Minimum viable length for a POD product ?

[Agentorange]

What is says on the tin really. I've been over at Drive thru RPG looking at all the lovely new RQ/Gloranthan products they all look interesting, but most are PDF only. I have asked several authors if they are thinking about POD versions and ( happy day ! ) many are doing so. I'm just old fashioned, I like having a print/POD version. But it got me wondering what do people think is the minimum viable length for a print product ? The Design Mechanism are doing Mythras modules with print options down to about 16 pages and many D'nD modules were smaller than that.

So what do folks think ?

[Austin]

DTRPG's print cost per book calculator can be found here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/pub_pod_cost.php

I think it may be useful for this discussion because it helps estimate if it's worth it for a creator to make something available POD. Messing around with small books myself to get some number guesses, the calculator doesn't seem to like some of the very-small books the listed categories below it indicate DTRPG can publish.

The minimum size for a Perfect Bound color softcover book is 49 pages. The smallest size the calculator will let me do is 18. I've not personally seen Standard Color works, but the consensus I've heard is that they're a significantly inferior product to the Premium Color option. Other creators I've spoken with have been setting up files planning to use Premium Color, but I can't speak for everyone.

The major complication with POD is that, because this is a community content program, Chaosium needs to approve the process. I don't know if they need to approve a creator one time, or if they need to approve each work which a creator wants to provide as POD. This is a much smaller hurdle than doing the technical work to prepare files for printing—@MOB and everyone at Chaosium and DTRPG have been perfectly pleasant to work with in getting one of my own works set up for POD—but there's still several more steps in the process. When normally uploading a PDF to the JC, you can do it all yourself.

21 minutes ago, Agentorange said:

I'm just old fashioned, I like having a print/POD version.

I think yours is the majority opinion in the fan community. I agree with you myself, at the very least! Reading something like the Rough Guide physically is a different experience to reading it digitally.

23 minutes ago, Agentorange said:

But it got me wondering what do people think is the minimum viable length for a print product ? The Design Mechanism are doing Mythras modules with print options down to about 16 pages and many D'nD modules were smaller than that.

Let's assume a short, 20-page module. On the calculator, that will cost $3.51 to print, and I presume it'll be Saddle Stitched (stapled), not a Perfect Bound (glued) softcover. Using the Brooke Scale* let's assume the PDF is priced in the middle of the Average range, at about $0.20 per page. That puts the PDF at $4. Would you pay $10 (plus shipping & handling) for that book? $8?

I'm not sure what I'd say the minimum length is, but I figure something down in the 20 page range is probably close to that line. It depends on how adept the creator is with the technical parts of the POD process, in addition to if, basically, they're willing to pay for an Adobe subscription. You can do it without Adobe, but it's a lot harder. If you can do the technical parts, it's probably worth it for a small increase to your margins. If those are a huge, difficult pain for the creator, they probably aren't worth doing (or paying someone to do) unless for a larger publication.

[Thaz]

Speaking as someone who is watching someone else go through the process of making the next Beer with Teeth product POD as well as PDF it's not about the cost/size of the product as a direct link to size vs cost so much as the fiddly, difficult and painful process of making the pdf POD compatible. Pricing is just something that's turned over to the buyer*.

The issue is its a real pain to do the work and can be quite time consuming, at least the first time. And who pays for that time? 

*And this is where pricing does come into it as say it takes an additional week or two of someone's time to sort a book to POD, that's quite a large cost to lump in on top of the actual cost of printing it. The next BwT product is looking to be about 50 pages. Just big enough to get a spine. At this point we've got a couple of weeks of Diana's time on editing and layout, a few days each for me, Diana and Erin on writing and research (Gods it helps to have a prof of archaeology on board) and a shed load of Kris's time on art and a spot of writing and proofing and general yanking out tails on fact checking and not being idiots. Adding in another  several weeks (a month in fact) effort to make it POD compatible doesn't just hike the price because the physical thing has to be made it adds in a lot of skilled work and effort on the layout. 

Now this is a labour of love, as are most JC products. But let's just say it values the creators time in pennies so that's why a lot of people haven't gone that route. Although I accept it's likely you'll get a lot more sales if you make a POD option it may well never pay you back. We just don't have much data on that yet. Which is also one of the reasons we're doing it at BwT. We're keen to contribute to the data set and put our heads together with our fellow creators and see if it's worth the hassle of making it available in dead tree format. 

Edited July 14, 2020 by Thaz

[Diana Probst]

There's a matter of minimum sales as well.  Shorter items tend to be priced higher per page, because typesetting an extra few pages when you've already done 100 is not so much of a problem as a matter of cut and paste.  They fall down the Bestsellers List faster, because they have a lower cost, so they spike high but sink.  Putting in the PoD for something that might sell an extra 50 when you could do a bit more work and get 100 sales and ALSO get something new out into the world.... does not add up.

Print on Demand is a really good option when it's there, but it's likely to cover categories which have decent sales and higher margins.  Beer With Teeth want to keep on putting out high quality work; for that, we need our previous work to make money.  Otherwise I have to get a different part-time job.  So ultimately for some fan publishers at least, it's best to move on from PDF to PDF, because this allows them to continue to publish.  We're not going to skimp on the writing, editing, or proof-reading stages, but we need to question what the other stages add. 

It's also non-trivial at the other end.  The printing process takes up skilled time that the printers get paid for.  There is a massive quality control process that you don't see when you see the book, but if you're an expert in any field, and know what it takes to get *that* right, and get annoyed when people don't realise, you can probably just translate it to printing.  If a single part of it doesn't go right, the whole book can look terrible.  That means that you need to check every single part, and if a single part isn't right, it goes around a loop and then you have to check every single part when it comes back in again.  And then you get the same thing happening when you get a proof copy sent out and the authors find out what their ink choices actually look like.  Want to change a typo?  Go through the whole process again.

So from that point of view, you don't want to be working on the things that fall down the bestseller list.  You want to be working on the things that will pay your printers and make your company successful.  As Thaz says above, it's difficult from the authoring end.  It's also an opportunity cost, for DriveThru and their publishing arm.  I'm OK with that, speaking as an author, because I'd really like this to be a successful long-term partnership.  That means not asking for PoD on things that are unlikely to be worth skilled print employee time.