boosts. One, we got low-cost access to much of the art done for the Dresden Files comic book that was at the time being published by the Dabel Brothers. The Dabels did not always manage their business well (and so the comic has since moved over to Dynamite Entertainment), but they were very kind to us by giving us broad access to the amazing art done for the comic by Ardian Syaf.  Two, Jim Butcher was willing to write a short story specifically for the RPG. It’ll show up in a collection of short stories elsewhere eventually, I’m sure, but having a period of time where we had exclusive first-source content of our own for the RPG certainly hasn’t hurt.

Do you and/or the licensor think that the game will sell in numbers that are far outside of how non-licensed RPGs tend to sell?

There’s always a decent chance that the value of a well-known license will boost sales of the RPG — but there’s absolutely no guarantee it will. It’s best to set expectations for all involved parties that the game will sell no better than an unlicensed RPG, and to make sure the financials make sense with that being the case (more on that in a bit). You can’t get yourself caught up in an agreement that more or less demands or expects you to sell thousands upon thousands of copies.

The costs of the license — often expressed in terms of down payment up front to the licensor and percentage of royalty paid to the licensor on a per sale basis — can’t take your unit cost to the point where you aren’t making money on a sale into your lowest margin sales channel (usually distribution). Run the damn numbers in a genuinely worst-case scenario, and make sure they still add up to you at least breaking even, or in the event of disaster, losing only what you can afford to lose.

Do you think the name alone is justification for a higher price point?

And while we’re on that topic, don’t think that you can simply make up for license costs by slapping a higher cover price on the game. Push your cover price high enough and you’ll lose the extra audience you’re supposedly gaining by acquiring the license. You shouldn’t be boosting the price of your product on the name alone; it’s gotta bring the cracklingly good content along to justify that. The two DFRPG books together are a hefty price tag, but the playable single core book, Your Story, is not outside the range of unlicensed games with a similar form factor; on top of that, we jammed it full of love-for-the-license content. All of that is a deliberate choice made to make sure the game competes as a game in its own right, sans the influence of the license.  We wouldn’t have been able to put that price on the book if the license costs were high. Thankfully, they weren’t, for us, so it was all viable.

Can you reasonably assess how large of an audience you’re getting access to with the license?

… And how much of a percentage of them (think very small: maybe 3-5% on a novel series?) do you think you’ll be able to acquire from that license’s fandom that you aren’t already getting access to? Overlap is the key calculation here: of a property’s audience, how many of them are likely gamers or willing-to-become-gamers? Not a lot. So divide by 20 or 30 or 50 or 100 or more.

I recently looked at a potential license and was lucky to be able to get some honest numbers on what the readership/viewership was for that property. When I looked at the probable RPG sub-portion of that number, it ended up not making sense to pursue the license, because the audience boost we’d likely get from the license didn’t outweigh the costs of acquiring the license and developing the project. It doesn’t always have to come down to a cold calculation like that, and sometimes you can decide to forge ahead even if those numbers don’t say you should. But it’s good to know what they’re saying, because that’s the mountain you’re gonna climb.

How important is your project to the licensor?

You’re going to be asking for a lot of initially uncompensated, additional work out of the licensor throughout the process, in all likelihood. You’ll be asking them to read through mountains of text, scour your draft for things that don’t fit with their vision of the license, etc. It’s a big time investment for them (and they’re busy generating the primary content for the property in the first place) and will be very time consuming for you as you wait for their feedback. Yes, it’s important to work out this process and make sure inefficiencies are identified and medicated in advance, but that’s just time and project management stuff. Important, but it won’t matter one bit if your project isn’t important to the licensor. They have to want to see it succeed; that’s going to motivate them to donate that extra time and effort, help you find resources you need, and figure out when they need to be delegating the approval and Q&A work to someone who does have the time to respond to you. What you want here is a collaborator who’s excited about seeing the project happen and wants to help — or someone who’s happy to take your check and stay hands off with the design of the final product. There’s a big swampy zone in between those two where your project can and will get bogged down because of a lack of time and/or enthusiasm, and in that swamp your project will also start to acquire a stink of mediocrity. Avoid it.

How fast are you expecting all of this to happen?

Because it’s going to take a lot longer than you think, and that’s okay. But you need to learn how to believe that it’s okay.

Are you going after this license because it’s popular (in the minds of the gamer populace), or because it’s personally exciting to you?

If you didn’t answer “yes” to that, you might want to reconsider. The best licenses are probably the ones that are both. You’ll get the audience you want because it’s popular. You’ll make sure you’re doing the best possible job because it’s personally exciting to you — exciting enough that you’ll still like it after you’re done. Which is no mean feat.

Plenty more to be said about this, but I think those are good places to start your exploration.

It’s worth saying that some of these things aren’t surefire, definitely-happening projects — sometimes the project is figuring out if it’s a project — but most of them are capturing some amount of my attention on a regular basis, and I certainly want them to happen.

Do we have the money to make all of these projects happen at once, simultaneously? No. (We do have enough money to make sure the creative folks working on the projects get paid for their efforts — that’s my necessary minimum.) But they won’t be happening simultaneously, and in at least a few (or maybe even many) cases, we’ve got the option to throw a little Kickstarter juice at them. Our ambitions would be just a tad smaller if we didn’t have the option of crowdfunding in the mix. Thanks to Kickstarter, our ambitions are having a bit of a right time, right place quality to them, which is great.

Let’s get into the details.

Role-Playing Games

Don’t Rest Your Head

Don’t Hack This Game: Hopefully you’ve read the post about this already. Don’t Rest Your Head is over 5 years old at this point, and Ryan Macklin & I think there’s been a lot of great, creative play and hackery going on out there. Don’t Hack This Game will be a supplement for Don’t Rest Your Head where we collect some of the best ideas and give folks a roadmap for hacking the game to be what they want it to be. The system can be bent into all sorts of shapes, but that’s really only one piece of the puzzle.

Dresden Files

The Paranet Papers: This has been one of the “big dog” projects since the Dresden Files RPG launched. The Paranet Papers is part system update and setting catch-up (getting us mostly current into the beginning bits of Ghost Story), part campaign starter kit. That latter part is being addressed by us cracking up the city creation mold a bit and looking at six different “cities” that do it a little differently, all viewed in light of the fallout from Changes. Those locations: Las Vegas; the “Neverglades”; the open road (taking the Dresden Files in more of a Supernatural direction); the Russian Revolution; South America; and some of the “outlands” of the Nevernever.

DF Adventures: Fairly recently we got ink on a contract addendum that lets us do a handful of “for-pay” adventure arcs for the Dresden Files RPG. Previously we were only in the clear to do free web support type stuff, which is where our collection of one-shots for the Dresden Files (as well as a Fiasco scenario) came from. Now, we’re going to get to do some more ambitious stuff. We’ve got three such projects slated, and the option to do more. You’ll probably see these parcel out over the course of the next two years; at least one of them will include some new details about the Dresdenverse gathered straight from the Word of Jim.

Fate

Fate Core: This would be that new core Fate book that we’ve been promising folks since Spirit of the Century. We haven’t been burbling about this as much as we could over on FateRPG.com, but that doesn’t mean the project’s on hold. Lenny is in straight up nose to the grindstone mode with this one; we’re hoping to have the full text to an editorial squad by February.

Gumshoe

Bubblegumshoe: Evil Hat’s going to be exploring Pelgrane Press’s Gumshoe system a bit, with a focus on taking it in some more deeply “story-game” directions, in a pair of projects. The first of these is Bubblegumshoe, the teen detective roleplaying game. In essence, we’re looking for something that runs the gamut from Nancy Drew to Veronica Mars here — a mostly female-protagonist perspective, but with plenty of room for Hardy Boys and The Great Brain besides — with a focus on how our teen investigators interact with the authority figures and other relationships in their lives. This one’s got a trio of RPG experts working on it: Kenneth Hite, Emily Care Boss, and Lisa Steele.

Revengers: Evil Hat’s other Gumshoe system game will be penned by Will Hindmarch and features ghosts-as-cops who investigate murders for the recently dead and, when possible, get revenge for them. This one will be half whodunit, half let’s-get-’em, and Will and I have been talking about making several system decisions that put some real story-shaping power in the players’ hands, as well as building some unity between the game-space and the story-space. That’s a bit gearheaddy, so let me stress again: you’re dead cops solving murder mysteries and haunting the bejeezus out of the murderers. Badass.

Spirit of the Century

Strange Tales of the Century: A Spirit of the Century inflected tour of the mostly-real international pulps that existed in the first half of the 20th Century, with geek librarian superstar Jess Nevins as your tour guide.  This will be a must-have for fans of pulp who want to break outside of the often-common American-inflected mold. Strange Tales of the Century is one has been in the works for a while, but got spun into an editorial limbo a few years back. We’ve managed to breathe new life into it with an expanded editorial team and believe we’ll see this one out in 2012 for sure.

Board/Card Game

Race to Adventure: One of our two big forays into the board game arena. Race to Adventure!™ is an easy-to-learn family board game you can play in 20-30 minutes. It features heroes from the Spirit of the Century setting racing around the globe on a scavenger hunt, trying to be the first to get their passports stamped and return to the Century Club’s home base. Of course, they run into all sorts of complications from the villainous masterminds of the SOTC setting along the way. The game was designed by Evan Denbaum, Eric Lytle, and Chris Ruggiero, features card art by Spirit of the Century illustrator Christian N. St. Pierre, and graphic design by Daniel Solis.

Zeppelin Armada: The flipside of Race to Adventure, Zeppelin Armada is a fightin’ card game featuring the villainous masterminds of the Spirit of the Century setting. An artifact of ultimate power has been discovered — and EVERYONE wants it. So they gas up their zeppelins, and of course, all arrive at the site of the artifact at the same time. A nasty brawl ensues! Featuring rules designed by Jeff Tidball. This one’s going to end up coming up a little bit behind Race to Adventure in part because we’re using the same artist for both projects — there’s only so much he can draw at once!

Fiction

Don’t Read This Book: A fiction anthology set in the Don’t Rest Your Head setting, edited by Chuck Wendig. This features some incredible authors — I’m seriously agog we got the roster we did for this — but I can’t list all the names just yet. I can say that it will contain a new short story by one of my favorite authors, Harry Connolly, and that I have read it, and that it is fantastic.

Dinocalypse Now: A novel — possibly the start of a trilogy if it is well-received — set in the Spirit of the Century universe, as psychic dinosaurs from the distant past try to take over the present and rule the future. Chuck Wendig will be writing this one, with the pulp action and strange science dials cranked to eleven. Expect to see the heroes from Race to Adventure put in an appearance, including our game’s classic love triangle, Jet, Sally, and Mack.

Graphic Novel

ElectriCity: ElectriCity will be a stand-alone graphic novel written by longtime friend C. E. Murphy – a superhero story set in a new world, with the rivalry between Tesla and Edison as part of the backstory of it all. We’ve been having a lot of fun developing the script and are working on finishing that up and assembling the artistic team. More than any other project on our roster, we’ll be relying on Kickstarter to help us determine if this is just a lovely dream or something we can actually bring to the world.

Mystery Projects

We do have a couple of them — pipe dreams, or opportunities that haven’t gotten any momentum yet. In nearly all of these cases that adds up to shouldn’t or can’t when it comes to talking about them, so I’m going to simply put a footnote here at the bottom that what I have listed above is not necessarily the whole span of what we’re hoping to do. In most cases, though, if something’s not listed above, it’s a project more likely to happen in 2013 than 2012 — though any of the above projects could end up in 2013 as well simply due to scheduling and effort particulars.

But it’s also given me a chance to reflect on the difference between Fear and Caution, as a publisher.

Here, I’m going to define Fear as “being scared of doing something because it’s scary”, and Caution as “being careful about what you’re doing because you aren’t bringing the resources to bear you should be”.  By those definitions it’s probably obvious that I’m saying that Caution is something you need to listen to, and Fear is something you should ignore, but it’s not as clean-cut as all that experientially speaking, and I’m not sure that it’s easy to teach folks how to suss out the difference between the two.

The thing is, both things just feel scary when you’re in the middle of them. And when you’re scared, you get risk averse. Sometimes that risk aversion is a good thing, and keeps you from losing your shirt. But completely avoiding risk means you limit your opportunities for growth. In short, without taking a chance at something  that includes the risk of failure, you stagnate.

(Worth noting: Don’t read too much into the connotations of “stagnate” here. A stagnant venture can still muddle along for a good long time, but it’ll never soar; that said, it also won’t ever crash — at worst, it’ll just slowly wind down over time. For some folks that might be desirable, because a stagnant venture also doesn’t require all that much work to maintain. It’s purely a momentum-as-it-is play, and may be the right way to go for  mildly commercialized hobbyists.)

If I let the Fear drive, Evil Hat would not be trying to push into new venues: there would be no fiction projects (Don’t Read This Book and Dinocalypse Now), no graphic novel project (ElectriCity), and no projects for moving into board games (Zeppelin Armada and Race to Adventure). It’s entirely possible we’ll lose some or a lot of money on these projects if they tank. For the Race budget, I’m looking at a production and printing budget that adds up to 20-30% of Evil Hat’s current (prior-to-getting-its-ass-taxed-off-again) bank balance, a figure that’s roughly three times the amount of money Rob & I invested in the company to get it started in the first place.

Evil Hat could have a perfectly fine time going for as-is RPG production more on the Spirit of the Century scale than the Dresden Files RPG scale and simply coast a long for a good long while. And we absolutely will continue to work on projects in the RPG space … but it’d be that momentum play, all the same. But Rob and I would like to play a little what if with the money the company has made, and see what happens if we deliberately try to grow into new (new to Evil Hat) markets, games, and media.

Fear wants us not to do that. Fear wants us to stay as we are.

Caution wants us to do that, but do it right. Caution is what told me to recognize where I didn’t have all of the pieces of the job in the right hands, and to bring in Dan.

I’m starting to think that experience is entirely about the journey of telling those two things apart.

I was particularly pleased to see Cindy Au from Kickstarter come out to talk to the Metatopians about Kickstarter. Her presentation focused right at the heart of what makes a good kickstarter drive, enough so that I think a checklist could be extracted from it, so I’m going to write down my hastily-scrawled bullet points here in case they happen to be useful to you, the prospective kickstarter. If you have any questions for her, you can reach her at cindy at kickstarter dot com. She’s super-approachable.

Those of you who are already kickstarter-savvy may know a bunch of this stuff already, but I was reminded this weekend when I had to explain what the heck I was talking about that not everyone has heard of kickstarter.

Some of these bullet points came from the experienced members of the audience rather than Cindy.

Presentation

Incentives & Goals

• The average goal is $4500. The average amount raised is $6000.
• The most common pledge is $25.
• The average pledge is $70.
• Between 5 and 7 tiers is the sweet spot. This probably has to do with how much reading someone needs to do to make a choice. Avoid overwhelming with choices.

Finances & Timing

• The largest number of successful kickstarters have a length of only 30 days.
• Projects that hit 30% of their goal are 90% likely to succeed. That’s true whether they hit 30% early in the drive or late in it.
• Amazon takes 3-5% of the total pledge amount; Kickstarter’s fee is 5%. So plan for getting 90% of the money you raise.
• End your project on a Sunday.
• Get your Amazon Payments account set up well in advance of starting your kickstarter. Give it at least a week.
• Make sure to calculate shipping costs and make sure your incentive tiers cover those costs. And make sure your total goal accounts for both production and shipping!

Folks who were at this panel — what’d I miss?

I really like going with domestic printers where I can, but sometimes the math just doesn’t add up in favor of it. Right now, it’s coming down to this:

The Leading Domestic Option

Pros

• Strong customer service
• Turnaround times from placement of order to delivery of product are ideal

It’s a bitch; they’re exact opposites of each other, and each has pros that I’d really like to have, and cons that I have a hard time finding a place to be comfortable about.

That $1.34 per unit gap (or even 79 cent gap) you’re seeing on the hard number side is nothing to sneeze at — when you’re intending to price your product at $25, you want your unit cost to be $5 or lower, and the lower the better (assuming all things held equal on quality), because your $25 product is probably selling for $10 per unit into distribution, where you’ll likely make the bulk of your sales. So if I was making a choice based strictly on price, the International Option would be the clear winner.

But damn if I’m not having a hard time finding my peace with that. In my personal life I’m likely to make a choice of customer service over bottom dollar nearly every time, because I’m buying an experience as well as a product, and I want the experience to color my use of the product positively. So my instincts pull strongly in that direction, and push me to find compromises I can live with, like dumping the linen finish intention from the games, and so on.

And after my chance to do a ride-along on a shipment-from-China experience with Hero System 6th Edition (there’s a reason it didn’t get to GenCon in time, and it had everything to do with the international factor), I’m super gun-shy about international shipping times. When I’m publishing books, that’s a decision I can make comfortably. The turnaround I see with my domestic printing options, from POD operations to hard cover full color offset jobs, is just stellar, along with strong customer service, etc, etc. But I can also operate at a comfortably smaller scale with my printings, there.

Not so much with card games, where you’re likely to commit at a 3000-5000 unit level at least — they’d tell you that 10,000 copies is the better entry level, though I’m sticking to my “test the waters” instincts of keeping it down in the 3k-5k range. (Yes, yes, I know about the POD offerings that are in the works out there but I haven’t yet seen the data that tells me they’re ready for prime time.)  So the gulf between those two price points starts to add up, and worse yet if I push to add quality-enhancing value adds that push me over the $5/unit max. As shown above, we’re talking a four thousand dollar difference at 3000 copies. And, yeah: I could kickstarter the thing, make the initial target $4k (or more) to cover the difference between the domestic and the international option. But, guys? I’d rather that $4k go towards getting me a larger print run, or covering more of the other costs on the table. Angst, angst, angst.

So, I feel stuck. Luckily, I don’t have to commit to either of these options right away — I probably have a couple months yet to decide, and frankly January would be just peachy by me, though I expect the ball to start rolling a touch earlier than that. Still: stuck. When it all adds up, the cons are weighing down the pros in each scenario enough that I don’t really like either choice. But them’s my choices, given my constraints.

Which would you choose?

Dear Deadly,

I’m getting pretty close to publishing my book and am considering a .pdf distribution along with print as you do with your products.

Obviously there is some concern for a small publisher for releasing something as .pdf not least losing potential sales. If I recall correctly your personal view is that this constitutes free advertising. Have your opinions changed and or do you place any protections on your .pdfs?

Secondly, given that there’s no way I will probably ever recoup the time I put into producing my game how do you set a price? $25 feels right to me (225-250 pages A4 with pictures and original art) but that’s without doing market research and so forth. Printing costs are ~$10 per book.

On PDFs, my opinions haven’t changed. “Protections” (i.e., restrictions) on PDFs only end up punishing the paying customer, in the long run. They get cracked by the pirates. Better to offer a restriction-free, more positive experience to the customer. For a lot of folks that’s a perspective akin to religion (be you for or against), so I’m going to leave that topic there.

Onward to pricing.

So, at $10 per book I’m assuming you’re doing very small or individual book-by-book print runs, because at volume you should be able to get a price considerably lower than that. (In fact, with Lightning Source, you could probably do more like $7 per unit, after $75 or so in set up costs, and that’s at an individually priced level, with volume discounts kicking in at as few as 50-100 copies. I’m assuming we’re talking *black and white* interior here, and paperback, when I make that assessment.)

At any rate, with a $10 book cost, $25 is your bare minimum, but good enough if you know for sure that you’ll only ever be selling the copies yourself, as directly as possible to consumers. If you want to start selling into retail, that $25 pricepoint won’t do you any favors vis a vis your costs. I sell into distribution, which means I get about 40% of my cover price (sometimes a tad more) not counting any free shipping subsidy I offer for volume orders. Sometimes I sell straight to retail at a 50% of cover price. So looking at your $25 MSRP, we’re talking a range of $10 to $12.50 of income (not counting any expenses of making that sale and getting it to the customer) vs. a cost of $10, so between $0 and $2.50 of profit (10% in your best case retail scenario).

The way “traditional” publishing tends to do the pricing calculation is to apply a multiplier to the printing cost. That multiplier is a slider depending on individual publisher philosophy, but if you put ‘em all in a blender you’d probably see that averaging out to at least 4. Making the book you’re talking about a $40 item, tho, will probably price it too high for consumer willingness. Faced with this, trad pub goes to push that unit cost down as far as possible. The folks pricing similar books at $25 may well be getting them printed for around $5 — which, given the distro/retail scenario I used above, is a profit range of $5 to $7.50, or 20-30%, aka doubling or tripling the margin.

Bottom line for the TL;DR set: Before you worry too much about pricing your book, shop around on your printing options.

I’m going to talk about my personal experience with privilege and publishing a little, and in doing so on the Internet I recognize I’m taking a big fat gasoline bath and asking folks to strike a match. With that in mind, I ask all of my readers who feel moved to respond here to focus on being positive, constructive, and open with those comments. I’m going to keep a close watch on that as well, and hopefully not strike any sparks while I’m at it myself.

This post was prompted by this tweet coming across my radar earlier this month:

I am by most all perspectives mister privilege: white, male, middle class, and so forth. So when I see something as incisive as the above, it hits home as one of those crystalline truths that doubles as an uncomfortable diagnosis of my state.

As a publisher with privilege, I’ve certainly goofed up in looking straight through that glass. Spirit of the Century – over five years old now — is pretty whitewashed as far as the art goes. I think we did slightly better on gender thanks to Sally Slick’s portrayal, though a big internet blow-up at the time around the depiction of women in SOTC showed me that no matter how decent of a job I thought we did, the one-way glass kept me from seeing the ways in which we fell down. I was not well equipped to hear that at the time and it all turned into a nasty meltdown. I still carry that meltdown with me today as a reminder of what not to do when someone points out the effects of my privilege. But more on that in a moment.

I’ve been looking for ways to address those failings since, though the projects started to do so have had troubles making it to publication. Bruce Baugh’s New Horizons got canceled after a long period of development, in great part because the early 20th Century was not a particularly great time to be a minority group and it became incredibly fatiguing and depressing for Bruce to try to navigate paths of heroism through the research. Jess Nevins’ tour of global pulps outside of America, Strange Tales of the Century, has been spinning around in editorial stasis due to limited resources on Evil Hat’s part — many of the delays have had to do with making the Dresden Files product line happen. Thankfully, we will get to feature a more diverse cast of heroes and heroines in our upcoming SOTC-derived Race to Adventure board game, and we do hope to get STOTC out there eventually.

But I’m sure I’ve goofed in other ways, too, both in and out of the SOTC-verse. Frankly it’s difficult as hell — and this is where the uncomfortable diagnosis of that tweet above is also a strength for me. I absolutely need to put in the hard, careful work of examining art and text for the presence of privilege. But I also need to recognize that I will fail at addressing it fully because I’m trying to hunt and kill something I can’t see or hear. But just because I’m deaf doesn’t mean I can’t learn to read lips. I have to make the effort because I love and respect Amanda, and Quinn, and Steve, and the Daniels, and all the other wonderful and wonderfully different-from-me gamers I know. I want to be worthy of them, and if I don’t make a real and honest (albeit inevitably flawed) attempt to counteract the privilege I bring to the table, I won’t be. I’m far from where I need to be on that point. But every year since Evil Hat published Spirit of the Century, I’ve taken a few steps closer to it. Miles to go before I sleep and all that.

All that said, here’s what I want folks to bring as a take-away from this post, and the quote that started it all:

To the extent you are privileged, recognize that there’s a high likelihood you can’t perceive its presence in the things you create. It’s important to figure out how to counteract that, and it’s rarely as simple or reducible as “well, I got my gay/female/black friend to read it”. People will come along and point out where you’ve goofed, and no matter how much you’ve vetted the material, how much you’ve tried to see the unseeable part of you, they’ll probably be right that it’s there. Listen to these people carefully. Welcome them and do your best to learn how they see. They are bringing you a gift and an opportunity to learn. As someone who’s lived with privilege, there is no better opportunity to grow new eyes and see the world how you, alone, can’t.

[Substantially revised paragraph follows] To the extent you lack privilege, I’d ask you to recognize that those who have it may well be baffled when you point out where the issues to arise. If you want people to work at counteracting the effects of their privilege, to create diverse and inclusive games and other entertainments, it’s possible to help them do that. I don’t think that showing them your (very justified) anger, or flinging labels at them (“racist”, “sexist”, “homophobic”, etc) will create the change we both would like to see. While it’s absolutely my job as someone who enjoys privilege to work on recognizing it and circumventing it, I can say that over the last five years especially I’ve watched what happens when that tactic is employed, and inevitably the privileged party digs in its heels, goes on the defensive, and shuts down. That’s not going to get you what you want and deserve. You have no obligation to teach the privileged, for certain. But please realize that many of them, myself included, would welcome it if you’re willing. If you are willing (and thank you for that), think instead about how to help the blind woman see, the deaf man hear. As someone who’s lived without privilege you can’t help but hear the roaring awful sound of its presence, but the guy who lives inside of that presence simply does not hear it. If you are able and willing, help him hear, even if it’s by proxy. Of course this won’t always work. Many aren’t ready to hear the hidden message of the world. In the end, the privileged need to learn to have empathy for your experience, and many of them are willing to make that effort but are terribly uncertain of where to start. If you think you can offer some empathy in kind, I’m confident a bridge can be built. A little safe harbor to understand the problem, to learn how to see it in the first place, will go such a very long way toward preventing it in the future. If you’re able and willing, please provide that harbor. In the end, the “one way glass” metaphor doesn’t help us at all unless all people in a discussion keep in mind what it looks like from both sides of the pane.

When it comes down to it, as a publisher and a person I might have privilege, but that doesn’t mean I lack interest in inclusion, in diversity in the things I help create or bring to market. To get right down to the brass tacks, as a publisher, I need to have an interest in it, I need to learn how to hear and see what I’m normally unequipped to perceive, because there’s a wider market out there than the white male gamer, dammit. And if I let myself walk around with the blinders on, I’m going to miss them entirely, or find them but lose them to the expression of privilege. That sucks, and it doesn’t create the kind of gaming world I want to play in.

I’ve been learning, and I’ll keep trying to learn.

If and when you can, please, gently, teach me.

As always, you can find our titles at the Evil Hat webstore and at other fine game vendors around the net and the planet.

Here’s the more detailed breakdown:

The trick, then, is what to do when other publishers come around and ask me who I’d recommend for editing their stuff. I know who, for sure — but they’re mine! You can’t have them! More seriously, work is a gas, and so it expands to fill the available editorial space. If I pointed you at Amanda or Ryan or Matt or Chad, there’s a decent chance their dance card’s full.

So I’m looking for editorial I could recommend to others (and maybe grab for Evil Hat work if the current roster of worthies is unavailable).

Comments here will be under special rules — all moderated. Comments shouldn’t be made unless they’re someone stepping up and saying “I’m an editor and I’m looking for work.”

I’ll approve comments of editors who address all of the following requirements:

• Provide links/details of your prior editorial experience; references from those jobs a plus.
• Are you a copy editor, content editor, or both? (If you don’t know the difference, you probably shouldn’t be answering.)
• What’s your editorial philosophy?
• How you can be contacted for more details or to offer work?

You only wish your experts were this awesome.

When it came time to figure out what the right name for Race to Adventure! should be, we knew we were going to be way off track if we tried to figure it out ourselves.

What we needed was an expert at playing games, but also had a perspective on what would appeal to kids and families, since we see Race as a way to introduce younger family members to the role selection genre of board games. We knew we had a leg up with basing the game in the Spirit of the Century universe — talking gorillas, jetpacks, and lightning guns all have plenty of kid appeal. Still, we needed that expert in what kids like and what they like to play.

So we went to the source.

Eight-year-old Ian Hanrahan is an amazing kid. He’s Chris Hanrahan’s younger son. He might not be your typical sample – he plays Ravenloft, D&D, Ticket to Ride, Qwirkle, and so forth. But we’re betting he’s not alone amongst the children of gamer families everywhere.

The thing is, I knew all this, and knew he’d be a great kid to check in with. What I hadn’t quite grasped was HOW great. So great, I think I owe this kid a consulting fee or something. So I invite you to listen in as this expert weighs in on the play of the game and, later, on our efforts to brand the game correctly with the right name:

Ian’s Playtest Comments (MP4)

Ian’s Brand Analysis (MP4)

Magnificent.

SILVER SPRING, Maryland — June 29, 2011 — Building on the momentum of its two 2011 Origins Awards, Evil Hat Productions, LLC, today announced an agreement to produce, publish and distribute a tabletop board game that will expand the company’s reach beyond the roleplaying genre. Race to Adventure: The Spirit of the Century Exploration Game, designed by Evan Denbaum, E.K. Lytle and Christopher Ruggiero, is an easy-to-learn pulp adventure game based in the Spirit of the Century universe. The richly themed “action-selection” game can be played in as few as 20 minutes, and its variable setup and levels of depth allow for infinite replayability.

“We wanted our first foray into board games to be highly accessible and fun, while taking advantage of the intellectual property Evil Hat has cultivated during the past few years,” said Evil Hat Co-President Fred Hicks. “What I love about Race to Adventure is it can serve as an entry point for younger and casual gamers into the ‘action-selection’ genre while also having ample strategy to appeal to a wide range of players.”

Race to Adventure: The Spirit of the Century Exploration Game is scheduled for a late 2011/early 2012 release. It will be a heroic companion-piece to the much-anticipated Zeppelin Armada combat card game by veteran game designer Jeff Tidball, targeting a similar release timeframe. Like Race to Adventure, Zeppelin Armada will also feature characters from the Spirit of the Century universe.

“This is just the start of what you can expect to see from Evil Hat in the months to come,” said Hicks. “The time is right to move into board and card games, and we’ll be leveraging our roleplaying game catalog as complementary tie-ins to those games. Together, they’ll create a gaming experience greater than the sum of its parts. Our motto is ‘passion makes the best games’ and you’re going to feel that passion poured into our upcoming offerings.”

For more information about Evil Hat Productions, visit www.evilhat.com/.

About Race to Adventure: The Spirit of the Century Exploration Game

Each year, a worldwide scavenger hunt brings together daring adventurers from all parts of the globe—members of the famed Century Club. Their journey is filled with danger, excitement and wonder as players race to be the first to complete every mission, stamp their passport as proof in every location and cross the Empire State Building finish line first. Snatch a golden eagle egg from a Himalayan mountain peak, escape the Mummy King, rescue a prisoner from Atlantis and much more in this family adventure game playable in as few as 20 minutes!

About Evil Hat Productions

Evil Hat Productions believes that passion makes the best games. It is this passion for gaming that raised Evil Hat to its acclaimed position in the RPG community. Our games can be used to build the best kinds of role-playing experiences—full of laughter, storytelling and memorable moments. Today we don’t just run games, we don’t just make them, we work with you to make your play the best it can be—the kind that upholds and gives birth to passions of your own. That’s the Evil Hat mission, and we’re happy to have you along on it.

Since its inception, Evil Hat has won accolades ranging from the Indie RPG Awards, the Golden Geeks, the ENnies and the Origins Awards, most recently claiming the Origins Awards for both Best Roleplaying Game (The Dresden Files RPG: Your Story) and Best Roleplaying Game Supplement (The Dresden Files: Our World).

Press contact:
Fred Hicks
Email: feedback@evilhat.com
Website: http://www.evilhat.com

###

Dresden Files: The Paranet Papers. This is the Dresden Files RPG supplement we’ve been working on for the past half year or so. We don’t have a release date, which is why you haven’t heard us being all that particularly loud about the work. If it’s out before the end of the year I’ll be surprised — pleased, but surprised. Writing is still underway, so we don’t have a complete rough draft of the whole book yet. It’ll be an at least 7-chapter book, likely hardcover and full color (though I say that knowing reality can have other ideas), and will cover events up through (and a little bit past) Changes in both the series and the short stories, plus take a look at various locations the Paranet organization has learned about: Las Vegas, the (N)Everglades, the open road, the Russian Revolution, South America, and out past the deeper reaches of Faerie in the Nevernever. We think you’ll like it quite a bit — GMs especially, but series fans in general. Authors on the book include Chad Underkoffler, Clark Valentine, Leonard Balsera, Rob Donoghue, and Jess Hartley.

Fate Core. We’ve been chatting a bit about the innards of Fate over on FateRPG.com as we limber up our brains for getting to work on this one. Fate Core is the name we’re giving to what we hope is the “final” edition of Fate — Fate 3.0 Release Candidate, if you like (where SOTC and DFRPG have been Fate beta and gamma, sort of). We’ll be further streamlining the terminology of the system and stripping it down to its essentials, while still exploring the flexibility it offers and taking a good look at what’s involved in using it for short and long term play.  It will be free and utterly open content in its electronic form, with a hopefully affordably priced print edition as well — because we want to give away the PDF for free, we may do a kickstarter to help cover the production costs, so stay tuned for that. Again, no release date. We’re Evil Hat. It’ll be finished when it’s done.

Zeppelin Armada. Our first card game, designed by Jeff Tidball, this is a “fightin’ game” set in the Spirit of the Century universe. Each player takes on the role of a villainous pulp mastermind, leading his or her own fleet of deadly zeppelins in a race to claim an artifact of ultimate power that’s been found at a remote mountain. Naturally, they all get there at the same time and have to duke it out to see who gets to walk away with the prize. No release date, but we’re in the second round of playtesting and things are looking pretty promising. As with all things, I’ll be talking more about it here as we make progress. There’s a lot of new territory to be covered, much of it dark territory for me!

ElectriCity. If we can demonstrate enough interest in it – a graphic novel! I’m collaborating with author C. E. Murphy to develop this one, with her taking on the writing duties. It’s a new comic book world, a self-contained story set in the modern day but tracing the root of superheroes back to the rivalry between Tesla and Edison. This one will certainly see a kickstarter with an ambitious target (again, see the post) which will have to succeed for us to see it through due to the high cost of producing a high quality hundred-page-ish story told with full page full color art. If the kickstarter does come off, well enough to hit some secondary/tertiary milestones, we’ll likely see some spin-off products, making the graphic novel the foundation for a sort of transmedia thing — short stories, an RPG, maybe other stuff.

Strange Tales of the Century. This is a “pulp from all around the world” supplement for Spirit of the Century written by geek-scholar luminary Jess Nevins, the guy who wrote The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana among other things. It’s been sitting in rough draft form and various states of editing for over a year now, for which I must apologize both to you and to Mr. Nevins. The Paranet project expanded to consume all available workforce, for one. As well, Jess — the beautiful bastard — wrote a ton of material for this, more than we think we can print, but all of which we think we should share, so we’re spinning up a strategy to produce a (still pretty big) tome of the essentials in print, which will be supplemented by a PDF component that gives you everything we had to excise from the print version. No release date! But it’s next on Chad’s plate to continue the editing process once he breaks free of Dresden-related projects.

Another DFRPG one-shot or two. We’re still working on editing and revising one, and have promises of another from another author, so stay tuned for those.

Another Don’t Rest Your Head supplement. This is a “maybe” project, depending on intended-author availability, focused on hacking the system for other settings and genres.

Stuff I Can’t Or Won’t Tell You About Yet, either because it’s not far enough along to do so, or because it’s not certain it’ll happen. But I think our plate is plenty full as it is…

Do Something With Jeremy Keller. Seriously, we need to (and are already talking about bringing him in on a project not named here). Have you seen his current Technoir kickstarter? The video is amazing.

Did I forget something? Probably. But there you have it, off the top of my head. If you have questions I will be happy to answer them below in the comments!

This is a companion post to Kit’s announcement over on her blog. You’ll want to read that, too, in either order.

My friend C. E. Murphy (another talented author — I’m lucky to know several — who’s behind the Urban Shaman/Walker Papers series, among others) and I go way back. We first met online back in the mid 1990′s, playing characters on an of all things X-Men MUSH. She called herself Kit there, so I always call her Kit. Or “Miz Kit,” as my rendition of Sabretooth preferred.

Kit’s an incredibly deep-geek fan of comics (whereas I’ve always been more of a dabbler) and a prolific writer to boot. So fiveish years back when I said:

Fred needs to put together a comics universe

Fred says, “With the major cities of DREAM CITY, CHARM CITY, and ELECTRIC CITY”

Fred says, “DREAM CITY is the Los Angeles analogue, CHARM CITY is your east-coast politics and crime thang, and ELECTRIC CITY is that sort of middle america big industrial near a giant hydroelectric dam”

Fred says, “DREAM CITY is home to The Stuff (ref: The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of), examining issues of responsibility, image, and fame. CHARM CITY has the title Charmed Life, blending supers with supernatural along with the gritty elements of washington politics and street-level crime. ELECTRIC CITY has the title ElectriCity, and is one of those post-modern Justice League/X-Men type things where the heroes have phenomenal powers but a lot of personal problems that are more interesting”

Fred says, “This bangs around in my head regularly.”

… I should’ve known that I was dangling fresh bloody meat in front of a hungry tiger. I didn’t, but I should’ve.

Kit pounced.

And then life happened. But we kept coming back to the idea of collaborating on something like this — me throwing my Big Picture Ideas at her, doing worldbuilding in the areas of my idea that excited me, but leaving it to her to make that world a complete, breathing thing with characters who laugh and love and fight and bleed and die. (Kit writer. Me publisher.) It was a dance that spanned years, punctuated by long bouts of having many other things to do.

Recently we had a chance to visit our dance again (I point you once more at Kit’s blog post, about that). It feels more alive than ever, more doable.

We’re going start by focusing on creating ElectriCity, a stand-alone graphic novel (not that we won’t have follow-up projects if this one succeeds — but we both like the idea of creating works that emerge as complete stories, here). Kit has already worked up part of a synopsis — a reflection on our dance — and it’s looking pretty hot. Plus, it’s got Tesla and Edison’s feud right there at the root of modern superheroes.

Over the course of the next several months (at least) I’ll be sharing details and tidbits of our plan. You’ll meet The Team, and learn a little about their problems. A few months out from now, hopefully, you’ll also see some of the concept art take form.

I’ll also be talking about the business side of trying to publish a single graphic novel. And I’ll tell you right now, that’s not liable to be pretty. The budget for even one of these things is prohibitive. Consider this: each page of a graphic novel has multiple artists working on it (penciler, inker, colorist, letterer, author), and each page is essentially a full-page, full-color piece of art.  It’s probably one of the most cost-dense forms of geek media you’ll find — a single 100-ish page graphic novel requires an art budget on the order of several Dresden Files RPGs.

To be honest, that’s not something we’ll be able to take on alone. A Kickstarter campaign with a not-at-all modest minimum target is almost certainly in the (non-immediate) future, after we’ve got enough material developed to give us a foundation for getting one going. (If Do was a kickstarter for a graphic novel, it would have just cleared the necessary amount a week or so shy of conclusion — and that’s with Evil Hat picking up about half of the tab.) If that campaign doesn’t succeed, we won’t have a strong enough foundation to get to the finish line.

But that’s putting the cart ahead of the electric horse. We first need to demonstrate to y’all that what we’re working on will be awesome. So that’s what the next few months will include (modulo Origins, modulo my second kid being born in July, all that), as we make our way through the work. We also need to put thought into what else we can do to tie into this thing, since transmedia is the word of the day. Short story collection? RPG tie-in? Both, and more, certainly possible, depending on whether and how much of a success we can chart for this thing.

The ride we’re on now may crash. We’re hoping it will soar. But it’ll be a crazy ride, and crazy fun. We hope you’ll come along with us.

If I recall correctly, there’s a lot of “write down your various module config infos, uninstall the modules, then reinstall them after the upgrade” BS involved; I’d want the Super Orders module reinstalled after the upgrade, and I’d also like then to look into getting another payment option or two installed — possibly Amazon Payments (since I’m going to end up with an Amazon Payments account anyway if I’m planning for Kickstarter fu down the road).

Someone who’s done an upgrade before would be preferred, so we can take advantage of that person’s prior experience making “entertaining” discoveries about the snags in the process. Minimized downtime is key.

So: are you someone who could do this work (please share your relevant experience)? And how much would it cost me? (We don’t have a lot of money for this, but free Evil Hat products can certainly be incorporated in the compensation package…)

Let me know!

• Reaching the Tipping Point on Kickstarter
• The What We’re Learning series

Instead, I want to talk (briskly) about what the existence of Kickstarter does for a publisher.

Polling for Interest, Voting with Dollars

Crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo aren’t much different from various polling sites out there: folks are asked whether or not a particular point of view is interesting to them, and those results get displayed. Here, the point of view is the product, and the votes are measured in dollars. With Kickstarter in particular, this gets interesting due to the “hit the minimum or get nothing” funding targets — if there isn’t enough money to fund the project, nobody’s on the hook to pay anything (your guy doesn’t get elected, to extend the metaphor).

That means that if you’re not 100% sure that there’s enough interest to make it worthwhile to do a given project, you can find out by way of trying to get the project funded. You’ll still need to do SOME up-front work — and you’ll probably see more success the more work you have to show people — and be willing to cover some of the expenses yourself (as Daniel has noted). But much like the preorder model has done in years past, you’ve got an opportunity here to get a taste of the level of demand there is for your game before you lay down the money to get it printed. And if your project doesn’t get funded, you’ve learned that you’re overreaching and can either restrategize and restructure or cut your losses. Either way, that’s gold, and provides a basis for risk management that’s akin to what the rise of print on demand did for the small guy. The new technology changes the playing field.

Safe Growth and Experimentation

Relatedly, this means that as a publisher you can try to pursue some avenues for growing your business that you might not be inclined to attempt otherwise, if you had to go into it blind and without assurances that your customer base is interested. In the patronage-style crowdfunded model, money up front is entirely reasonable and expected, allowing you to attempt projects beyond your usual means without opening a second mortgage on your house. (There’s a lot that goes into making sure that you have the right numbers on hand when you go into starting something like this, but for the moment an exploration of that is out of scope for this post.)

In the coming months and years you’ll probably see Evil Hat take advantage of this, for all of these reasons.

We’ll probably do a Kickstarter to help cover part of our costs on our first card game, Zeppelin Armada, currently in development. This will help us get the product out there by covering costs, but it’ll also answer questions like “how interested are folks in seeing Evil Hat do card games?” and “is our pitch for this particular card game enough to get people excited and contributing?”

There’s also a chance we’ll be working with C. E. Murphy on turning an old idea or two of mine into a graphic novel — if we can demonstrate an interest in Evil Hat publishing the occasional stand-alone graphic novel (maybe even with a tie-in game, to think all multimediaishly). Kickstarter would be how we demonstrate that. (And, man, the costs there are way too intimidating without some crowdfunding backing behind it: even a modest graphic novel can cost $30-50k to produce.)

We’ll also use Kickstarter to help cushion some of the costs of growth both by evaluating and backing riskier products, and maybe launching ones where we need a little help on the printing costs (which we might need help on with our due-sometime-in-the-coming-year Dresden Files supplement, The Paranet Papers, as it’s likely to be another decently sized full color hardcover).

Before tax season hit, Evil Hat was getting close to around $200k in the bank thanks to our successes. We paid nearly half of that in taxes, and had some other expenses (like paying Jim his cut of the DFRPG sales, getting a reprint of Your Story queued up, etc) that drove it down even more. With the full scope of what we’d like to do in the next couple years all tallied up, we might not have the money on hand we need in order to do all our projects both big and small. With Kickstarter, we have an opportunity to spend less money in advance of measuring the potential success of a project –which means we’ll be spending the money we have more wisely.

Alphavengers Assemble

Here’s something else that the Kickstarter does for you and your product: it grabs hold of your extended social network, and picks out the alpha fans — those folks who are willing to commit some money because they believe in and trust you to deliver (do everything you can to avoid abusing that trust; bend over backwards if you must!). Then it puts all those folks in one place, gives them something to rally around, and a tangible, flag-like thing they can wave at other people to try to get them interested too.

That right there is amazing. It’s like a magnifying glass that focuses the rays of fandom into a cutting laser. Use it well and use it wisely. These are the people who will stick by you and cheer you on towards the finish line. You’ve found your army thanks to Kickstarter. Now go conquer your objectives!

The Game Changer is a Game

This last point, short and sweet, has struck me every time I’ve peeked in on a Kickstarter campaign in the last few months: here we are, keeping score. The amount of money pledged to a campaign is right there, and visible. All of us who are backing the campaign or considering backing it are playing in an MMO called Will This Make It? It’s a team effort, and just a little gamelike, in that — which is particularly likely to appeal to the audience of a game publisher.

Anyway, I figure that Kickstarter is here to stay for a lot of good reasons, only some of which I’ve covered here. It’s a big deal for the small guy — and the not-so-small guy — and so long as it’s deployed intelligently, a successful Kickstarter campaign can be a real tentpost for a product’s success.

Speaking of which, go check out the Bulldogs! kickstarter from Galileo Games. It’s a new Fate sci-fi game — think “Han Solo, the RPG” — and I’m doing the layout. It’ll be about 168 pages, full color, hardcover, and does a great job of taking Spirit of the Century, updating it, then flinging it into space. It is indeed “Sci-Fi That Kicks Ass!”

So if you’re not already a playtester for us, and you think that sometime in late May/early June you’ll be able to do some multiple-session playtesting (2 to 4 sessions worth is probably 2 to 6 hours), I am interested in hearing from you. Volunteer with your credentials in the comments below, or you can email me at evilhat on the gmail.

After the back and forth about the font choices towards the end there, I went “internal” and talked over the issues with Chris Hanrahan of Endgame. We worked through a few more iterations and eventually landed on what you’ll see below — using Penumbra Sans Bold, a font that has just enough personality to make me happy while still giving a nice, professional feel. As Chris said to me during these chats, “In this most recent version, I think I see not a redesign of the EHP logo, but a maturing of the brand,” and that’s exactly the kind of upgrade I was looking for.

I thought you might want a look. It’ll be a while before we can get our website updated with the new dress, but you will see the new logo on our new stuff, starting with Do.

Whee!

This is all the same logo, just shown on light and dark backgrounds, as well as in its black and white only presentation.)

The name, we’re stuck with (though not the font) — once you build solid name recognition (and I think we have), changing that is a huge deal and risks severing your ties to the crowd built up around the older name.

But you can afford to evolve your logo a bit over time, staying careful to keep it recognizable as related to the prior versions. Soft drinks do this all the time (though arguably Sierra Mist tries and fails a lot — they’ve been through some nutty iterations, some of which made it look like a cleaning product), as do a number of other brands each time they decide to modernize their look and update their packaging.

The trick is to take the Evil Hat Productions logo away from the horror-movie, unfriendly-monster-is-going-to-bite-you aggressive stance, and make it more … sly. Co-conspiratorial. The villain you love to watch do the dastardly. That’s an evil that parents are usually perfectly fine to see shown in cartoons.

I brought this concern up with Daniel while we were discussing some of the production aspects of Do recently, specifically because I wanted the Evil Hat that showed up on the back cover of Do to feel like it was Do-compatible. Reviewing the concerns I had, the items to be addressed were essentially:

• Go for a font that was less dripping-blood horror-movie in its vibe
• Move away from sharp-toothed aggression
• Keep the hat recognizable, adjusting its attitude as much or more than its content

So naturally he “whipped up” a few “quick” versions of how he might see the thing change. The man is disgustingly talented. His thought, which I dig, was that if we lost the sharp-toothed maw (something I was already considering), the hat-band could be given a wider footprint and a curve adjustment to make it read, just a little, like a smile. With the maw gone, the eyes could be upsized (or just dropped from the design). He also streamlined the silhouette of the hat in a way I really liked. Here are a few of the iterations he offered up:

I think everyone will find something to like in one of those. There’s something I like about all of them. I dither on the serifed vs. sans-serifed font, but both of them have their, uh, head in the right place. The eye-free version of the hat is compelling, but I wonder if it loses too much of the “character” element of the hat. I get what Daniel is doing with the eyes in the second row — upsizing them significantly, but then giving them a bit of a round-cheeked “happiness squint” effect along the bottom; it doesn’t entirely work for me (I like the rounded-underside of the original version up top of this post). I’m also unsure about a white hat-band — while it does convey smiling teeth a little more, I feel like it overwhelms the red-toned eyes, so I’m inclined to keep the hat band red in all cases.

So, at that point I had Dan shoot me the file he was working with and get back to Do. Now that I’m tinkering with it (quite hamhandedly by comparison), I’ve tried out my tweaks: I got rid of the cheek-squint on the eyes and downsized them a little so they could have some space between them and the hat-band, and took the hat-band back to red. I find that keeping the hat band red also helps pull it together with the eyes to convey a cohesive expression (shown off to the side below). I’m toying with whether or not to make the eyebrows red too, so that the expression reads clearly through the whole hat-face, rather than using the white. For now I’m using the sans serif font, but that decision’s up in the air as well.

So there’s the work in progress. Not finalized, but further along. As with any change I imagine some folks are going to hate it, some love it, some indifferent, some dissatisfied. But I feel like it’s a good direction for a company that’s trying to build on its brand as it stands, to become the brand it wants to be, able to do kid-friendly and adult-oriented products alike under a common, recognizable stamp.

Please feel free to share your thoughts here, but keep ‘em constructive and positive, please! (That’s not to say no critique or “I don’t like it”, just think about how to suggest new positive directions if that’s where you’re starting from.)

UPDATE: We may have a new front runner! Based on the various bits of feedback I’ve gotten below, it’s sounding like the white band is more of a winner than the red, for very good and well-explained reasons, so thanks for that, folks. That left me with the need to figure out how to reconcile some of my feelings about the white band being too forceful. Turns out, thinning it just a tad so that it suggested the smirk a bit more with a sharper taper does the trick.

Now I get to dither on the font for days^H^H^H^Hweeks on end.

UPDATE #2: Just to get an idea of the range of fonts which might be considered, I did this bit up. No “Productions” in it, yet — that could end up as its own infuriating exploration of options, if it ends up not being the same font as the big one — as I wanted to focus on what did Evil Hat up proper.

I light the heavy weight of the lower left corner. I’m thinking the bottom middle (which adds a distortion on top of a solid, pulpy font from BlamBot) is too much. I like the quirky vibe of the top middle and top right. The upper left and lower right are the ones you’ve seen above.

UPDATE #3: Someone suggested I use Sinzano (which I’m using experimentally for the headers on this site as a webfont — you’ll see it in some browsers). Here’s that version. I kinda dig it:

UPDATE #4: Yeah, Sinzano is really growing on me. It has a lot of interest to its ligatures, which helps give it a kind of off-kilter energy that I like for the brand. I added a white stroke around the hat and letters to make sure they’ll show up in good contrast against dark backgrounds as well as light — which also adds a touch of separation from the hat and the letters even when the hat is seen as “sitting on” them. That separation ends up doing double-duty for making things distinct when I make the logo strictly black and white for those printing applications. I think the result is pretty strong (this is the same logo in three contexts, not three different logos):

At this point, I’m going to sit on things for a while and let them brew while more comments (if any) come in. I have some travels coming up in the next few days, so that’s where my focus needs to be. But feel free to keep chiming in!

Some background, here. Going into distribution has been great for Evil Hat in general. It’s helped our older products reach wider audiences, and it’s been a big part of the Dresden Files RPG getting out there (especially the extent of retailer attention it has received). That silver cloud has had a grey lining, though, in that — combined with Evil Hat running its own webstore — sales at Indie Press Revolution have slowed down a bit for us. This isn’t fault I can put on IPR, but rather an outgrowth of some necessary changes Evil Hat has made in how it does business. We still support and sell through IPR, happily.

But, it does mean that with some titles we’ve had more stock than we’re likely to sell through quickly at IPR (by which I mean on the order of a handful of months). With tax season upon us, that’s on my mind particularly, because — glory glory — companies owe taxes on inventory they carry from one year to the next (if you’re ever wondering why crazy wide variety in genre fiction went the way of the dodo a few decades back, here you have a cause for it; interestingly, the rise of ebooks may have a shot at reversing that, since egoods aren’t inventory).

When I have a problem like this — or any publisher does, really — the publisher has a few choices: transfer the stock to another location where it’s selling more briskly (but that reduces your margin because now you’ve double-shipped your stuff, once to the current warehouse, once to the new one); throw it out (sometimes the loss of destroying product is smaller than the loss of shipping it); or find a creative way to liquidate it. I’d been going mostly for the first option, with Spirit of the Century and a couple other titles.

Enter Loot. Now, previously, Loot’s model had been to act as a sales proxy for a publisher. They sell the items through their website, at some kind of big discount, for one day only (the same way that Woot does). When those sales wrap up, Loot passes the sales information and (after taking a cut) the money for those sales on to the publisher, and the publisher ships. I get the impression that this can and did get a little shaky on occasion — any time you’re doing a proxy thing like that, you’re introducing multiple potential failure-to-act-swiftly points.

Regardless, the idea there is solid enough; Loot’s clear purpose and service from a publisher’s standpoint is to help with those times when liquidation is the intention for a block of product.

When Ed from Loot contacted me at the beginning of this week about Loot, though, he wanted to try something different — he wanted to try with Loot possessing the copies themselves, rather than proxying. He initially asked after another product, but since I had a few surplus items and — for me, at the time, more importantly — Loot would use the same warehouse for shipping that IPR does, it meant I could simply approval-stamp a no-cost stock transfer to Loot. At that point, it’s out of my hands — I don’t own that product any more — so Loot’s free to price it however. Rather than buy the product from me (at cost or otherwise), we did this as a trade of stock for a few months of advertising exposure. At this point, I was thinking, hey, I have no ad budget to speak of, and I’m essentially getting a cover-price-value amount of ads for a my-actual-cost-to-print-those-books-that-aren’t-selling-as-fast price. Not bad, and I like the idea of some of my products getting coverage on some of the sites listed on the ad network.

So on the surface, things felt good. This was also — clearly to me — a play to get some more eyeballs to Loot, since Spirit does still sell well enough; well enough that it’d have a good shot at selling all 50 copies I traded to Loot (and it did — they sold out inside of about ten hours, between midnight and the morning). But I didn’t quite have all my ducks in a row, and those quacky twerps really know how to bite.

Wednesday came and Spirit of the Century popped up on Loot. The price (not under my control, nor should it have been given the arrangement) was set at $12. That’s a 60% discount, which for those following along at home, is completely crazy — distributors buying from me only get a 56% discount; retailers usually get between a 45 and 50% discount. So these books were out there in a price range we like to call “below distro” (well, I don’t know that I like to call it that, but it’s factual). I wouldn’t be shocked if some of the sales that Loot saw during those ten hours were to retail stores buying copies at a rate below what they have to pay their distributor of choice (be that IPR, Alliance, ACD, or another). That’d be fine and all if Spirit had been juiced of most or all of its selling power otherwise, but it hadn’t.

So, mea culpa there. I hadn’t thought to ask Ed what price he’d be selling the product at, and I should have, because the price chosen was lower than I was honestly comfortable with. Even $15 would’ve been too low for me, though better; I bet the copies still would’ve moved at $18 or even $20. I am in general not a huge fan of deep discounting for “active” products, but I had figured Loot was worth the try because it was helping me with slow inventory and no cost shipping to transfer it off my back, and because the impact it could make would be limited: only 50 copies, only one day.

And that’s largely true. It came and went, and then the Origins Award news popped up, and the retweets (especially given it selling out) faded. But I’m left wondering if there’s been a little harm dished out in terms of the perception of the product (only worth $12!) and Evil Hat (since it’s clear that a number of folks thought this was Evil Hat doing the selling at such a steep discount, since that’s Loot’s usual modus operandi). And I’m wondering if that was worth the trade value in ads.

On the surface of it, getting ad time valued at $1500 ($30 x 50) for my cost of printing those books (let’s call it $6, a book, so $6 x 50 = $300) seems solid enough. But let’s look at that from Loot’s perspective, too: that ad time isn’t the same as hard currency; it’s hit-or-miss risk in a bottle, as is the nature of all advertisement. This ad-like quality got imparted to the books I traded to Loot, here. And with “ad dollars” you can get really fluid and a little crazy if you want. Loot didn’t pay (at least not directly) any actual dollars for the stuff they were to sell. So dropping that price down to $12 was trivially easy — even with a $6 shipping bill to them for each book sent (a number I’ve pulled out of the air), that’s still $6 of real-dollar profit they’d be making on each copy sold. Plus, as mentioned above, it’s more eyeballs to Loot, a validation of their sales model. From where Loot stands in that deal, the $12 pricepoint’s completely reasonable. If they’d been buying the product from me as a retailer or even as a distributor, that $12 figure would be below cost — they wouldn’t be able to do it without losing a little money per sale, or a lot per sale once the free shipping got added on. But that just wasn’t the case.

So what’d I learn here?

First and foremost, I need to remember that Evil Hat doesn’t really have a lot of dead or mostly-dead weight in its catalog, and in terms of providing a service to Evil Hat, Loot’s not the best of fits because of that. Loot’s value to a publisher, as mentioned, is as a liquidation service, and I may have over-evaluated the need to liquidate the slow-moving 50 copies that I traded over. Spirit doesn’t need liquidation. It does eventually sell. I did get proof that people would pile on to a $12 pricepoint on Spirit like crazy, but there’s very little value in that — selling Spirit at that level would kill margins, make retail and distro sales a loss, and probably dirty up the brand and the company in general.

Second, I need to remember what things look like from the other guy’s perspective, in multiple ways, before I make a business decision like this. I’ve already broken down how I think the value proposition here looked for Loot, and I should have anticipated at least some of that. Similarly, I should have established how low would be too low to cut the price, even though post-trade I don’t see that I really have a say  in that. In doing so, I would have also been looking at the case where “the other guy” in question is the retailer and the customer. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for those folks who got the book (though there won’t be any PDF coming with it due to the steep discount, sorry — but hey, PDF’s only $5, and a total of $17 ain’t so bad for both). But customer expectations get affected by stuff like this, and retailers don’t feel well supported when they see a deep discount online for an item they have on their shelf (though if any of them did buy from Loot here, man, more power to ‘em).

Third, I really have no true idea what the value of advertising is. Am I getting $1500 in trade value here? Or are the ads actually worth more like $600 minus shipping costs, the actual revenue Loot will be getting from the deal? Unfortunately this is one of those things that’s terribly hard to evaluate. I may end up with a $1500 or $600 or $0 boost in product sales revenue over the next few months as the ads run (they’re mostly DF focused, with a little SOTC and DRYH in the mix), but it’ll be hard to say if it’s the ad what convinced (or reminded) the customer to make the buy. At any rate, while I remain thus ignorant, I should think carefully about how that trade-value transfers onto the brand of the thing I’m trading.

Fourth, all the same, I should feel responsible for business decisions like this, but not necessarily guilty. This is a hard lesson for someone transitioning into a period of business that involves more indirect selling than direct selling, as with distribution. Once you sell your stuff into distro or retail, you no longer control the presentation and pricing of the product. I needed to give that more thought, in this case. I do believe Loot acted properly in its best interests here, and while I could have done better, I did recognize going in that this would be an experiment. As with any experiment, and I’d be interested in seeing how it played out, whether that meant I would gain superpowers or a quick trip to the eyewash station in the subsequent explosion. The risk exposure here, I hope, was relatively low, and it’s good experience to have.

But next time, I think I’ll try charging actual dollars for my stuff. I hear that’s made it through the beta test with flying colors.

So, how does one get nominated? (Let’s take it as a given that you’ve already created and published a game of quality, and move past that part as something outside the scope of this post.)

To get nominated for an Origins Award, you need to get on the radar of brick & mortar retailers. This alone makes it a tough row to hoe for a micro-publisher, because that’s a plural noun I used right there. It’s not enough to make a splash at Endgame, as much as I wish that were true. You’ve got to penetrate the consciousness of a wide spread of those guys, and honestly a lot of that is luck built atop your game of quality. (The license, yes, helped.) You’ve got to do this because (and this is where I may be summarizing based on old info) they get formed into committees that select first-round nominees, that in turn get voted upon by retailers in attendance at the GAMA Trade Show in Vegas earlier this year. You’ve got to have something that’s been heard of and been well received by retailers on that committee, and retailers attending that show. It’s a trick. And in order to start all that you need to give a handful (5 or 6) of your hope-they’ll-get-nominated products to the folks running the awards so they can use them to evaluate, display, etc.

If you manage to run that gauntlet successfully, against every other eligible, submitted product in the relevant categories, you get on a very short list like the ones published today.

So, how does one get a win?

This is a little complicated, tho the process is pretty simple to describe: the Origins convention happens (which I’ll be attending along with a bunch of other Evil Hat folks this year, tho we intend this to be largely “for funsies” — no Evil Hat booth); there’s a ballot in the program; attendees vote on the products they believe are worthy; ballots are submitted, tallied, and winners determined. Finis.

Yeah, but, how does one get a win?

Like I said, it’s complicated. But, clearly, it boils down to: You need to get into the mind of the Origins attendees who make the effort to vote.

There are a number of ways to do that, and one very strong component is by having a strong presence at Origins that year. Luke ran the hell out of his game the year Burning Empires won. The Looney Labs guys have an incredible presence at Origins every year, and that goes a long way towards supporting their games when they get nominated. It should go without saying (but I’ll say it) that the wins are still well-deserved and the products, well-selected. But as a game company you can put a little english on that with your presence. (Evil Hat’s going to be at Origins, but as people not publishers, so I’m not sure we’ll get the “presence” boost. I’m okay with that. Origins is about the people, for me, and I pretty much never get to hit a big con and treat it as a non-business event. This time, I will, and that’s worth a lot to me. No booth-running stress sounds like heaven!) You can also use your presence there, beyond simply running games or selling your stuff at a booth, to ask for folks to vote for your stuff, actively. And if you’re lucky, you’ll get proxies to do some of the presence thing for you too (I certainly hope IPR will be campaigning both for Fiasco and Dresden this year, through their booth, and I would be pleased as hell to hear of people running our game both on and off schedule.)

Hopefully you’ve gotten a boost in the time since your product was released and leading, as well. It’s always nice when a voter shows up to Origins already knowing about your game and thinking it’s the best. But I don’t know to what extent that secures a win over active, at-show efforts. Again, it’s a situation where a micro-publisher is liable to be facing an uphill battle: potentially smaller audiences and a greater likelihood of not having a presence at the show.

So what does a win mean for a publisher?

Mostly, it’s prestige. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone, at least recently, report that winning an Origins Award had a palpable effect on their sales. But who knows? That sort of thing is hard to track, and certainly a game that can be called “prestigious” might have just a little bit of an extra shot at capturing a customer.

Me, I try to look at awards like this (as with the ENnies) as the nomination being the real honor. I’m gobsmacked at the company our game is getting to keep in that Best RPG category (which should not shock you, given my goopy radioactive retro-love for this year’s Gamma World, my tragic shot-in-the-head admiration for Fiasco, my dark bloody four-color appreciation of Green Ronin’s work). And if you’re gunning for the awards, yourself, that’s where  you might want to put your hopes, too.

Now that said… if you’re going to Origins… please vote.

So who’s going to write these letters? Well, we’ll write a few. But mostly: you are. We’d love to have your letter, and to give you a chance to be a part of Do with us. Interested?

We can’t promise we’ll accept every letter we get, but we will do our very best to get into trouble with it. Ideally we should have your letters in before the end of April. This will give us time to select the letters we’ll use, and get some editing and artwork done on the booklet. And even if we don’t use your letter, we’ll save it up and possibly share it on Daniel’s blog later on. No letter goes unheard by the pilgrims.

Here are your guidelines.

Inspiration:
Avatar: the Last Airbender, The Little Prince, Kino’s Journey. Stories of young people traveling through the strange, often absurd world of adults.

Premise:
There are hundreds small worlds orbiting a flying temple. Like islands, these small worlds often have strange cultures and unique problems. Whenever the people have a conflict that cannot be resolved on their own, they send letters to the temple requesting assistance. The temple sends young monks on a pilgrimage across the universe responding to a stack of letters one at a time. Their goal is to leave each world with less trouble than when they arrived.

Your Mission:

• You’re a worldly citizen (that is, a citizen of one of the tiny worlds floating in the sky) with a weird problem. You’re writing to the pilgrims of the flying temple for help. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write a letter to be included in the next supplement for Do.
• Your letter should be around 150-500 words.
• List key phrases from the letter, including character names, important locations, important objects, adjectives and verbs. Repeat them up to three times if they are very important. Depending on the difficulty level of your letter, the letter should have a list of 10 key phrases (Easy), 15 (Medium), or 20 (Hard)
• Tag your letter with two or three of the symbols that describe the subject matter in the letter. These are described in this PDF. (There’s a sample letter in there too!)
• Email your letters to Fred Hicks at evilhat [at] gmail [dot] com

Guidelines:

Getting Inspired: To get started, what is your favorite episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender, Kino’s Journey, Star Trek or Stargate SG-1? Pretty much any show where the heroes go from place to place helping people and getting into trouble is a good place to start. Imagine you are one of the people who needs help from the heroes. First you may have to explain a little about the world you’re on, just to give the heroes some context for your problem. That also gives the players more hooks and inspiration to begin their adventure.

A Dose of Realism: You may find inspiration in stories of the real world as a way to start your letter, like natural disasters, historical conflicts, and even outright wars. But make sure you approach those subjects with sensitivity and respect. Do is by its nature a comedic game. Before you submit a letter “ripped from the headlines,” try to change the circumstances enough that the letter doesn’t seem like it’s just making light of a real-world tragedy.

Symbols: The trouble symbols are described in this PDF. Think about the subject matter of your letter. What makes a TREE+BOOK letter different than a SWORD+BOOK letter? What kind of troubles do you expect pilgrims to get into when they visit this world and meddle with people’s lives?

Difficulty: A good letter suggests a complicated situation with no clear solution. A great letter suggests several problems with several unfavorable solutions. Present a Gordian knot to the pilgrims and they’ll figure out the rest.

Age Appropriateness: Do is a game designed for players 12 and up, so adjust the tone of your letter appropriately. The editors reserve the right to revise or re-word your letter in order to make it more age appropriate, if necessary.